Famous Birders – Page 11 – Birding New Jersey

November 5, 2014November 5, 2014

Overkill?

Small and fragile, birds have always posed a challenge to scientific collectors, who over the centuries have developed a startling range of techniques for taking them more or less intact and whole. Indeed, the smallest species were often secured by shooting them not with lead but with sand or ash, in hopes of minimizing the damage to tiny feathers and tender skin.

Sometimes, however, intentionally or otherwise, less punctilious methods have been brought to bear. In the early spring of 1917, for example, M.A. Carriker, Jr., unexpectedly obtained three specimens of the white-collared swift on the grounds of his in-laws’ plantation in Santa Marta, Colombia:

While blasting out the intake for a flume at Cincinnati on March 19, 1917, a colony of this large swift was discovered nesting in a shallow cavern behind a waterfall. The place was absolutely inaccessible, so that no idea of the number of nests could be had. Only one nest, which happened to be near the top, was secured, together with the occupants, which had been stunned by the blasting, and proved to be an adult female and two recently hatched young.

October 29, 2014April 6, 2015

Tischbein the Birder

On October 29, 1786, Goethe arrived in Rome, where he was met by the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. The rest, as they say, is history: the two traveled Italy together, and their long friendship would be commemorated in Tischbein’s most famous painting, the most famous image of Goethe ever produced.

A century and a half later, Roger Tory Peterson posed for a portrait of his own — striking a pose that I have always suspected was modeled on Goethe’s.

Whether that connection is real or — just barely possibly conceivably — imagined, there is another, more easily demonstrated. For Tischbein, the creator of so many famous portraits and classicizing history paintings, was a lapsed birder.

From Rome, the artist wrote to Johann Heinrich Merck

I was once a great amateur of birds and knew almost all the species, especially the native ones. In Holland I saw some very fine ones. I like birds very much; it seems to me that they occupy the same place in living nature as flowers in a nature morte. The bright, beautiful colors and the feathers in themselves are a beautiful thing. I’ve seen some here I didn’t know before: a green bird that resembles a kingfisher but is a type of thrush; a blue thrush; and another little birdlet like a wren.

Tischbein, who had etched some of the early plates for the Nozeman – Sepp Nederlandsche vogelen, even considered producing an illustrated guide to the birds of Rome:

If I could be certain that these birds were not already known, I would have them drawn and their life histories added.

It didn’t happen. And maybe that’s just as well.

October 8, 2014October 7, 2014

Other People’s Bird Books: A Missing Plate

What would any of us do without the Biodiversity Heritage Library? Those millions of scanned pages answer questions we might not even have dared ask twenty years ago, and I can’t count the hours of sloggery and the gallons of gasoline they’ve saved me.

Every once in a great while, though, one runs across a scanning error: a pudgy thumb across the text, a blurry page, even — on the rarest of occasions — a missing leaf. Sometimes what is not here truly was not there: not every old book has come down to us intact. But most of the time the pages were simply flipped too fast and something was missed.

Happily, it’s easy to report problems like that, and the response from members of the BHL staff is always prompt and helpful. And sometimes, in the meantime you can help yourself.

Lately I’ve become interested in the history of the toucans, a group second only to the hummingbirds in their power to conjure up the exotic for European naturalists and collectors.

My favorite is the curl-crested aracari, a bizarre little toucan first collected in (apparently) Peru not even 200 years ago. Oddly, this weird but appealing species did not accumulate much of a pictorial record in the years after its discovery. Obviously, it is found in John Gould’s Monograph:

and in the German translation by the Sturms of Gould’s second edition:

Pickin’s are otherwise slender from those early days, and so I was excited to run across a reference to another example, a painting published in the Magasin de zoologie in 1836.

And of course the BHL includes the Magasin.

But somebody at the Museum of Comparative Zoology nodded at the scanner, and the digital book goes from Plate 61 — a handsome magpie shrike — to Plate 63 — a great shrike-tyrant. The aracari was Plate 62.

Frustrating. But then again….

The plates in this volume of the Magasin bleed noticeably through the paper, leaving the ghost of a mirror image on each otherwise blank verso page. This one does, too: our Plate 62 may be missing digitally, but it was clearly present physically.

A little primitive photo editing:

Pretty it ain’t, but it’s good enough to answer the questions I had wanted to pose of the image. First, the nomenclature used is that of Gould’s first edition, in which the bird is called Pteroglossus ulocomus. And second, more importantly, the image is not based on Gould’s, but is an original (if not overly imaginative) composition.

The explanatory text accompanying the plate is preserved on line. We learn there that this specimen, “the first of this pretty species” to be brought to France, and “perhaps to Europe,” was brought back by the surgeon of La Favorite from that ship’s circumnavigation of the world under the command of Captain Laplace.

Aha. I knew that the ornithological volume from that voyage had appeared in 1839, after long delays; but was it illustrated?

Back to BHL. And BHL comes through.

Our little toucan, the “aracari à crête bouclée,” is the very first species treated in the report, in an account taken verbatim from that published in the Magasin in 1836. And it is depicted, happy wonder, on Plate 10, engraved after a painting by Edouard Traviès.

Here it is, in all its ramphastid glory.

It was the long way around, but well worth it. And can you imagine how long it would have taken us if we’d had to go to the library — the old-fashioned kind, I mean?

October 6, 2014October 6, 2014

A Friendly Gesture

Whenever we’re invited to a wedding out of town, the second thing we check is the bridal registry.

And the first?

Do you have to ask?

Nowadays we just pull a field guide off the shelf or call up an eBird map or two—luxuries that were not available to Auguste von Leuchtenberg when, in August 1829, he left Munich to escort his younger sister Amélie to a wedding in Rio de Janeiro. The wedding was hers: the seventeen-year-old princess had been married by proxy three months earlier to Dom Pedro I and was now the empress of Brazil.

Auguste—at that time still just the duke of Leuchtenberg and prince of Eichstätt, but the future prince consort of Portugal—spent much of his time in Brazil birding. Who wouldn’t?

In April 1831, Johann Georg Wagler reported on some of the natural history specimens Auguste had brought back from his journey. Wagler was greatly impressed by the duke’s haul of insects:

The insect collection is remarkably rich, and the dazzling beauty of certain of them exceeds any splendor that the entomologist’s eye has ever beheld in the world of these wondrous little creatures. Brazil has not entrusted its gold and gemstones to the depths of the earth alone: No, it has also lavishly adorned its insects with it, and radiant with such glitter, or clad in the deepest purple or in the purest most ethereal blue, they may remind the traveler of that great menagerie described in the most ancient of all books or of the enchanted gardens of the Hesperides.

Among the many noteworthy mammals brought back to Eichstätt were two howler monkeys and a vampire bat with a wingspan approaching two feet, that last captured by the duke himself “in his bedroom, where, harpy-like, it was fluttering about him eerily.” The party even brought a few mammals back alive, including agoutis, white-lipped peccaries, and “an extremely sweet and confiding” golden marmoset, which Auguste installed in a greenhouse for the northern winter.

If Wagler’s account of the Brazilian insects is a bit florid, he waxes ecstatic about the birds of South America.

No other continent can match the feathered wildlife of Brazil in its—I might almost say—extravagantly magnificent colors…. Shall I remind you of the great throng of hummingbirds, those pygmies among birds, which incline the blazing fires of their heads and their glowing throats toward the calyces of luxuriantly blooming flowers, as if to singe with their flame any blossom that would dare compete with them for the golden apple? Shall I recall to you the toucans with their saffron-colored throats, birds of blood red, azure, and hyacinthine blue?

Wagler found much that he thought was new among the specimens Auguste had returned with. On the duke’s suggestion, he went on to name three of the hummingbirds for members of the noble family: Trochilus Amalia for the newly minted empress, Trochilus Theodolinda for August and Amélie’s sister the countess of Württemberg, Trochilus Maximiliani for their thirteen-year-old brother.

None of those names stuck, of course. Wagler would seem to have figured out—if he didn’t already know— that the skins from Brazil represented species already known and named, and he never proceeded to publish formal descriptions for any of his “new” hummingbirds, some of which may today be in the collections of the Gabrieli Gymnasium in Eichstätt. None of them can be identified with a currently recognized species, making Wagler’s well-intentioned names nomina nuda (or “nomen nudums,” as I recently heard said).

Still, it was a nice thought, and the ducal family must have been grateful.

October 5, 2014October 5, 2014

Birding In Tune

In 1903, the American Ornithologists’ Union held a special spring meeting in California. It was a largely informal affair, essentially a “pick-up trip” of the sort that groups of birding friends and colleagues still take today, and lodging seems to have been arranged in the most happily haphazard way.

Those couch-surfing at Joseph Mailliard‘s San Geronimo ranch house included Elizabeth and C. Hart Merriam, Fanny and Frank Chapman, Jonathan Dwight, Louis Bishop, and Louis Fuertes, a distinguished guest list indeed.

Chapman and Fuertes spent the mornings afield, returning to skin the fruits of their labors at the house. Twenty years later, Mailliard recalled something odd about those sessions:

There seemed to be some subtle means of communication between the two men, for it was a rather startling thing, again and again, to hear them suddenly commence to whistle or hum the same air at the same instant. I finally remarked upon this and one of them told me they had often noticed that they did whistle or sing together in this way, but that they could never quite account for it.

That may seem remarkable, but I think this intense mental sympathy — for lack of any better description — between Fuertes and Chapman really represents only an extreme example of a phenomenon we’ve all experienced with our close birding friends.

We may not sing out loud (for which I’m sure my companions over the years have been endlessly grateful), but if we’re well matched, we fall into step, into tune, with each other in all sorts of ways.

What’s your experience?