Interestingly, the ornithologist who first discovered the species, Alexander Wilson, was born and spent his youth in Paisley….
But our warbler had been known to science for half a century by the time Wilson learned of its existence. In 1789, more than two decades before Wilson put pen to paper about what he mistakenly considered a “new and beautiful little species,” Gmelin knew the bird — and gave it the nicely descriptive name Motacilla tigrina in his edition of Linnaeus’s Systema.
The real eye-opener here is — or should be — all the earlier citations Gmelin is able to adduce. Edwards, Brisson, Buffon, Pennant, and Latham had all described this warbler in the mid- and late eighteenth century, a couple of their accounts even accompanied by paintings.
Edwards, 1758Brisson, 1763
So much for the notion that Wilson — who died 200 years ago this year — was the “discoverer” of the species.
Indeed, not even Wilson himself, though laboring under the notion that the warbler was unknown when he first saw it, claimed the bird as his own discovery. In his American Ornithology, he puts it as clearly as anyone possibly could:
This new and beautiful little species was discovered in a maple swamp, in Cape May county, not far from the coast, by Mr. George Ord….
Of this beautiful species, which was first described by Wilson, very little is known…. I am indebted for the fine specimens … to my generous friend Edward Harris….
Now there’s an irony. Audubon devoted so much energy to denying Wilson‘s priority in other cases, but here, thanks to his profound disdain for George Ord (or to sloppy reading and even sloppier bibliographic work), he created a myth that is still being retold nearly two hundred years later.
But we all know better. Three cheers for Edwards and the rest!
I’ve always thought it nicely appropriate that we should celebrate Edward Sabine‘s birthday just at the time of year when his most beautiful namesake is exciting so many birders on its southbound passage.
Sabine’s Gull. Louis Agassiz Fuertes.
Sabine would be 225 years old today. In 1818, at the age of 30, he was recruited to serve as the astronomer on the Ross Expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. A scientist of wide-ranging interests — he would later be elected President of the Royal Society — Sabine made a point during his time in the Arctic of collecting birds, among them specimens of an unknown small gull. The circumstances were described by his brother, Joseph Sabine:
They were met with by [Edward Sabine] and killed on the 25th of July last on a group of three low rocky islands, each about a mile across, on the west coast of Greenland….
Joseph Sabine, “in conformity,” as he said, “with the custom of affixing the name of the original discoverer to a new species,” named the new gull Larus Sabini.
It was an understandable gesture, but the name has exposed the Sabine brothers over the years to occasional sniping by those who believe that Edward Sabine had named it for himself. He didn’t, and I leave it up to you to decide whether you think Joseph Sabine was looking for a bit of vicarious immortality in his choice of names.
Among the many other honors accruing to him over a very long lifetime, Edward Sabine would later be also commemorated in the name of those very islands off western Greenland where he shot the first gulls. As a result, the Sabine’s Gull is one of the most onomastically overdetermined birds around:
It’s mildly old-fashioned now, I think, but “Alice” was all the rage in the nineteenth century, a naming fad inspired in Britain, Germany, and the US by Alice Mary Maud, daughter of a British empress and mother of a Russian one. (I am married to one of her more recent namesakes, born of British and Hessian parents almost a hundred years after the Grand Duchess’s death.)
The popularity of the name coincided with a great boom in descriptive natural history, and today there are dozens, no, hundreds, of plants and animals named for one Alice or another. There’s the Alice sundew, the Alice wood-boring beetle, the Alice cream-spotted frog, and on and on. There are even a few birds.
A quick look at the Handbook of Birds of the World turns up something like twenty species named for an Alice, among them –unsurprisingly — four hummingbirds. One of them is the threatened Purple-backed Sunbeam, Aglaeactis aliciae.
Purple-backed Sunbeam, J.G. Keulemans
This lusciously beautiful Marañón endemic was first met with by the German collector Oscar Theodor Baron, who in March 1894found several of the birds in Succha, Peru, “above an elevation of 10,000 feet … feeding from parasitic flowers which abound on alder and other trees.” Before returning to Europe himself, Baron divided the large collection he made in Peru into two lots, “containing many novelties” besides this hummingbird, and shipped one set of specimens to Walter Rothschild, the other, jointly, to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, then some 35 years in to their collaboration on the vast Biologia centrali-americana.
When Salvin published the formal description of Baron’s new hummingbird in early 1896, he named it Aglaeactis aliciae. Alice’s Sunbeam, a pretty name. But he didn’t bother telling us who Alice was
James Jobling’s unbeatable Dictionary, our first and usually last resort in such questions, identifies the mysterious eponym as
So it’s back to the drawing board, which in this particular case is already covered by a messy sketch of a very large haystack and a very slender needle.
Baron, the collector of the first specimens of the sunbeam, remains a little known figure even in lepidoptery, his apparent specialization. It would be almost as nice for us as for him if he was happily married to a lovely Alice, but I can discover no mention of any matrimonial circumstance anywhere in any of the sparse documents available from his life. Arguments ex negativo are the most dangerous kind, but there is further, if equally circumstantial, support for the belief that this well-traveled naturalist was without an help meet to him. See what you think of this.
In 1893, Salvin had described another hummingbird taken by Baron as Metallura baroni, the Violet-throated Metaltail. Had there been a wife in the picture, I suspect that Salvin, gallant Victorian gentleman that he was, would have honored her rather than her husband, if by nothing more then at least naming the bird baronae.
That’s a slim straw to grasp at, but there’s more. Ernst Hartert, Rothschild’s curator at Tring, named two hummingbird species for Baron, a Eutoxeres sicklebill in 1894 and a Phaethornis hermit three years later. Both bear the epithet baroni, a potentially inexcusable slight — and one that would certainly have been avoided by Claudia Hartert, co-author with her husband of the description of Eutoxeres baroni.
The Baron’sSuperciliated Wren, described by Hellmayr,and theBaron’s Spinetail and Yellow-breasted Brush-Finch, both named by Salvin, all commemorate a masculine eponym, too. Either Mrs. Baron did not exist, or she had somehow made herself persona non grata with much of the ornithological establishment of her time.
What about Osbert Salvin? We know that he was married, but we also know that his wife’s name was Caroline Octavia Maitland, and that they had one daughter, Viola. No jesuitical squirming and wriggling required here: our Alice was clearly not a member of Salvin’s immediate family.
But we’re not out of possibilities yet.
Recall that though Salvin was the author of the formal description of Baron’s new sunbeam, the specimens were not his alone. In the Novitates Zoologicae for February 1895, Salvin wrote that
during the past summer Mr. Baron, who is now traveling in Peru, sent to Mr. Godman and myself his first collection of birds made during the first half of the year 1894 in Northern Peru.
Godman and Salvin were the powerhouse natural history team of the second half of the nineteenth century.
these two distinguished men of science were intimately associated in research and the results of their labors form an important part of the treasures of the Natural History Museum. The friendship between them dated from the fifties of the [nineteenth] century, when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge, and lasted until the death in 1898 of Salvin, who was survived twenty-one years by Godman, the latter dying in 1919, in his eighty-sixth year. In 1876 [probably much earlier] the two friends conceived the idea of the monumental work entitled Biologia central-americana, which has been described as without doubt the greatest work of the kind ever planned and carried out by private individuals.
In 1885, Godman and Salvin decided to donate the specimens and library gathered in the course of their work on the Biologia, which they owned in common,to the British Museum; Science reports that the combined collection comprised more than 520,000 — that’s more than half a million — bird skins.
The memorial to the two ornithologists had been paid for by subscription. So great was the respect for their work that more contributions had been received than needed:
Lord Rothschild, in presenting the tablet on behalf of the subscribers, explained that the committee had decided that any subscriptions left over after the memorial had been paid for should be devoted to a collecting fellowship…. Such names, such acts, such memories and such lives should not be forgotten by those who looked at the specimens and collections the museum contained.
The Godman family agreed:
a further sum of £5,000 [was donated] to the Godman Exploration Fund
by his two daughters, Edith and Eva, and by his widow.
I think it more than likely that Salvin named the sunbeam for this Alice, his friend and colleague’s wife, who had borne their first child in summer 1895 (and would have the second at the end of 1896). Anyone with access to the correspondence between Salvin and Godman should be able to prove that supposition with ease. Meanwhile, I think she deserves her hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Don’t you?
After yesterday afternoon’s cold front, we thought we had it made this morning. The woods along the Delaware River would, we thought, be swarming with warblers and vireos and flycatchers and tanagers. All we needed to do, we thought, was get there.
Point Breeze. Charles Lawrence, before 1820.
“There” in this case is a very special place in the history of American ornithology.
Point Breeze was the country estate of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of the first Napoleon and erstwhile king of Naples and of Spain. At the mouth of Crosswicks Creek in Bordentown, New Jersey, Point Breeze was also the home for some five years of Charles Lucian Bonaparte and his cousin-wife, Zénaïde, and it was here on the banks of the Delaware that the Prince of Musignano and Canino conducted much of the work that would lead Coues to call the 1820s “the Bonapartian Period” in American ornithology.
Bonaparte had better luck with the birds than we did. But still we enjoyed treading the same paths trod almost two hundred years ago by the man Coues styled “the princely person.”
Back in Bonaparte days, the marsh at the bottom of the hill was a lake, formed by damming Thornton Creek. The view down Crosswicks Creek to the Delaware is still impressive, and this would be a great place to simply set up and wait on a day when migrants really did decide to show up.
The house Joseph built above the lake for his daughter and son-in-law is long gone, replaced by tall beeches and tulip trees.
The tangled banks held chipping Northern Cardinals and mewling Gray Catbirds; on a warbler day, the edges could be lively.
The most evocative spot we discovered was this crumbling stretch of carriage road.
The only intact structure from Bonaparte’s day is the old Garden House, a modest building now overlooking lawns and a sparse orchard but once guarding the entrance to Joseph Bonaparte’s formal gardens.
This little house, too, has its place in ornithological history. You can read about that, and more about Charles Bonaparte and American ornithology, tomorrow at the newly remodeled ABA Blog. See you over there!
Thanks to Alison and to Hidden New Jersey‘s Sue and Ivan for the excellent birding company, and to the Divine Word Mission in Bordentown for allowing us access to their grounds.
Alexander Wilson’s accomplishments were manifestly great, but any real understanding of the man and his works will have to wrestle with the question of his influence on American culture: Did Wilson — does Wilson — matter?
I think he did, at least if we are to judge by bits of evidence such as this.
This painting of Niagara Falls by the American “primitive” Edward Hicks resides in a conspicuously inscribed frame, dated 1825. The verses, it turns out, are from The Foresters, a poem written by Alexander Wilson following his own visit to the Falls in 1804.
According to Alice Ford, Hicks’s brother had financed a reprint of the poem sometime before 1819, when the painter and his companions traveled to Niagara.
I know no more than that. But isn’t that enough to raise big questions about Wilson and the utopians (Thomas Say, Philadelphia, New Harmony!), Wilson and Quakerism, Wilson and the construction of the American landscape before the Hudson River School, Wilson’s religious co-optation, and on and on?
