Famous Birders – Page 16 – Birding New Jersey

July 5, 2014July 4, 2014

Pokeweed and Raspberries

It’s among the most familiar phrases in any field guide, Roger Tory Peterson’s description of the adult male purple finch as

like a Sparrow dipped in raspberry juice.

As a fan of both sparrows and raspberry juice, I can’t say that I really get it, but it’s a thoroughly memorable and justly famous line, cited over and over in just about anything written since about these lovely feeder visitors.

Of course, it’s not Peterson’s.

Nowhere that I know of does he attribute the phrase to its source, though he does — as is the case for most of the uncredited quotes in early editions of the field guides — enclose it in single quotation marks.

Happily, the poet Allan Burns filled us in some years ago on the ultimate origin of the Petersonian comparison. In June 1866, nearly seven decades before the Field Guide, John Burroughs published his essay “In the Hemlocks.” “Most people receive with incredulity,” he wrote, “a statement of the number of birds that annually visit our climate.” But they are many, and among them is

the purple finch or linnet…. His color is peculiar, and looks as if it might have been imparted by dipping a brown bird in diluted pokeberry juice. Two or three more dippings would have made the purple complete.

The inspiration is obvious, but we still have to get somehow from Burroughs’s brown bird and pokeweed to Peterson’s sparrow (“Sparrow”!) and raspberries.

Neltje Blanchan, whose sesquicentennial nears in 2015, was one of the most successful and influential nature writers of the turn of the twentieth century — and like most of her colleagues, an avowed devotee of John Burroughs, whom she credits, rightly, with having

awaken[ed] the popular enthusiasm for out-of-door life generally and for birds particularly, which is one of the signs of our times.

In her Wild Birds Worth Knowing, published by Doubleday in 1917, Blanchan (who wrote under that name even after marrying her publisher) repeatedly cited Burroughs by name. When it came to the purple finch, however, she took his pokeweed analogy as a springboard for her own fantasy:

Old rose is more nearly the color of this finch which looks like a brown sparrow that had been dipped in a bath of raspberry juice and left out in the sun to fade.

Could this be the hitherto unrecognized missing link between Peterson and Burroughs? It is.

Blanchan complains, in her winning and witty way, that

it would seem as if the people who named most of our birds and wild flower must have been color-blind. Old rose is more nearly the color….

And what does Peterson write, a decade and a half later?

Purple is hardly the word; raspberry or old-rose is more like it.

So far as I’ve been able to determine, Burroughs never (risky word, that) used the words “old rose” to describe a color, certainly not the color of a purple finch.

Blanchan does, though, and I am more than satisfied that she is the immediate source — Burroughs the ultimate source — for that memorable line in the Field Guide.

It oversimplifies, badly, the function of intertextuality in natural history writing to speak of “plagiarism.” But I do wish that Roger Tory Peterson had mentioned Neltje Blanchan in the acknowledgments of the Field Guide. Plagiarism? No. Bad form? You decide.

July 4, 2014July 1, 2014

A July Fourth First

On Independence Day 1890, William Palmer, taxidermist and exhibits technician at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, was collecting for the museum on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. One of the birds that fell to his gun that fateful day was a Cuculus cuckoo, the first of its genus ever to be taken in North America. Palmer and Stejneger published the bird in the Auk as a specimen of Cuculus canorus telephonus, the common cuckoo of the Far East.

It took forty years for another Cuculus to meet up with an Alaskan collector. In the summer of 1930, “an Eskimo” secured a female common cuckoo on St. Lawrence Island; that bird, too, made its way into the collections of the National Museum, where Herbert Friedmann and J.H. Riley identified it as of the subspecies bakeri.

Friedmann and Riley also took the time to re-examine Palmer’s cuckoo. It turned out not to be a common cuckoo at all, but an oriental cuckoo.

Palmer died in April 1921, but Stejneger could still be consulted: he agreed that the St. Paul bird was in fact optatus, and the correction was made in the next, fourth edition of the AOU Check-list.

But the first Old World cuckoo for the New World had lain misidentified in its drawer for four decades. Or rather in its drawers. Good preparator that he was, Palmer had skinned the bird and skeletonized the carcass. The identification of the skin was corrected — but the trunk skeleton still appears in the Smithsonian‘s database as belonging to a common cuckoo.

Two for the price of one, I guess.

I am not inclined to believe that the cuckoo Palmer claims to have seen on June 13, 1890, was the individual he would shoot three weeks later — or even that that earlier bird can be identified.

July 3, 2014July 3, 2014

The List

Remember the mocking charge once leveled at the bookish young?

“I bet you read the dictionary!”

Well, maybe not read exactly, but for many of us, our earliest experiences with literacy did in fact include a good browse through the book of words, each entry suggesting another as time slips past. I still do it, if truth be told, but I’ve branched out over the years, letting association and chance lead me through lists and catalogues and inventories of all sorts.

Including, of course, bird lists.

James Graham Cooper spent July 3 and July 4, 1857, in the vicinity of Shawnee Mission, Kansas. I don’t have convenient access to Cooper’s diaries, or to the published biography, or, for some inscrutable e-reason, even to the classic Ibis article about the “father of Pacific coast ornithology.” But I do have — and so do you — Spencer Baird’s Birds of 1858. And that fine book is full of lists, lists just evocative enough to let us speculate about what Cooper experienced on his way west.

Did the eastern kingbird he shot dance around his head on quivering wingbeats? Were the male western meadowlark and the two male grasshopper sparrows still singing in their tallgrass fastnesses, or had the exertions of parental care pretty much silenced them by early July? Were the two dickcissels — a male and a female — Cooper sent back to Washington an ill-fated pair, or did he widow the mate of each? And why did he take only one juvenile northern rough-winged swallow? Were its siblings too fast, too far, too cute to shoot?

Taken together, those records, none of them more than a name and a date in a dry, factual table, conjure memories of early mornings on the prairie, the birds of open country busy singing and feeding and caring for their young while merely human life goes on around them.

Try it yourself. Trace a place or a naturalist through the lists in Baird or any other sober-sided ornithological compilation, and see what stories you can come up with. It’s even better than reading the dictionary.

July 2, 2014July 1, 2014

Happy Birthday, Grace’s Warbler

A century and a half ago today, on July 2, 1864, Elliott Coues was on his way to Fort Whipple, Arizona. “On the summit of Whipple’s Pass of the Rocky Mountains, not far from the old site of Fort Wingate,” New Mexico, he “secured the first specimen” of what would turn out to be a new wood warbler.

Coues found his pretty novum to be

a bird of particular and not unpardonable interest, being the only species of this beautiful genus that it has fallen to my lot to discover….

And he named it Grace’s warbler, after

one for whom my affection and respect keep pace with my appreciation of true loveliness of character.

Grace Darling Coues, five years younger almost to the day than her brother, would appear to have been one of the very few figures in the strong-minded ornithologist’s life with whom he never fell out.

The almost effusively fond words quoted above from Coues’s Colorado Valley would be followed in 1882 by the more subtle but still telling note in the second edition of his Check List, explaining the dedication of his Dendroeca graciae to

Mrs. Charles A. Page, née Grace Darling Coues, the author’s sister. Would more strictly be written gratiae (Lat. gratia, grace, favor, thanks).

Among those gracious favors for which Coues was thankful was the opportunity to move in with his sister in 1881, as Coues’s second marriage was dissolving.

Three years later, in November 1884, Grace Coues Page herself would remarry, this time to the Boston publisher Dana Estes; Coues’s most recent biographer quotes a letter to Baird in which he rather crassly alludes to the new relationship,

telling Baird that he had “not the slightest difficulty in getting published anything I write now.”

One suspects that that would have been true even without a helpful brother-in-law, but in fact, Estes and Lauriat — with whom Coues had already worked — went on to publish a number of his books in the 1880s and ’90s, both ornithologic and theosophic.

One thing often left unmentioned when this warbler’s story is told is that Coues was very nearly not the first ornithologist to collect specimens of the species. Dendroica graciae was given its formal name in Baird’s 1865 Review, and Coues followed up the next year with his own more extensive account in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy. Just as that article was about to hit the press, Coues discovered

several examples of this species in a collection made by Mr. C[ristopher] Wood, at Belize, Honduras, where it is said to be quite common…. It is somewhat remarkable that the species has never been detected in the regions lying between these two countries [namely, Arizona and Honduras].

Fortunately for Grace Coues, Wood and Berendt had not bothered to describe those birds as new. Robert Ridgway would perform the task in 1873, naming that Central American population decora, the beautiful Grace’s warbler.

I can only assume that her brother approved.

July 1, 2014June 30, 2014

Bird of Battle

On this date in 1898, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had their date with destiny on San Juan Hill.

TR was not the only birder in Cuba that day. A year later, an English journalist stopped off at the American Museum to tell Frank Chapman his story:

I noticed at San Juan a bird which seemed to be much alarmed by the firing. He hopped from the bushes to the lower branches of trees, and then, limb by limb, reached the tree tops.

Chapman was able to identify the bird “readily” from his interlocutor’s description as a Great Lizard Cuckoo.

I wonder: Did Chapman ever get an answer to his question?