It’s comforting to think that once an object enters the collections of a major museum it’s safe, preserved for all time and all people.
Comforting. And false.
Museums and libraries, private and public, buy and sell and trade items from their holdings all the time, for all sorts of reasons. This coming April, the Indiana Historical Society will auction its copies of Audubon‘s Birds of America, along with the Viviparous Quadrupeds, purchased eighty years ago for the then princely sum of $4,000. The proceeds from the sale will be used to enrich the Society’s collections of books, papers, and artifacts more immediately connected to the history of Indiana.
Thus far, the Society’s president, John Herbst, appears to have succeeded in forestalling the (often irrational) outcry that usually follows the announcement that a collection will be de-accessioning a prominent object:
The revenue should further the historical society’s modern mission of focusing on Indiana artifacts. The society would have loved to have had the money to buy a 1961 letter penned by Indiana native Gus Grissom during a recent auction, but the item — which alluded to the competition among Mercury 7 astronauts — slipped away. The same goes for a letter written by a Civil War soldier from Indiana, who was part of the 28th Regiment, United States Colored Troops.
“We continually see Indiana-specific items on the market that we’d like to have,” Herbst said.
Much of Audubon’s work — and particularly his masterpiece, “The Birds of America” — is publicly available through the thousands of prints, posters and cards that have been made, Herbst said. And there’s another original [copy] of that book at the Indiana University Library in Bloomington.
And besides that, the IHS’s Birds and Mammals are both said to be in noticeably worn condition, after
years spent on the shelves of the Borden Institute, a private school in what was then called New Providence, Indiana. “They still are vivid colors, and there’s a lot of wonderful attributes that they still have,” Herbst said. “But they were materials that were in public libraries before we got them. They both had a lot of use before the society purchased them.”
As a result, Sotheby’s has set a modest reserve of only (only!) three million dollars for the Birds. If memory serves, the most recent complete sets of the Birds have brought three times that or more at auction. Somebody’s going to get a real bargain.
Given the poor-quality binding and the apparent rough condition of the plates, there would be nothing but sentiment to prevent that lucky purchaser from breaking the set up and selling the images singly, the fate of so many copies of this iconic book over the years.
With that prospect in mind, I hope that Sotheby’s and the Indiana Historical Society will make the effort to thoroughly document whatever signs of use are present on the plates. A pristine set of Audubons is a fine thing, but how much more valuable — intellectually, not financially — would be a copy, its binding shaken and its edges smudged, with the notes and arrows and marginal sketches of an early owner or user. I want to know what the boys and girls of the Borden Institute thought about this book, how they viewed it and what it meant to them. After all, what else are old books good for?
Or am I the only one who finds it hard to keep all those sapphires and brilliants and emeralds and rubies and topazes straight?
There are so many hummingbird species, and their classification has been revised so many times over the past two centuries, that the vernacular names have inevitably become a hodgepodge of historical relics and well-meaning neologisms, often enough reflecting neither relationship nor similarity.
In 1854, Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the royal zoo in Dresden, set out to clear the decks and introduce some of that good deutsche Ordnung into trochilid nomenclature.
The hummingbirds, like many another group of beautiful and popular creatures, have been worked on more in a spirit of pleasurable dilettantism than according to the stricter requirements of scholarship.
Firmly grounded in the powerful traditions of German Idealism and organicist aesthetics, Reichenbach lays out his taxonomic principles with great clarity:
It is necessary in a scientific work that we have always before our eyes the clear need to trace the development of the Type through its degrees of intensification, that we correctly evaluate the individual components in their significance to the whole, and that we be able to demonstrate the culmination of the Type as well as its deflection to heterogeneity.
Reichenbach goes on to observe that
Heaven and earth and all sciences and arts, even music in its chords and systems of tuning, are all four-parted, just as are all living things… and this quaternary system of divisions, whose accord echoes through all of Nature, … can be called a system that rests stable in itself.
All that theoretical hoohaw behind him, Reichenbach goes on to establish (you guessed it) four large categories –families, I suppose, though he doesn’t use that word — of hummingbirds: Nymphs, Fairies, Sylphs, and Gnomes.
Each of those four large groups is further subdivided into four smaller categories — subfamilies — one of which is “typical” and the other three of which are “deflected into heterogeneity” by their similarity to one of the other families.
Thus, for example, there are “nymph-nymphs,” but there are also “fairy-nymphs,” “sylph-nymphs,” and “gnome-nymphs.”
Each of those subfamilies in turn comprises four genera, each of which in turn can be broken into four subgenera (again, only loosely translating Reichenbach’s categories into modern taxonomic terms). All of the known species of hummingbirds are then fitted into this scheme.
Our White-chested Emerald, for example, one of the most abundant and familiar trochilids of Trinidad and Tobago, would be a member of the family Fayae, the Fairies, which Reichenbach defines as “creeper-like” hummingbirds without head ornaments and with arched bills.
That family “culminates” in the subfamily Ochrurae, the Fairy-Fairies, but the emerald and its close relatives apparently tend to the “heterogeneous,” making them members of the subfamily Hylocharinae, the Nymph-Fairies, the third genus of which is Amazilia.
Richenbach’s “perfect” hummingbird, the culmination of the Type, has to be a Sylph, a member of the “genuine or typical Trochilideae: adorned with helmet, crest, ear-tufts, or extensive brilliant iridescence.” Naturally (or artificially, one might say), there are sylphs and then there are sylphs, but the ultimate hummer should be a Sylph-Sylph, of the subfamily Trochilinae. The first genus listed there is Trochilus — and the first species Reichenbach cites is Trochilus Colubris Linn. 1766.
They’re everywhere today, run by government bodies, NGOs, and even individuals in search of a tax break. They staff hawk watches, monitor shorebird nests, and work with landowners and managers to preserve habitat. They do a lot of good work — almost always without a lot of money.
Bird observatories are so much a part of the modern birding landscape that we can easily forget they had to be invented. This is a great day to remember that fact — and to honor the founder of the first such institution in the world, Johannes Thienemann, born 150 years ago today in Thuringia.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Thienemann was living in Rossitten, then a village in East Prussia and now the Russian Rybachy. In October 1900, he was assigned a spot on the agenda at the Leipzig meeting of the German Ornithologists’ Society. His was the final paper in the Sunday morning session; in his remarks, he presented the plan for an ornithological observation station on the Curonian Spit, that long slender bit of sand now connecting Lithuania and Russia.
In mid-December, the Prussian Ministry for Religious, Education, and Religious Affairs issued a decree establishing the Vogelwarte Rossitten, to be run by the DO-G and the observatory’s first director, Johannes Thienemann.
Thienemann had set himself some ambitious goals. The new bird observatory was charged with maintaining thorough migration records, collecting life history information, investigating molt, monitoring crop depredations, undertaking habitat plantings, installing nest boxes, building feeding stations, and establishing a museum and library. Thienemann’s responsibilities would also include the publication of an annual report and occasional papers treating noteworthy observations and experiments; he was no doubt pleased by the assurance in the by-laws that
there are no restrictions placed on any other publication activity on the part of the Director so long as that activity does not interfere with the timely preparation of the official reports.
That must have come as a considerable relief to the new director as he wondered what to do with all his spare time.
Undaunted as only a young German can be, Thienemann set to work immediately, and the observatory was formally opened on January 1, 1901, with funding provided by the Royal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Province of East Prussia, and generous private patrons, among them Secretary of State von Moltke, not otherwise known as a birder.
In 1907, the East Prussian state constructed a building to house the observatory and its staff, which at that time comprised Thienemann and a servant; a local taxidermist, A. Möschler, stuffed and mounted the specimens collected as part of the observatory’s work.
From the earliest days of Rossitten, Thienemann was particularly interested in marking migratory birds in the effort to determine their routes and timing.
If the colors of birds of the same species living in scattered localities were so strikingly different that, for example, eastern German storks had red legs and western German storks yellow, south German ones had green and those from the Russian provinces blue and so on, then we would quickly make good progress in our studies of migration; every migratory bird would carry its own passport, and we would always be informed about the Where From and the Where To of the travelers. Well, nature isn’t that accommodating, but perhaps we can help….
By marking and numbering the birds in a systematic, well-organized way, researchers could “raise the individual above the common run of his conspecifics,” and use the marked birds to discover things about their migration routes, their winter ranges, their ages, the sequence of their plumages:
This would mean the end of hypothesizing and the beginning of factual knowledge.
Concerted banding began at Rossitten in 1903, with tantalizing results coming in almost immediately. Of the more than 900 Hooded Crows captured and ringed in the first seven years, fully 12% were recovered; one bird, marked in October 1903, was shot in May 1909 30 kilometers outside of St. Petersburg.
Black-headed Gulls and White Storks wandered even farther. One of the 40 foreign recoveries among the gulls came from Tunis, 2200 kilometers to the south, while stork bands were returned from Syria, Egypt, Palestine, the Sudan, Rhodesia, and what is now South Africa.
Thienemann died at Rossitten in 1938, nine years after his official entry into what was a very active retirement. The bird observatory remained open until 1944, and was reconstituted after the war as a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; since 1997, its operation in Ribachy has been funded largely by the German Heinz Sielmann Foundation.
Ask almost any English-speaking birder about the history of German ornithology, and the first word out of her mouth will be “Heligoland.” But it all started far to the east, and it’s all thanks to Johannes Thienemann.
Audubon cites the Great Crested Grebe as being “not uncommon during autumn and early spring on all the larger streams of the Western Country….” Does anyone know anything about this?
Well, no, not really — not beyond the general observation that even Homer naps. And this time, the dozing was a doozy.
This handsome plate, number 292 of the 435 that would eventually make up the Birds of America, was engraved in 1835 from a painting about which I know nothing else. It seems likely that Audubon drew the birds during one of his sojourns in England, but we cannot be certain that this plate is not based on specimens he borrowed from one or another American collector.
The passage Nathan mentions is from the Synopsis of the Birds of North America, a much-needed taxonomic concordance to the plates and the Ornithological Biography, published in Edinburgh and London in 1839. Audubon provides a full description of the bird in the Synopsis, but has virtually nothing to say there about its habits in its putative North American range:
In contrast, the complete account in the Ornithological Biography, which appeared in 1835, is lavish in its detail. The technical descriptions, prepared with (or quite possibly by) MacGillivray, are as complete as any offered for any species, and include the measurements of eggs lent to Audubon by William Yarrell.
What startles is not that Audubon should have accounted this exclusively Old World bird an American species — an easy enough mistake in the days when specimens and their labels did not invariably keep the closest of company — but how, in the Ornithological Biography, he compounds his error with what we can read only as a series of scandalously precise fictions. On his own authority, Audubon tells us that “this beautiful species”
returns from its northern places of residence, and passes over the Western Country, about the beginning of September…. I have observed them thus passing in Autumn, for several years in succession, over different parts of the Ohio, at all hours of the day. On such occasions I could readily distinguish the old from the young, the former being in many instances still adorned with their summer head-dress…. on the Ohio’s rising I have observed that they abandon the river and betake themselves to the clear ponds of the interior…. When these birds leave the southern waters about the beginning of April, the old already shew their summer head-dress….
Audubon’s words paint the vivid picture of regular visible migration over the Ohio Valley, “in flocks of seven or eight to fifty or more” — by a species never before and never since reliably reported on the continent. To forestall any suspicion that he was mistaking this species for what was then the only other large podicipedid known from North America, Audubon assures his reader that the Great Crested and the Red-necked Grebes prefer different habitats.
All very odd indeed. But Audubon, it turns out, was not alone in assuming that this large Palearctic grebe also occurred in the New World.
The Great Crested Grebe received its formal binomial from Linnaeus himself, in the authoritative Tenth Edition of the Systema. But the bird, widespread and conspicuous in western Europe, had been known to science for hundreds of years. The descriptions of most of the diving birds given by the ancients can hardly be untangled today, but Severus Sulpicius, the fourth-century historian, is said by Conrad Gesner to have described a grebe with “red feathers like horns on its head.”
Gesner himself, writing in the 1550s, does his best to work out the identity of the larger divers. He appears first to describe the Red-necked Grebe, “known to the Venetians as the sperga,” before turning to a different “genus” found in Switzerland,
quite similar to the others, but crested with plumes sticking up around its crown and upper neck, black at the top and reddish towards the sides, like the hair of a fox.
Not a bad description of a Great Crested Grebe — or of Gesner’s illustration of the species. The Swiss naturalist, like his contemporary Belon, also points out that this, and all grebes, “has its feet at its tail,” an observation behind a great many names for these birds, including the latinizing podiceps, the Dutch arsevoet, and the Savoyard loere, which, Gesner, tells us, is also used as a pejorative for
a fat and lazy person, because of the well-known reluctance of this bird to walk on land.
At the end of the sixteenth century, Aldrovandi copies Gesner’s text into his Ornithologiae — but for some inscrutable reason replaces the perfectly serviceable woodcut there with his own, slightly less successful image of a Great Crested Grebe (Brisson, in a major lapse of taste, calls it “satis accurata”).
First recorded hybrid between a cassowary and a grebe?
We’re on firmer artistic ground with Francis Willughby’s “Crested Diver, or Loon,” a friendly-looking bird with perfectly creditable feet and bill.
Willughby and Ray are at pains to distinguish this bird –which they identify with the one described by Aldrovandi and Gesner — from another, “something less” in size, apparently our Eared / Black-necked Grebe. Unfortunately, the English names they assign each only add to the already enormous potential for confusion. The first they call “The greater crested or copped Doucker,” the second “The greater crested and horned Doucker.” It’s little wonder that even 150 years later Audubon could be confused.
All of these authors agreed on one thing: whatever the bird they were describing and depicting was, its range was Europe. George Edwards was able to cite specimens from Switzerland and England; the Dutch translator of Seligmann’s Recueileven named the bird “de groote Geneefsche Duiker,” the Great Grebe of Lake Geneva.
collapsing slightly the detail given five years earlier by Thomas Pennant in the Arctic Zoology, who had added “every reedy lake” in Iceland and Siberia to the species’ known range.
The first forthright assertion I know of of the Great Crested Grebe as an American bird actually antedates Pennant and Latham. In 1781, Buffon and his busy workshop of collaborators published the eighth volume of the Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, comprising accounts of — among many others — the grebes.
A comparison of the information provided by ornithologists shows that the Great Crested Grebe is found both on the sea and on lakes, in the Mediterranean and on our ocean shores: its species is even found in North America, and we have identified it as the acitli from the Gulf of Mexico of Hernandez.
It is not clear, of course, just what the so steadfastly anti-Linnaean Frenchman means when he speaks of “son espèce,” but Buffon appears to have arrived at the suspicion put forward by Willughby and Ray in their account of the “Water-Hare, or crested Mexican Doucker” described in Hernandez’s Thesaurus.
Between this and the precedent [species, namely, the Great Crested Grebe] there is so little difference, that I scarce doubt but they are the same.
And we can scarce doubt that the Thesaurus does, in fact illustrate a bird with feet set far back on the body and terminating in extravagantly lobed toes. Johannes Faber, the papal physician who provided Hernandez with the description of this bird, was himself not entirely sure what to make of it, as his extremely long, extremely learned, and extremely tiresome discussion shows. He finally concludes that the bird must be “the American Mergus,” a name that in fact tells us nothing, given its vast range of application over the centuries to essentially any bird that spends time in the water and dives. There is no positive indication in Faber’s dissertation that he considers this Mexican diver identical with the Great Crested Grebe of Europe (I suspect that the picture is a semi-fanciful rendering of a Sungrebe); but his use of the vague label “mergus,” coupled with the grebishness of the illustration, made it possible for Ray and Buffon — perhaps independently of each other — to take the next step.
inhabits the north of both continents: rare in the middle states, and only during winter: common in the interior and on the lakes.
John Richardson, in the Fauna boreali-americana, even goes so far in 1831 as to describe a specimen that he says was “killed on the Saskatchewan,” surely — surely — a misidentified Red-necked Grebe.
The extensive account of the Crested Grebe, or “Gaunt,” in Thomas Nuttall’s Manual probably led Audubon more strongly down the path of error than any other source.
Nuttall’s text relies especially closely on Pennant, carefully including Siberia in the species’ Old World range and even borrowing the pretty phrase “reedy lakes” to describes its breeding habitat. His most fateful borrowings, though, are from Richardson, and it is here, in some incautious copying, that we find the immediate inspiration for Audubon’s later misapprehensions.
The Fauna boreali-americana correctly and sensibly informs us that
the Grebes are to be found in all the secluded lakes of the mountainous and woody districts of the fur countries, swimming and diving….
Unfortunately, Richardson and Swainson’s printer set that paragraph, intended as an introduction to the general status of all grebes in the northern reaches of North America, beneath rather than before the header for the species Podiceps cristatus, the Great Crested Grebe, making it seem to the careless reader that the statement applies to that species alone.
A typographic infelicity in the Fauna boreali-americana …
Nuttall’s research assistant was, apparently, one of those careless readers, and this was the result in the Manual:
The Crested Grebe, inhabiting the northern parts of both the old and new continents … [is] found in all the secluded reedy lakes of the mountainous and woody districts, in the remote fur countries around Hudson’s Bay,
a neat compilation of Pennant and Richardson — but not true at all.
… and a substantive error in Nuttall’s Manual.
Audubon did not notice the error — he probably didn’t consult Richardson directly at all — and Nuttall’s statement seems to have been all it took to set Audubon to spinning the wild tale he tells in the Ornithological Biography.
And it took considerable time before that tale was refuted. George Lawrence, in the ornithological report of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, reports no fewer than five specimens of the Great Crested Grebe from North America, two from Shoalwater Bay, in present-day Washington, and three from the “Atlantic coast.” Spencer Baird owned one of those latter skins, said to have been collected by Audubon himself; it’s no surprise, then, that Baird included the species on the list of the birds of North America he published in 1859.
Not until 1881, nearly half a century after the publication of Audubon’s effusions, did a young Robert Ridgway suggest, tentatively, the removal of the species from the North American list. In the appendix to his Nomenclature, Ridgway annotated the name Podiceps cristatus, Lath., with a simple question:
Not North American?
Three years later, Baird and Ridgway provided a definitive answer to that query.
In the Water Birds of 1884, they give the range of the Great Crested Grebe as the “Northern part of the Palaearctic Region; also, New Zealand and Australia. No valid North American record!” The italics and the startling exclamation point are the authors’, and they go on to call
the occurrence of C. cristatus — which for half a century or more has been included in most works on North American ornithology, and generally considered a common bird of this country — …so very doubtful that there is not a single reliable record of its having been taken on this continent.
The American Ornithologists’ Union, graced by late birth, never really had to face the question. The Great Crested Grebe is included in none of the editions of its Check-List, and as far as I know, the nearest this species has been authentically — to use the Couesian term — recorded to North America is Gran Canaria, where a single adult appeared in December 1984.
Not to rule out the possibility, of course. Birds have wings and they fly, as someone long ago pointed out.
But it’s unlikely, at least on the scale of human history, that we will ever see Audubonian flocks of this lovely species flying south through the center of the North American continent. That was a possibility — an imaginary possibility — only thanks to some sloppy printing, some careless reading, and the unbounded fantasy of the greatest American ornithologist of his time.
I long ago reached the point that I just don’t care if someone pronounces a bird name in a way different from mine. As long as you give two syllables to “phoebe” and observe the juncture in “nuthatch,” I’m perfectly willing to believe that reasonable tongues might differ.
Don’t we all have more important things to worry about?
That said, the stakes are higher when a bird bears the name of a historical person. I generally think we owe those eponymous souls a nod in the direction of the way they preferred their own names to be pronounced.
That information isn’t always easy to come by, of course. If you’re fortunate enough to know Vauxes and Bewicks and Bendires, they’ll be happy to help you out, but otherwise we’re cast on the tender mercies of family histories, most of them rare, obscure, and nearly inaccessible. Enter: Firestone Library.
In 1953, William Henry Waldo Sabine published his Sabin(e): The History of an Ancient English Surname, a typescript reproduced in 250 stenciled copies. One of those copies he presented to Princeton University, where it entered the library on November 18, 1954, and was shipped off in January 1955 for binding in the ugly gray card traditionally used for pamphlets and programs. It would be checked out for the very first time fifty-eight years later.
Most of the book’s hundred pages are filled with extracts from parish registers, pedigrees, wills, shields of arms — the usual miscellaneous debris of amateur genealogy. But here, on page 84, we have exactly what we’re looking for:
The correct pronunciation of SABINE in England is: SAB’ (short as in ‘cab’) and INE (long as in ‘wine’)…. The accent is placed on the first syllable, as marked.
For nigh onto 40 years now, I’ve been rhyming the name with the word “cabin.” And now comes an honest-to-goodness Sabine to tell me that I’ve been wrong. W.H.W., and thus almost certainly his famous relatives Edward and Joseph, pronounced their surname with a short vowel followed by a long. If we believe (we don’t necessarily have to) in honoring the practice of those who actually bear the name, many of us are going to have to change what we say when a pair of tangram wings flies past on a cold October morning.
W.H.W. Sabine goes on to add a note demonstrating abundantly the depth of his own feelings in the matter:
It is unfortunately necessary to insert here some remarks on the disagreeable practice of pronouncing Sabine as “Sabeen.” So far as this compiler knows, no Sabine in England does this, but it is very frequently done by other people…. If the people concerned would pause to think the matter over for a while, they might perceive that it would be just as reasonable for them to speak of the “feen Alpeen cleember who carried a carbeen on his shoulder and a bottle of ween in his pocket.” … In short, to borrow a phrase from H.W. Fowler, the pronunciation “Sabeen” shows ignorance of English more conspicuously than knowledge of French or Latin.
You know tempers are running hot when somebody trots out Fowler.
