Famous Birders – Page 25 – Birding New Jersey

January 7, 2014January 5, 2014

Bush Tyrants and Freckled Mockingbirds

Among the birds from the final voyage of James Cook sent back to England was a new thrush, collected at Nootka Sound in what would later be British Columbia. The skins wound up in the collection of Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Cook’s first expedition, who passed them on to John Latham to prepare the formal description.

Latham named the bird the Spotted Thrush, a name taken over into scientific Latin a few years later by Gmelin as Turdus naevius, the “thrush with freckles.”

I’ve wondered for years just what those spots and dots were meant to be, and now, thanks to The Marvel That Is The Internet, there’s no reason to guess. We can know.

Latham says that the coverts of the wing are

ash-colour; the lesser ones plain; all the others marked with a ferruginous triangular spot at the tip: the prime quills dusky; each feather marked with two ferruginous spots on the outer web, one near the base, the other about the middle; the second quills have one of these marks near the end, but paler.

Those intricate wing markings are the only “spots” Latham’s account mentions. Gmelin, too, fidus interpres that he was, points out the same “macula” and no others.

Thomas Pennant, writing two years after Latham published his description, was apparently less impressed by the bird’s freckled wing and more interested in the overall pied aspect of its plumage. Pennant gave us both one of the least successful portraits ever of the species and its enduring English name, Varied Thrush.

Pennant’s plate is so bad, in fact, that it misled Swainson and Richardson, who had access only to a single, molting specimen, to deny that the bird was a thrush at all:

it exhibits unequivocal indications of those characters by which Orpheus [the thrashers, catbirds, and mockingbirds] is so decidedly separated from the true Thrushes…. This opinion is, in a great measure, confirmed by the figure of Pennant, where the tail is represented as rounded, and fully as long as the wings, a structure which precisely agrees with the American Mocking-bird.

In order to “express what appears to us its real affinities,” Swainson coined new English and scientific names for the bird, Orpheus meruloides, the Thrush-like Mock-bird.

Swainson’s view didn’t really catch on. Audubon, with “numerous specimens of this Thrush in [his] possession,” which he compared carefully to skins of the American Robin and “another new Thrush from Chili,” came to the

opinion that both these and the Chilian species are as nearly allied as possible, and therefore ought to be considered as true Thrushes….

With few and infrequent exceptions, such as the brief entry in Lesson’s Notices of 1840, ornithology has agreed with Audubon. In January 1854, though, almost three years to the day after the old man’s death, Charles Bonaparte went out of his way to take a cheap shot at his erstwhile friend:

Notwithstanding the efforts of the pen and the paintbrush of the famous ornithologist Audubon, Turdus naevius, Gm. (Orpheus meruloides, Sw.), is neither a Turdus thrush [Bonaparte: Grive] nor even a mimid [Chanteur], but a teniopterian bird, the type of my new genus Ixoreus.

That is simply mean-spirited, and Bonaparte deserved what he got when Philip Lutley Sclater pointed out that the ornithologist prince had been far more confused than either Audubon or Swainson:

The true type of Prince Bonaparte’s .. Ixoreus … is, as I know from its having been pointed out to me by the founder [viz., Bonaparte] in the Jardin [des] Plantes’ collection, the S[outh] American Taenioptera rufiventris….

If I’ve run the synonymies correctly, Taenioptera rufiventris is an obsolete name for the Streak-throated Bush-Tyrant. Thus, even as he ridiculed Audubon for his taxonomic naivete, Bonaparte was confusing the Varied Thrush with an entirely different bird, a lovely neotropical flycatcher.

Audubon’s old protégé Spencer Baird, on learning of Bonaparte’s confusion, decided to drop Ixoreus entirely, and coined the new and very pretty genus name Hesperocichla for the thrush. Not until 1902 did Charles Richmond restore the name Ixoreus:

it is yet plain that [Bonaparte’s] term was based upon Gmelin’s name.

His heart, in other words, was in the right place, and Ixoreus it has been always since.

January 3, 2014August 25, 2018

Captain Cook’s Birds of Canada

Brian E. Sharp’s recent review of the California Condor in its northern range is a remarkable contribution to the historic record of that rare species (and almost reason by itself to join the WFO!).

Sharp adduces nine “records” of the species — or something like it — from British Columbia, beginning with “a bird of the vulture tribe” shot by the eccentric fantasist Alexander Milton Ross in 1817. Just how many of the remaining eight reports pertain to actual condors can probably not be determined, but Sharp is generally more forgiving than I think I would have been.

In any case, there may be a tenth report of California Condors from British Columbia, one that antedates all those cited in the Western Birds article.

In spring 1778, James Cook and the Resolution were at Nootka Bay on Vancouver Island. The crew had little time for zoological investigation, but they did observe

two or three racoons, martins, and squirrels … the prints of a bear’s feet near the shore.

They learned more from “the skins which the natives brought to sell”; the most commonly offered were bears, deer, foxes, and wolves. Ermines and squirrels were scarcer, but lynx seemed to be “by no means rare.” Those were the days.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Englishmen found birds to be both scarce and shy. In the woods they encountered Northwestern Crows and Common Ravens, Steller’s Jays, Pacific Wrens,

and “a considerable number of” Bald Eagles. The local residents also brought them “fragments or dried skins” of a small hawk, a heron, and the Belted Kingfisher.

Certain of the forest birds struck the visitors as likely new to science:

One less than a thrush, of a black colour above, with white spots on the wings, a crimson head, neck and breast, and a yellowish olive-coloured belly….

Indeed, Gmelin soon thereafter named the Red-breasted Sapsucker on the basis of specimens brought back by the expedition and described by Pennant (Gmelin, though, attributing it to northeastern South America rather than to northwestern North America).

Cook also observed

a larger, and much more elegant bird, of a dusky brown colour, on the upper part, richly waved with black, except about the head; the belly of a reddish cast, with round black spots; a black spot on the breast; and the under-side of the wings and tail of a plain scarlet colour….

That one, too, made it into Gmelin’s edition of the Systema, though this time the German taxonomer was even more geographically mixed up when he named the Red-shafted Flicker cafer.

The third suspected novum was

a small bird of the finch kind, about the size of a linnet, of a dark dusky colour, whitish below, with a black head and neck, and white bill.

It’s impossible to know what flavor of Dark-eyed Junco is being described here; Gmelin no doubt assumed, reasonably enough, that it was just the Junco hyemalis of Linnaeus’s 1758 edition, and thus felt no obligation to name it himself.

The last of the small land birds encountered, which “the natives brought … to the ships in great numbers” towards the end of the mariners’ stay, were hummingbirds, which

seem[ed] to differ from the numerous sorts of this delicate animal already known, unless they be a mere variety of the trochilus colubris of Linnaeus.

The natives called the bird “sasinne, or sasin.” Lesson would later use that name to denote a different species, but Gmelin named Cook’s bird, descriptively enough, Selasphorus rufus, the Rufous Hummingbird, the only hummingbird to be first described from a Canadian locality.

Vast numbers of shorebirds can be seen in the area in spring, but Cook and his crew, busy with their ships, found only “a plover differing very little from our common sea-lark” and two sandpipers, neither of them identifiable from the descriptions provided; one was “the size of a small pigeon,” the other “about the size of a lark” and said to bear “a great affinity to our burre,” a name as mysterious to me as the bird.

Waterfowl and other seabirds were “not more numerous than the others.” Gulls and cormorants were seen offshore and in the Sound, as were two species of ducks, a few swans, and a Common Loon. And Cook and his men also observed “quebrantahuessos.”

Now there’s a bird name not easy to come to terms with. In the early nineteenth century, Vieillot tells us in the Nouveau dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle that it was in use by Spaniards for the giant-petrels, southern hemisphere birds never seen off western Canada that Cook and his sailors had identified a year earlier at the Falklands.

The word is also applied, however, to the Lammergeier, that impressive accipitrid vulture of Old World crags and coasts. It seems possible that what Cook was reporting was a similar scavenger, large and long-winged and with an appetite for bones.

Surely not giant-petrels, but perhaps Turkey Vultures — or perhaps, just perhaps, even California Condors.

A few weeks later, in May 1778, Cook again encountered “a few quebrantahuessos,” this time on the shore of Kaye Island in southern coastal Alaska. Again, he provides no information that would let us identify the birds with any real confidence, but the locality is not much farther north than some of the other historical condor reports Sharp cites.

We’ll never know. But it would be a shame to overlook even these possible records — and an even greater shame to ignore the contributions of the Resolution to North American ornithology.

January 2, 2014December 29, 2013

The Russet-clothed Brotherhood

I knew in advance how this one was going to work out: the OED would lead me to the earliest citations for the English hummingbird label “hermit,” and a little bit of e-drudgery would let me push the name back to its apparent source, probably among the French trochilidistes of the early nineteenth century. And along the way, perhaps I would find an unexpected motivation for the now opaque metaphor that compares these birds to the early desert ascetics.

That, after all, is how scholarship works — even when it comes to so trivial a question as that and so ephemeral a medium as this.

Well, not always. In this case, the citation hunters in Oxford fail us. The French ermite appears to be modeled on the English hermit. And if we trust John Gould, the name seems to be due entirely to the bird’s

frequenting the darkest and most retired parts of the forest … affecting dark and gloomy situations.

As far as I have been able to discover, it was Gould who introduced the name to ornithology. Interestingly, though, he makes no claim to originality: Gould’s Introduction to the Trochilidae expressly says that these hummingbirds, “remarkable for being destitute of metallic brilliancy,” are “popularly known by the name of Hermits.”

I was surprised to learn that hermits were “popularly known” at all in the English-speaking world of the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, though, Gould wasn’t referring to the streets of London. In the 1849 description of Phaëthornis eremita, he explains the source of the species epithet (later elevated by Reichenbach to generic status): this bird, he writes, is the

Little Hermit of the collectors of Para

in Brazil. And just who were those collectors?

The residents of many parts of Brazil employ their slaves in collection, skinning, and preserving them for the European market; and many thousands are annually sent from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco.

One segment of the clientele didn’t care much for dull hummingbirds, though: the Brazilian collectors

also supply the inmates of the convents with many of the more richly coloured species for the manufacture of artificial-feather flowers.

It is my guess — an especially safe guess, given that it can never be tested or disproved — that the Luso-Brazilian “eremita” originated at the door of one of those monasteries, where a monk or a nun declined to pay for a brown hummingbird, rejecting it as too drab, like the sackcloth-clad hermits of the wilderness, what Alfred Newton would later call “the russet-clothed brotherhood.”

December 31, 2013December 27, 2013

Surly Motmots, Pouting Jacamars, and a Gloomy Birder

On his long journey through the West Indies in 1888, the Canadian cleric Léon Provancher attended a reception in Trinidad at the home of the eccentric Sylvester Devenish, where he made the acquaintance of Dr. Léotaud, “an island celebrity of whom I had already heard,” and his son-in-law, also a physician.

Provancher, fully absorbed in his host’s collections of engravings, bronzes, photographs, relics, and “ornaments of all kinds,” has no more to say about the medical men in attendance, but I want to believe that they were relatives of an even more celebrated Trinidadian, Antoine Léotaud, author of what remains nearly 150 years after its publication one of the best and most ambitious, if necessarily imperfect, neotropical ornithologies ever written.

According to an obituary quoted by Junge and Mees, Léotaud was born on Trinidad 200 years ago this New Year; he studied the sciences in Paris, eventually taking a medical degree, and returned at the age of 25 to practice in Trinidad. Léotaud’s Oiseaux was published a year before his death on January 23, 1867 from “a painful malady of fourteen months’ duration.”

I don’t know whether it is poor health, frustration at his lack of scientific resources, or a literary tristesse tropicale that is to blame for the striking tone of disappointed nostalgia that Léotaud affects in the Oiseaux.

It would be the most offensive of positivisms to draw conclusions about Léotaud’s “real life” from the attitudes he strikes in his writings. But consider the fact that in 1865, while he was hard at work on the ornithology, Léotaud was awarded the gold medal of the Medical Society of Ghent for a study entitled “Sur les causes de dépérissement des familles européennes aux Antilles” — on the sources of degeneration in European families in the Antilles.

Somebody clearly missed Paris.

Whatever Léotaud’s own state, he had some pronounced ideas about the emotional and intellectual condition of the wild birds of Trinidad.

The Black Vulture, for example, moves in ways

destitute of gracefulness, revealing the bird’s insignificance; even its anger results in nothing more than an exhaled grunt which evinces its stupidity; its quarrels, lacking in energy of any kind, bear the sign of weakness…. Even in the pleasures of love it exhibits those sad characteristics that it reveals in everything else; it is silent, it is clumsy, its preparations are tedious and only with great effort does it manage to accomplish that act that is normally so effortless in almost all birds.

Projection? Pathetic fallacy? Or just a bad mood?

Léotaud writes with greater sympathy of the Snail Kite (the photograph here is from the South American continent — we did not see the species on our visit to Trinidad and Tobago).

This bird is rarely seen here…. It is always alone, no doubt because it finds no companions…. only a few individuals come to visit us around the month of July, and thus they find themselves in conditions contrary to their usual habits.

Loneliness, in fact, seems to be a problem for many of the birds of Trinidad, if we trust Léotaud. The poor little Tropical Screech-Owl sings a song that

inspires sadness, as this bird is heard only when everything in nature is ready for slumber; its song ushers in the dusk. No doubt he is calling his companion in this way….

Even the beautiful Trinidad Motmot moves Léotaud to melancholy contemplation:

He prefers the dimness of our forests, which seems to suit so well the sluggishness of his movements and the sadness of his call. Having perched for a long time on a branch, he leaves it only with reluctance. Even the fires of love can barely raise him above his apathy. His call … is in no way meaningful; it is a call not of gaiety, or of anger, or of passion. And beyond that, his posture is heavy, his shape graceless… he draws attention only with his tail, [the shape of] which is one of those secrets that man will no doubt never manage to unravel. The female accompanies him almost always, but she is incapable of bringing animation to his so sad life.

Yes, motmots are notoriously calm, but rarely have they been accused of having a flat affect. The reproach makes even less sense when Léotaud turns it on the flashy Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

he remains immobile for hours at a time, and hardly stretches out his beak to grab an insect that happens to stray within his reach…. His call is weak and plaintive…. His companion follows him almost always to share this life that seems so sad and monotonous.

The most poignant case of all seems to be that of the Green Honeycreeper.

I’ve always found these sturdy little frugivores a colorful delight, but Léotaud had a different impression:

Its form is not very graceful, and its posture is somewhat heavy…. Its plumage is worthy of admiration, but its weak, insignificant call draws no notice. He is not made for captivity, and deprived of his liberty, he soon converts his cage into a tomb. Nevertheless one can accustom him to his prison, but only at the cost of so much effort and patience that it is a triumph of which only some people are capable, namely those whose interest in birds is a true passion.

It is harder and harder not to imagine that the author is speaking of himself and his own circumstances in such descriptions.

December 26, 2013December 21, 2013

Citizen Nighthawk

Christmas of 1897 found a new and exciting book under many a young birder’s tree.

Citizen Bird was the latest offering from Mabel Osgood Wright, one of the turn of that century’s most important authors of bird books for children and novices. Written, as its subtitle promises, “in plain English for beginners,” Citizen Bird was a collaboration between Wright, Elliott Coues, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes — a high-powered team if ever there was one.

The book’s conceit is simple and straightforward: the Doctor, obviously Coues’s fictional alter-ego, takes his young daughter and her two cousins, along with the neighbor boy Rap, on a series of pastoral walks and leisurely carriage rides across Orchard Farm, where they encounter the wild birds and fall into conversation with Mammy Bun, a retired nurse, and Olaf, a fisherman.

Poor Rap always plays the bumpkin. One evening, when the party stops to admire a rural sunset,

a large bird that had been sailing about overhead dropped through the air till it was almost over the surrey, then turned suddenly and darted upward again…. “That’s a Nighthawk … he’s looking for small birds to eat,” [said] Rap.

The kindly Doctor corrects him, of course:

“his broad, shallow mouth is only suitable for insect-eating … and the beak is equally small and feeble, not at all like the strong hooked one of a cannibal bird.”

Interestingly, the Doctor characterizes the nighthawk as “belonging to the Ground Gleaners as well as Sky Sweepers.” Fuertes’s dramatic illustration of this “valuable Citizen” shows him engaged in the first activity:

I can’t recall ever having seen a Common Nighthawk tussling with even the largest insect on the ground, but apparently it happens, and not just at Orchard Farm.