Famous Birders – Page 20 – Birding New Jersey

May 30, 2014May 29, 2014

Illusionism

It can be easy to forget that something as familiar as the habitat group had a beginning. It did, though, and apparently it took a little time for the fin de siècle museum-going public to catch on.

In 1908, the New York Times reported on the new bird exhibits at the American Museum, completed at great expense and effort:

Two or three days ago several young women were passing, but, attracted to the [mounted] birds in the marsh [habitat group], stopped in front of the group. “That’s pretty good,” said one, “but I don’t see why the museum authorities allow that dirty water to stand there like that. You can smell it clear through the glass case, and I should think it would be unhealthy.” She was speaking of a celluloid preparation used as a water substitute which has no odor at all.

Now that’s success.

Leonard C. Sanford Hall of North American Birds, American Museum of Natural History

May 29, 2014

Another Piece of the Grosbeak Puzzle

The story of the piecemeal discovery of the evening grosbeak is too well known to bear repeating here. One often overlooked piece of the puzzle, though, fell into place 171 years ago today, on the banks of the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota.

On May 29, 1843, John James Audubon and colleagues were hunting and collecting around Fort George. In his diary that evening, Audubon noted that John G. Bell — he of vireo (and later of sparrow) fame — had run across several evening grosbeaks in the course of the day. And in a bit of classically Audubonian snideness, he couldn’t help adding

therefore there’s not much need of crossing the Rocky Mountains for the few precious birds that the talented and truth-speaking Mr. —— brought or sent to the well-paying Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia!

I don’t know whether those eloquent dashes were present in Audubon’s manuscript or we owe them to the punctiliousness of his famously fussy granddaughter and editor, but in either event, it is obvious that they conceal the name of John Townsend. The Mearnses tell the full story of Audubon’s struggle to get access to the nova Townsend had sent ahead to Philadelphia, a struggle Audubon himself describes in the bitterest possible terms in the Ornithological Biography. While Nuttall, who had been with Townsend in the West, “generously gave [Audubon] of his ornithological treasures all that was new,” Townsend’s specimens were in the possession, or at least under the control, of the Philadelphia academicians:

Loud murmurs were uttered by the soi-disant friends of science, who objected to my seeing, much less portraying and describing those valuable relics of birds…. seldom, if ever in my life, have I felt more disgusted with the conduct of any opponents of mine, than I was with the unfriendly boasters of their zeal for the advancement of ornithological science, who at that time existed in the fair city of Philadelphia!

Half a decade later, a thousand and a half miles away on the banks of the Missouri, it still rankled.

May 22, 2014May 22, 2014

Mme Knip and Her Bird Book

Nicobar Pigeon by Pauline Knip — **Nicobar Pigeon** by Pauline Knip

Not every cause remains célèbre, but birders still recall, more than two centuries on, the noisy falling out between Coenraad Jacob Temminck and Pauline Knip, erstwhile collaborators on one of the loveliest of the illustrated bird books of the early nineteenth century.

Antoinette-Pauline-Jacqueline Rifer de Courcelles was born in Paris in July 1781; her marriage to the landscape painter Joseph Knip (he alone rates a Wikipedia article, by the way) ended in divorce, but she kept his name until her death in April 1851. A student of Pierre-Paul Barraband, Mme Knip specialized, like so many of her gifted female contemporaries, in scientific illustration, but, as a later biographer observed,

One has nevertheless encountered true artists in that inferior genre, to which they gave unexpected worth thanks to the genuineness of their exceptional talents. Mme de Courcelles, for example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while drawing and painting only birds, still managed to deserve a distinguished place among the artists of her day…. Even if one had no interest whatsoever in ornithology, no one could regret the time spent leafing through her splendid volumes.

In 1805, the artist provided the plates for Desmarest’s Histoire naturelle des tangaras, des manakins et des todiers, and three years later, she and Temminck began the publication of their Pigeons.

These pigeons, from our turtle doves and wood pigeons to the singular species of the tropics, they coo, they puff with pride; their wings life, their delicate and changeable colors shimmer in the sun; ingenious touches make the air and the light play among their silky plumes; their round eyes, even in the brute immovability, have the brightness and transparency of life…. Nothing better has ever been done in this genre.

It is not for her artistic skill that she is remembered, however. Elliott Coues tells the story: Les pigeons

is one of the curiosities of literature…. The work was originally published in 15 livraisons, 1808-1811. At the ninth livraison, Madame Knip accomplished a piece of truly feminine finesse, by which she stole it from Temminck.

Knip intervened with the printer to change the cover of that ninth fascicle to make it seem that she was alone the author; apparently, to conceal her treachery, some copies were produced and sent to Temminck with his name on the title page. When the fifteenth was issued, though, she informed the binders that they were to omit all mention of Temminck, including the introduction and index he had written, “a bold trick, regardless of consequences,” says Coues.

What may have gone on under the surface would doubtless be even more curious….

Temminck himself identifies Knip’s motive:

The work she had thus mutilated was presented to her imperial highness Marie Louise, with the effect of gaining for Mme Knip the gratifying results her ambition had long coveted.

Only when he visited Paris from Leiden did Temminck find out what had happened. It was too late:

Every effort made to appeal against her arbitrary actions was useless, and it was not possible to raise my voice then against intrigues supported by such powerful protectors [namely, Napoleon and his second empress]; editors refused to publish my side in their papers, even in reply to an article published by [Mme Knip as] the new author.

I haven’t seen that article of Knip’s. Coues could not find it, either, and it is unmentioned in the most recent scholarship on l’affaire Knip and Temminck; it likely tells the story from a very different angle, one no doubt more sympathetic to the painter than the past two centuries of history and “delightful … gossip” have been.

May 19, 2014May 19, 2014

The Eider Economy, 1763

Two hundred fifty-one years ago, Morten Thrane Brünnich (yes, he of thick-billed murre fame) published his Eder-Fuglens Beskrivelse, “A Descriptive Account of the Eider Duck.”

De Kay, Zoology of New York — De Kay, *Zoology of New York*

The great Danish naturalist concludes his study with an impassioned appeal for common sense in the exploitation of this species:

Do not the highest reasons prove that this bird should deserve the protection granted it by our blessed kings, most particularly by King Christian VI piae memoriae, who forbade any and all in these lands to destroy a single one of these birds, on pain of imprisonment? Are there not enough other birds of sea and shore that can and do serve as human food that it should be unnecessary to rob this bird of his life, a life so useful both to him and to us? Can a man not find more usefulness in this bird by leaving its eggs alone, or by removing them only temporarily and returning them to the nest in order to encourage the laying of more? Is it not worth the effort to teach the ignorant Greenlanders and to encourage the sensible ones to collect the ducks’ down, which is otherwise harvested only by the wind? Are we not at considerable pains to raise silkworms, in spite of the fact that they are foreign creatures unsuited to our part of the world, in an effort to establish a silk industry here in Denmark? How much more we should devote our attentions to a bird that is native to our country, a bird that asks only for its life and the life of its offspring, a bird that every year offers us reliable tribute if only we take the trouble to accept it. Surely we could create a new trade in eider down that would be far more profitable for Denmark!

They don’t taste all that good anyway.

May 12, 2014

Blackbird Hill

It was 171 years ago today that John James Audubon, Edward Harris, Isaac Sprague, John Bell, Lewis Squires, and their crew tied their boat on the Iowa side of the Missouri River, across from the “famed bluff” known as Blackbird Hill.

Audubon’s bird list from the immediate area is more or less identical to what one might tally on a good morning’s birding today: Canada geese, mallards, wood ducks, bank swallows, Blackburnian and golden-winged warblers, yellow-headed blackbirds, and Lincoln’s sparrows were all seen or shot by the party — apparently all on the east bank of the river — between Wood’s Hill and Blackbird, landmarks on the Nebraska shore in what is now Burt County.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a teacher named Edith Newton. Mrs. Newton had gone to school with my maternal grandmother and taught my mother, and then, in the early 1970s, she was my teacher for science and “social studies.” Only now do I realize, more and more with each passing year, how richly Mrs. Newton combined (and sometimes conflated) her academic subjects — and how much of an influence her fusing of science and history had on even a seven-year-old me.

Mrs. Newton was the first birder I knew. She taught us grade schoolers our first scientific names (can you imagine that today?), and introduced us — in the classroom — to the common birds and the early scientists and explorers who had studied them, including Audubon, who spent the night of May 9, 1843, in our town.

She also told us the story of Blackbird — the romantic version, of course. And she did not leave out the macabre tale of George Catlin’s grave robbing, whereby in 1832, with “a little pains” and the help of a pocket gopher, he stole the head of the Omaha and “secreted it” with the other skulls he gathered on his travels.

I don’t know whether Blackbird’s remains — one of more than 4,000 native skulls once held by the Smithsonian — have been returned to the Omaha yet.

Looking back from nearly two centuries’ distance, it’s obvious that that struggle was essentially over by the time Audubon and his friends ascended the Missouri in May 1843. Where Lewis and Clark had raised a flag in tribute to “the deceased king,” Catlin took a shovel to his grave; where Catlin had seen great herds of buffalo on the prairies, Audubon’s boat dodged bloated cattle floating downstream from the new settlements in Dakota. The Omaha, Audubon said, “looked as destitute and as hungry as if they had not eaten for a week.” They probably hadn’t.

Blackbird died in 1800. Audubon died in 1851. Edith Newton must have been born just about exactly halfway between Audubon’s death and my own birth, now more than half a century ago (how’d that happen, anyhow?). Books and stories and anecdotes and, yes, lies passed down from age to age still make me feel a part of it all.

But I’m sad that nowadays Catlin’s scurrilous “collecting” seems to have tainted the entire history of Blackbird, his life and his burial. Elementary school students in Nebraska don’t learn about Blackbird Hill anymore, depriving them of an opportunity to talk about biological warfare and economic co-optation in the ultimately one-sided struggle for the Great Plains.