The Experience of Birding
In November 1764, Rousseau wrote of the natural historian:
I believe that Buffon is the equal of any of his contemporaries as a thinker and a philosophe; but as a writer, he has no peer. He wields the most beautiful pen of the age.
The calendar and the weather agree: It’s still late summer in northern New Jersey. A month from now, things will be different, but for the moment, only the most foolishly impatient prodder of the seasons is thinking of winter birds.
Except, of course, on this date. It’s September 6. And every year on this day, we pause — don’t we? — to remember the only Oregon junco named for a New Jersey birder.
Eugene Carleton Thurber died in California on September 6, 1896, at the shockingly tender age of 31. Born in Poughkeepsie in 1865, Thurber moved to Morristown in 1881; a “promising young ornithologist, a careful collector, and a good observer,” he published his magnum (and perhaps solum) opus in November 1887, the List of Birds of Morris County, notable especially for its early records of the Lawrence’s and Brewster’s warblers.
Fragile health sent Thurber to California in 1889, where he
lived an out-of-door life in the field, collecting birds and mammals, as his health would permit, and preserving to the end his love for his favorite study.
On May 24, 1890, Thurber collected two juncos on Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains. That summer, he showed the skins to Alfred Webster Anthony, another New York native exploring the Golden State; Anthony was “considerably surprised” to learn of juncos’
nesting in abundance within twenty-five miles of Los Angeles,
and as none of the other local collections seemed to include any similar specimens, he organized an expedition in late August to “obtain, if possible, a series of birds.” On August 27 and 28, Anthony found juncos “very abundant” between 5200 and 5800 feet elevation. He shot what seems to have been a total of eight adults, two juveniles, and one bird of unknown age and sex; all of those new adult specimens, however, were — as one might have predicted, without climbing the mountain in the first place — “in ragged moulting plumage,” inadequate for diagnosis.
So Anthony, apparently forgetting about Google Images, sent his little series, which by now included both of Thurber’s skins, to Washington, whence Robert Ridgway replied with some “rather unexpected” information: Anthony’s — Thurber’s — California juncos represented a “strongly marked” but still unnamed subspecies.
A deficiency, naturally enough, that Anthony promptly made up in the October 31, 1890, issue of Zoe:
I take pleasure in naming this handsome Junco for the discoverer, Mr. E.C. Thurber of Alhambra, Cal.
A few months later, having run through the juncos in a collection of birds purchased from Thurber in 1889, Frank Chapman was mildly skeptical: he pointed out that Anthony had failed to demonstrate that his new thurberi could be distinguished from the very widespread shufeldti.
The AOU, however, recognized the new race in 1892, and continued to list it as valid in the last Check-list to tally subspecies. BNA and Pyle, too, list thurberi among the Oregon junco subspecies. I’m glad we have a name for this population, whose recent colonization of the nearby California lowlands has provided some surprising insights into the rapidity of junco evolution.
Thurber’s early death kept him from leaving much of a biographical trail: We know a great deal more about the junco than the man. All the more reason to remember him once a year, I think, even if our juncos are still a month away.
I’m as big a fan of Robert Ridgway as anybody, and I couldn’t be more delighted that at long last, decades after we all learned to say “buff-collared nightjar,” the man is once again commemorated in the English name of a US bird.
The Smithsonian ornithologist was just 24 years old when he described this bird — not, mark well, as a new species but rather as a new race, obsoletus, of the king rail.The type specimen, A 6444 in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History, was sent east from San Francisco, California, where it had been obtained in March 1857 by George Suckley. Obtained, but not exactly collected: as Suckley reported in 1859,
The king rail [= today’s Ridgway’s rail] is very common in the San Francisco market…. A fine specimen was presented to me in San Francisco by F. Gruber, an excellent practical taxidermist of that city.
Edward William Nelson fills us in:
F[erdinand] Gruber was a German taxidermist, in San Francisco, who was well known in the ’70’s and ’80’s of the [nineteenth] century. He had a shop for a long time on California Street… a small gruff man, rather repellant at first contact but … under the crust was a most friendly person to any young naturalist interested in birds.
Crusty or not, Gruber would be named the first curator of ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences. His place in ornithological history was assured in 1870, when Robert Ridgway (who else?) described a new species of hawk from California, which he named Onychotes gruberi for that
zealous naturalist and accomplished taxidermist of San Francisco, having added much to our knowledge of the birds of California, through the frequent contribution of valuable specimens.
The honor was hardly diminished 15 years later when Ridgway re-examined the specimen and determined that it was, in fact, a Hawaiian hawk that had made its way — no doubt already a skin — into Gruber’s store.
George Suckley, too, was the beneficiary of Ridgway’s gratitude when it came time to name a small sooty falcon from Washington Territory. Ridgway gave his new subspecies from “the northwest coast region of heavy rains and dense forests” the scientific name suckleyi. We knew it for a while as Suckley’s pigeon hawk, but now it is, more blandly, just the black merlin.
I’m glad that Ridgway has his rail. But we mustn’t forget, it seems to me, that he got it from Suckley, who got it from Gruber, who got it from an unknown rail hunter in the long-ago market stalls of San Francisco.
Even bird skins have their stories.
It was two centuries ago this summer, just a year after the death of his “ever-regretted friend,” that George Ord published the first scientific description of the bird he honored with the name of the Wilson’s plover.
Ord commemorated his late colleague in both the English name and the scientific name of the new species, assigning it the Linnaean binomial Charadrius wilsonia. Ten years later, he changed his mind. Not about Alexander Wilson’s considerable merit, and not about the suitability of “this neat and prettily marked species” as a monument to the American Ornithologist; but rather about the proper form of the bird’s scientific name. In the second edition of Volume Nine, and then in the three-volume edition of Wilson’s work published in 1829, Ord — accepting without comment a change first made by Vieillot in 1818 — alters the epithet, from his original wilsonia to wilsonius.
Alters and corrects, I should think: Charadrius is a masculine noun, and so any adjective modifying the genus name — from vociferus to nivosus, from thoracicus to modestus — should itself be masculine — and thus, Charadrius wilsonius it is. Sometimes. And sometimes not. The currently recognized scientific name of the Wilson’s plover is — if we follow the AOU, the SACC, Clements, the IOC, Howard and Moore — Charadrius wilsonia, just as it was in Ord’s 1814 description. Why? It all started, I think, in 1944, when the Committee responsible for the preparation of the fifth edition of the AOU Check-List — long delayed, “in part due to the war” and the attendant shortage of good paper — published a preliminary digest of the changes to be expected whenever that edition might appear. Among the principles propounded: where in the fourth, 1931 edition any “obviously” adjectival specific names were made to agree in gender with the genus name, in the new edition
original spellings will be used in all scientific names.
When the fifth edition was published, in 1957, that pronouncement was furnished with an important exception:
specific and subspecific names used as adjectives have been made to agree with the gender of the genus,
just as had been the case before 1944. Oddly, though, that exception was not applied to the plover, which on being returned after some decades of exile to the grammatically masculine genus Charadrius, nevertheless retained, and retains today, the grammatically feminine epithet wilsonia.
This combination, officially sanctioned though it be, is not only barbarous, but contravenes the ICZN, whose principles and decisions the AOU expressly follows in matters of naming. While priority remains the highest of principles, the Code tells us that
a species-group name, if it is or ends in a Latin or latinized adjective or participle in the nominative singular, must agree in gender with the generic name with which it is at any time combined (31.2)
and that
if the gender ending is incorrect it must be changed accordingly (34.2).
If I read this correctly, then the name of the Wilson’s plover should rightly be Charadrius wilsonius Ord 1814; wilsonia should be rejected as improperly formed. Unless, of course, the ICZN has issued a special dispensation permitting the retention of the ungrammatical name. I can’t find such a document, but maybe it’s out there — or maybe I’ve missed something obvious.
I do not, by the way, buy the explanation offered by some — most recently endorsed in the new Howard and Moore — that Ord’s “wilsonia” was not adjectival. The change to “wilsonius” in 1824 (and earlier in Vieillot) is proof enough that Ord understood the word to be a first-and-second declension adjective — and that obviously renders inapplicable the ICZN’s provision (31.2.2) covering equivocal species epithets:
Where the author of a species-group name did not indicate whether he or she regarded it as a noun or as an adjective, and where it may be regarded as either and the evidence of usage is not decisive, it is to be treated as a noun in apposition to the name of its genus.
Does anyone know who decided, when and on what basis, “wilsonia” was a noun? What am I overlooking here?
Fill me in.
On the 201st anniversary of the death of Alexander Wilson — with thanks to David and Ted for good discussions.
We tend to date the beginning of the First World War from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant consort. But for those who enjoy the game of “what if,” it was another archducal death, equally violent, that created the circumstances leading to the greatest slaughter in European history — until the next, of course.
The argument goes like this: If Archduke Rudolph, born on August 21, 1858, as the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph, hadn’t murdered young Mary Vetsera and then killed himself on that winter’s day in 1889 at Mayerling, Rudolph — famously and openly sympathetic to the cause of decentralization — might have tempered his father’s absolutism, and the promise of his eventual succession to the throne could have mollified the nationalists in the empire. Instead, the crown prince’s death only strengthened the hand of the conservative forces at the Hapsburg court, and the frustration of the empire’s national minorities festered, only to burst in Sarajevo.
Enough — far more than enough — has been jabbered over the past 125 years about Rudolph’s death, but little is said nowadays about his scant three decades on earth. And today almost no one remembers that he was a birder.
Rudolph’s mentors in matters natural historical included Alfred Brehm and Ferdinand von Hochstetter, two of the most famous and influential scientists of their day — sometimes it paid to be a Hapsburg.
Ornithology, both observing and collecting, was for Rudolph a refuge from “the petty, irritating matters of daily life”:
A man needs diversion to keep his spirit and his body fresh, he must have the chance from time to time to flee everything he has created and the company of cultivated people; to hasten out into wild nature, into the only true magnificence, a magnificence that he himself is not capable of creating but that out of which he himself once emerged…. Only there can a real man feel truly comfortable and exist in the awareness that elements surround him that are mightier than he himself.
In April 1878, Rudolph and Brehm, accompanied by Eugen von Homeyer, the “father of Pomeranian ornithology,” Rudolph’s brother-in-law Leopold, and their collectors and crew set off down the Danube with a single question in mind:
whether the Steinadler and the Goldadler represented distinct species of eagle or should be lumped as a single species.
There was a great deal of what we can only call recreational collecting on that trip (“we were surprised ourselves by the number of birds we shot“). The party took a total of eight griffon vultures, one black vulture, seven imperial eagles, three lesser spotted eagles, two greater spotted eagles, fourteen white-tailed eagles, two ospreys, one short-toed eagle, three common buzzards, one red kite, nine black kites, five goshawks, one hobby, four common kestrels, one marsh harrier, two eagle-owls, one tawny owl, six ravens, seven hooded crows, one rook, one jackdaw, one magpie, one jay, five European rollers, two lesser gray shrikes, one nightjar, three cuckoos, two hoopoes, four turtle-doves, two rufous-tailed rock-thrushes, one ferruginous duck, one mallard, one graylag goose, eight great cormorants, five black terns, eleven black storks, one white stork, nine gray herons, two purple herons, four black-crowned night-herons, and “a series of twenty-six additional species of birds of less interest.”
And, of course, lots and lots of indeterminate Aquila eagles. Brehm was able to use the shocking number of specimens taken to answer the question of their identity or non-identity to his satisfaction. In the second edition of his Thierleben, published the following year, he wrote that
Naumann and Pallas, along with my father, separated the Steinadler from the Goldadler, while more recent scholars tend to understand them as age-related plumages or simple variants of a single species. Recently, inspired by the eagerness for research of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and accompanied by Eugen von Homeyer, I examined and compared some eighty of these questionable eagles, and I must agree with the scientists named above…. I believe it is correct to maintain both eagles as separate species until unequivocal proof of their belonging to a single species has been produced. These birds are certainly very closely related to each other, and the distinctions between the two are very subtle given that the immature plumages of both are so similar as to be easily mistaken, and even the adult plumages are not so clearly different as Naumann’s account might lead one to believe.
Brehm notwithstanding, we now know that those “more recent scholars” were right, and that all of the doubtful birds shot on the Danube belonged to a single species, the golden eagle — the same eagle that in double-headed form ornaments the sarcophagus of Crown Prince Rudolph in Vienna’s Capuchin Church.