Category: Famous Birders

We owe it all to dead things. Natural history hobbies today would not exist if long generations of our forebears hadn’t taken to the field with guns and nets and traps, stuffing and pickling everything unlucky enough to come across their path.

Wholesale collecting of birds was relatively easy, at least once the recipe for arsenical soap had been leaked: a huge number of skins could fit into a barrel or a box. Mammals have always been more challenging. Not only do the commonest and most frequently encountered species take up a lot of room even as skins, but for many species, skeletal material  is indispensable.

Shrews? No problem. Bats? Easy. Bison and mule deer and elk? A different matter entirely.

I’ve been rereading Audubon’s Missouri River journals lately, and I quickly lost count of how many big, bulky skulls he and his colleagues — among them, famously, Sprague, Bell, and Harris — collected on their up and down the big river.

Unfortunately, the naturalizing team did not restrict its efforts to wild animals.

Until shockingly recently, the human inhabitants of the Great Plains were considered (yes, I nearly wrote “fair game,” far too close to the truth) appropriate subjects for natural history collecting. George Catlin’s fondness for human skulls pales next to the systematic thefts committed by Robert Shufeldt. In spite of repatriation efforts, some museums still harbor great troves of such things.

On June 18, 1843, “a beautiful, as well as a prosperous” day, Audubon

took a walk with Mr. Culbertson and Mr. Chardon, to look at some old, decaying, and simply constructed coffins, placed on trees about ten feet above ground, for the purpose of finding out in what manner, and when it would be best for us to take away the skulls, some six or seven in number, all Assiniboin Indians. It was decided that we would do so at dusk, or nearly at dark.

Four days later, during an evening “tramp” across the prairie, Audubon “found an Indian’s skull (an Assiniboin) and put it in my game pouch.” On July 2, Audubon and Mr. Denig celebrated the “cool and pleasant” Sunday by taking a walk

with a bag and instruments, to take off the head of a three-years-dead Indian chief, called the White Cow. Mr. Denig got upon my shoulders and into the branches near the coffin, which stood about ten feet above ground. The coffin was lowered, or rather tumbled, down, and the cover was soon hammered off…. The head still the hair on, but was twisted off in a moment, under jaw and all….

A mutual acquaintance filled Audubon in on the life of his specimen:

He was a good friend to the whites, and knew how to procure many Buffalo robes for them; he was also a famous orator, and never failed to harangue his people on all occasions.

Once the industrious and talented man’s skull was safely in their bag, Audubon and Denig

left all on the ground but the head. Squires, Mr. Denig and young Owen McKenzie went afterwards to try to replace the coffin and contents [minus the head, of course] in the tree, but in vain; the whole affair fell to the ground, and there it lies; but I intend tomorrow to have it covered with earth.

That was a nice gesture. Yeah. Thanks, JJ.

By temperament and training, I’m always willing to step back to consider facts and deeds in the context of their times. Not things like this, though.

On this first truly hot day of summer, I’m deep in thought about — what else — juncos.

As devilishly tricky as it can be figure out just what kind of junco you have before you, there has historically been little difficulty in distinguishing the juncos from other thick-billed ground-dwellers.

But there are exceptions.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom is remembered today, if at all, almost exclusively for its inclusion of a number of dinosaurs, still a novelty when this encyclopedia was first published in 1859. In its late nineteenth-century day, though, Goodrich’s compilation (republished in 1872 as Johnson’s Natural History) was a standard reference for young people with an interest in zoology, and this was the book that inspired the estimable career of none other than Frank Michler Chapman, whose 150th birthday approaches next week.

Goodrich was nothing if not assiduous as a copier and compiler, and his sources (often credited, sometimes not) include many of the most important naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Buffon up to Goodrich’s own day. Every once in a while, though, even Goodrich nods.

For example, when it comes to the juncos.

Somehow, Goodrich conflates three quite different species in his discussion of the genus Struthus. He gives a perfectly recognizable, if concise, description of a slate-colored junco:

color bluish-black; abdomen and lateral tail-feathers white.

But he goes on to apparently synonymize S. hyemalis — the junco — with Plectrophanes nivalis, the snow bunting. The next portion of the description applies to that very different species:

it is a shy, timorous bird, seldom seen except during snow-storms, when it appears in flocks around the houses. At this it presents much diversity of plumage, some being almost white, and others partially white.

The summary of range and habitat also belongs to the snow bunting — at first.

It is a northern bird, common to both continents, being found as far north as Greenland, Spitzbergen, the Faroe Islands, and Lapland. It migrates southward, always by night, on the approach of winter, and some go as far as England and France in Europe, and Virginia in America.

But get this:

Although they mostly breed in high northern regions, still some nests are found in most of the northern Atlantic states,

a statement that can be read as applying only to the slate-colored junco.

All that is confusing enough. But Goodrich goes on, keeping the promise proclaimed in his work’s title, to illustrate this “snow-bird.”

That’s not a junco, and it’s not a snow bunting. It is a common bird, and it is often found in snowy habitats, but I don’t think anyone, even 155 years ago, could really confuse a Lapland longspur with the other species in Goodrich’s jumble.

I doubt very much that the serious readers of the Illustrated Natural History were led significantly astray by this complex garble — which was repeated, words and picture alike, in the second edition. All the same, I’d love to see the young Frank Chapman’s copy of the book. I bet there’s an interesting note scrawled there.

On June 2, 1900, Frank Chapman “startled” his audience at the annual meeting of the New York State Audubon Society. In his lecture, which — still a novelty at the time — was illustrated with photographs, Chapman, cold man of science that he was, pushed as many rhetorical hot buttons as he could, citing, for example,

a shipload of ten tons of the willow grouse wings, the birds killed for the plumage…. [hawks and vultures] were trapped … the feathers pulled out, and then they were let go, but unable to fly.

On a single winter afternoon in Virginia, plumers “destroyed” 1400 gulls, their snowy breasts destined to ornament hats. “Is it fair,” Chapman concluded, “to deprive a beautiful bird of its life to make a hat like that?”

And the women in the audience clapped heartily to show their disapproval of millinery coffins.

 

After several days of watching the odd bloated carcass float past their steamer, John James Audubon and the members of his Missouri River expedition finally, in the last days of May 1843, saw their first living American bison. And killed a bunch of them, of course.

The men’s tutor in all things buffalo — their Bos boss, so to speak — was James Illingsworth, a trader and functionary at Fort George. Illingsworth supplied Audubon not only with specimens but with some very valuable practical information, too:

When calves are caught alive, by placing your hands over the eyes and blowing into the nostrils, in the course of a few minutes they will follow the man who performs this simple operation.

I might let somebody else try that first.

The past week or so has seen the annual online panic about the perceived lateness or scarcity of ruby-throated hummingbirds on their North American breeding grounds. If your favorite trochilid hasn’t “returned” to your feeders yet, you might take the advice of Althea R. Sherman, who in 1913 reported on

her experiment in feeding humming birds in an effort to get them to nest near her house. The birds were first tempted with a flower of oil cloth, gaily painted and containing a little vial of sweetened water. The same birds [!] have been coming back [!] year after year [!] since the beginning of the experiment…. The sugar syrup is now placed without concealment in bottles and the birds come for it with delight.

I’m busy manufacturing oilcloth flowers, which I expect to sell for, oh, say, $150 each.