Famous Birders – Page 23 – Birding New Jersey

January 24, 2014January 24, 2014

Other People’s Bird Books: Howard Saunders

Howard Saunders was a big name indeed in British ornithology in the late nineteenth century. Co-editor of the Ibis, editorial executor of the last two volumes of Yarrell, and the author of any number of still useful papers, Saunders was a particular expert on the larids, one especially lovely species of which still bears his name.

In the late 1870s and early ’80s, Saunders was a member of the BOU group charged with assembling an official list of British birds “in accordance with the most approved principles of modern nomenclature.”

His own copy of the list, which was published in 1883, now resides in the library of the University of California at Davis, and the annotations reveal a man not always satisfied with the results of committee work.

Among Saunders’s co-authors, Henry T. Wharton, responsible for, among other things, the book’s etymologies, comes in for some particularly withering criticism.

Saunders honestly (and often rightly) disagrees with some of the derivations offered here, but he seems to have had a more fundamental objection to the whole enterprise, writing at one point, when Wharton has gone on a bit too long,

Is this a Latin Dictionary?

At times, Saunders reproaches Wharton for being too tentative. Where Wharton derives the epithet curruca “perhaps” from curro, “I run,” Saunders writes in bold pencil that

Curruca was the derisive title of the lover of the adultress — he had to “cut and run,”

an amusing and helpful reminder of the relationships, etymological and ornithological, between Lesser Whitethroats and Common Cuckoos and common cuckolds.

Neither does Saunders have much faith in his colleague as a bibliographer. Along with correcting simple transcription and spelling errors in the citations, he calls Wharton’s attribution of the genus name Linota to Bonaparte

Nonsense: it was used by Gmelin in 1788.

Dudgeon rises even higher when his fellow committeeman misreads or overlooks something in Saunders’s own work. The account of the Stock Dove avers that that species “does not occur in Scotland or Ireland,” a claim Saunders underlines and furnishes with an editorial exclamation point before adding at the bottom of the page,

Certainly it does, in both; as Saunders tells you, Mr. Wharton!,

a reference to the citation — “Saunders, iii. p. 8″ — in the account’s bibliographic header.

And then, inevitably, there are those cases where one of Saunders’s own contributions to the list was altered before publication. The published account for the Bonaparte’s Gull says that

this transatlantic species is said to have occurred in Ireland, and near Falmouth, Cornwall.

Saunders’s pencil underscores the verbs, then adds

Not my writing — I said it had occurred, for I had seen examples, but some people rush in etc.

He crosses out vigorously the statement of the range of the Ross’s Gull, writing in its place

“A circumpolar species,” I wrote, because I knew, but some sapiento-ignoramus must needs alter it.

In a note following the Glossy Ibis account — badly truncated by the binder’s knife and the scanner’s edge — Saunders explains what had happened:

I left for the winter, Dec’r 1882, at this point, and all the rest was rushed before my return in Mar [?] 1883.

I don’t especially have the feeling that Saunders would mind our reading these comments, nearly a century and a half later. But I’m going to be very careful about where my own books and their annotations end up, that’s for sure.

January 23, 2014March 28, 2015

The Duck and Daniel Webster

I for one don’t often think of nineteenth-century statesmen when I’m up to my ears in bird stuff, but the note in the catalogue entries for two of the Smithsonian’s Labrador Duck specimens couldn’t help but catch my eye:

Daniel Webster received specimen from Audubon.

Yes, that Audubon. And yes, that Daniel Webster.

But as far as I can tell, that isn’t exactly the way it all happened. A quick e-trip ad fontes reveals that the collector was actually Webster, who killed — as Audubon reports —

a fine pair … on the Vineyard Islands, on the coast of Massachusetts, from which I [Audubon] made the drawing for the plate before you.

Audubon claims (I haven’t checked) that his was the first published image of the female of this species.

In 1846, Audubon passed the precious skins on to one of his more promising protégés, Spencer Baird, who, Ridgway tells us, “considered [them] his personal property while he lived,” even though Baird housed the birds in the Smithsonian.

You might think — you might — that specimens of such surpassing rarity and distinguished provenance would be left to lie quietly on their backs in the cambridge cans. But in the late 1950s, skin A 1972 was dismantled and relaxed for study by Philip Humphrey and Robert Butsch. After thoroughly photographing the bird and taking a series of eleven X-ray images,

Butsch … began by removing the wings and legs…. When study of the wings and legs was completed, Butsch relaxed the body of the specimen and opened the midventral incision.

But never fear.

Where the skin had been “in rather poor condition” when Butsch and Humphrey began — torn, broken, and “gray with dirt” — it was “considerably improved in appearance … washed and degreased” by the time they had finished their work and put the bird back together.

It’s a rare bird that can, in a sense, give its life twice for science — and a rare politician who can represent two states in Congress and serve two terms as Secretary of State.

They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

January 22, 2014January 21, 2014

Unexpected Guests?

Here’s an inspiration for a quick, easy dish you can stir up with nothing more than the ingredients you’re sure to have ready to hand:

Two servants came in, singing all the while, and started to rummage through the straw. They dug out some peacock eggs and passed them around. Our host turned to us and said, “My friends, I gave some peacock eggs to a hen, and by Hercules, I hope they haven’t started to hatch; let’s see whether they’re still good.” We picked up our heavy silver utensils and broke into the eggs, which turned out to be made of heavy flour crust. I was going to give mine up, since I thought it had been fertilized and the embryo was advanced, but then I heard someone say, “This ought to be good,” and looked closer: and I discovered a very fat figbird inside, resting on a bed of peppery baked egg yolk.

Petronius’s meal was probably fictional, but Buffon, seventeen centuries later, assures us that Ortolan Buntings can still be prepared in the same way:

Well-fattened ortolans are very easy to cook, whether in a double boiler or in a bed of hot sand or ash; and they can also be prepared very nicely indeed inside a large eggshell, real or artificial, the way they used to cook figbirds.

January 17, 2014January 16, 2014

Yummy Snipe

One more, and then I need to quit shooting fishiness in a barrel.

That same otherwise exemplary work notes that the specific epithet of the Wilson’s Snipe is delicata, which it translates as

paramour or favorite; unclear why the name was applied to this species.

This one’s easy. Alexander Wilson himself, the eponym of our common North American snipe, tells us that these birds

when in good order are accounted excellent eating.

Audubon records, approvingly,

that richness of flavour and juicy tenderness, for which it is so deservedly renowned.

We could go backward and forward, in the ornithological tradition and in the hunting literature, piling up testimonies to the tastiness of the snipe. But perhaps the easiest thing to do is simply to turn to the dictionaries.

The late Latin “delicatus” mean “exquisite.” It means “fine.” It means “delicious.”

January 16, 2014January 15, 2014

No, He Didn’t

I really shouldn’t have to stand up — again– for the Father of American Ornithology, but Alexander Wilson had the ill grace to die 201 years ago, so somebody’s got to step in and defend his probity from these vicious attacks.

Here is that grossest of calumnies, again, in an otherwise fine book published this past year: the Wilson’s Warbler was, I read,

first collected and named (for himself) by Alexander Wilson.

No. No no no.

It is true that Wilson was the discoverer of this warbler, a “neat and active little species … never met with in the works of any European naturalist.” But he did not, not ever, name this or any other bird “for himself.”

Wilson called his bird, deposited in Peale’s Museum under the catalogue number 7785, the “Green Black-capt Flycatcher,” and assigned it the latinizing binomial Muscicapa pusilla, in recognition of its small size.

Muscicapa, of course, was one of the catch-all categories of those days, like Motacilla and Falco. When Charles Bonaparte set out to revise the genera of North America’s birds in 1828 — fifteen years after Wilson had shuffled off his mortal coil — the princely ornithologist reassigned the little “flycatcher” to the warbler genus Sylvia, and changed its species epithet to wilsonii, in honor of his great predecessor.

A decade later, Bonaparte further subdivided the warblers, erecting the new genus Wilsonia and restoring (as was only proper) Wilson’s original species name pusilla to the small black-capped bird.

And so it was Charles Bonaparte who named the warbler for Wilson, first by using the (invalid) epithet wilsonii and then by creating the genus name Wilsonia. In his Ornithological Biography, Audubon was still calling the bird the Green Black-capped Flycatcher in English, but by the time he compiled his own Synopsis in 1839 — a much-needed index to the plates of the Birds of America — he had come ’round to refer to it as Wilson’s Flycatching Warbler, the English name it still bears, with a slight simplification, today.

So why, oh why do people otherwise of normal intelligence insist on accusing Wilson of the supremest of ornithological vanities?

It’s because they’ve never learned to read a scientific name.

Until recently, the name of the bird we call in English the Wilson’s Warbler was this:

The name in parentheses is the original author of the scientific name — but those parentheses, crucially, are the conventional indication that the genus name has been changed since the species was first described (and in this case, changed several times).

A sloppy or lazy or ignorant reader of might, just might, sloppily or lazily or ignorantly come to believe that our poor parenthetical friend was responsible for every nomenclatural element there, where in reality only that meek little pusilla remains from Wilson’s original name.

A plea to follow my rant: Next time you decide to repeat a twice-told tale, especially one with a faint whiff of the libelous about it, think. Just think.