It’s well known that the two sexes of the Williamson’s Sapsuckerwere originally described as separate species, a perfectly understandable confusion given the remarkable difference in their plumages.
What most of us don’t recall is that in the early nineteenth century another woodpecker was subjected to a similar, and similarly temporary, fate. Today we think of the Red-headed Woodpecker as absolutely distinctive, unmistakable in any plumage; but our forebears weren’t always so certain.
John Latham was the first to describe this puzzling bird, in the 1780s; he called it, logically, the White-rumped Woodpecker, and based the account in his General Synopsis on a specimen from Long Island, New York. Neither the collector, a certain Captain Davies, nor Latham himself quite knew what to make of it: as the latter wrote, this bird
has, till now, never come under my inspection. I have some opinion of it being a female, but of what species cannot ascertain; am therefore constrained to place it as a distinct species, at least for the present.
Johann Friedrich Gmelin, updating the Systema naturaeat the end of that same decade, was less cautious. He copied out Latham’s description in Latin, then assigned the “Whide-rumped Woodpecker” its very own Linnaean binomial, Picus obscurus — in allusion, I’m sure, to the animal’s overall color, not to its ontological status.
Alexander Wilson, whose own connection to this species is the stuff of myth, was apparently unaware of Gmelin’s unwarranted multiplication of species; in the American Ornithology, he writes only — probably in reference to Latham, whose work we now know was available in Philadelphia — that the dusky plumage of the young birds “has occasioned some European writers to mistake them for females.”
As similar as the male and the female of this species are to each other in color, the immature birds differ from both sexes of the adult…. Latham and Gmelin created a redundancy when they presented the young bird as a separate species.
It was no doubt a specimen from Vieillot’s own collection that served as the model for Jean-Gabriel Prêtre’s illustration of the “Pic tricolor jeune”:
The matter, one would think, was closed. But Charles Bonaparte, while acknowledging that Vieillot had already made the point clear, still felt moved, twenty years later, to include an account of the Young Red-headed Woodpecker in his American Ornithology of 1828. In addition to a very thorough description to debunk this “nominal species,” Bonaparte “thought proper … to give an exact figure of it,” in the shape of the colored plate at the top of this page, by Alexander Rider. Bonaparte, always given as he was to extravagant enthusiasms, felt that Rider’s woodpecker
will perhaps be allowed to be the best representation of a bird ever engraved.
I’m not so sure about that (or rather, I’m quite sure about that). But it is a nice illustration from, and of, a time when even the familiar birds of America could provide a mystery.
For years — for decades, in fact, ever since, as a fourth grader, I first learned about the man and the work — I’ve judged him, and harshly, solely on the evidence of the engraved plates that make up the The Birds of America.
I’ve been fortunate over the years to have been affiliated with a couple of institutions that own full sets, and I’ve always appreciated the big books as masterpieces of technology and entrepreneurial drive. But art? Not really.
My mind was changed, completely and abruptly, in late April when I finally made my way to the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition of some 220 of Audubon’s paintings — not the plates that were printed, colored, and sold to subscribers, but the actual paintings that served as the exemplars for the engraver.
Like most of us, the closest I’d ever come to seeing anything from Audubon’s paintbrush was the rather poor reproductions, on decidedly poor paper, of the watercolors published and republished in the 1970s and 80s. The originals themselves have been shown only very rarely in the 150 years since they were purchased from Lucy Audubon — but they are astonishing, startling, eye-opening.
They’re really good.
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Not only do the paintings reveal an artist in masterful command of his media, but they also, just as surprisingly, have a few things to teach us about the birds Audubon was painting. Take his Snow Bird, the bird we know today as the Dark-eyed Junco.
The engraving of this otherwise so engaging sparrow in Birds of America has always left me cold. It’s bland and dull, and the coloring of the specimens I’ve seen has always seemed vague, especially on the lower bird, the male, whose breast and hood just don’t seem to want to join up as they do in real life. Poor draftsmanship, poor engraving, poor coloring: it doesn’t really matter where the sloppiness was introduced.
Most of the engravings are more or less faithful renderings of Audubon’s originals: but not this time. The painting, prepared from specimens collected in Louisiana, differs strikingly from the engraved plate in depicting a male bird with a decidedly black, highly contrasting hood, sharply set off in a straight line from the softer gray of the breast sides and flank; the lower edge of that hood extends into the white lower breast, creating a “convex” border.
You know where this is headed, don’t you?
Audubon’s bird was not your everyday Slate-colored Junco. Instead, the bird that he shot and drew was a male Cassiar Junco, and his painting was the first depiction ever of a “flavor” of juncos that would not be formally described until 1918, nearly a hundred years later.
I don’t know whether we have any of Audubon’s instructions to the colorists responsible for finishing the plate, but I still think that we can figure out with some certainty what happened. I’m guessing that Audubon was slightly puzzled when he reviewed his Louisiana painting, and that he asked the engraver and the colorists to “correct” the pattern of the bird’s breast and sides to match that of the Slate-colored Junco, the taxon he would later describe in the Ornithological Biography.
Had I not seen the painting hanging in New York, I would have gone on in my benighted way, shaking my head over another botched Audubonian bird. Instead, I wind up admiring more than ever before the ornithologist who discovered the Cassiar Junco — and the artist who gave us such a fine depiction of a wonderful but long unrecognized bird.
The meeting appears not to have been an altogether happy one, and they parted none too amicably after a warm dispute as to who [had] discovered Falco harrisii.
Audubon had done it again. Eight years before the meeting with Cassin, he had received the skin of a female hawk from Louisiana unlike anything he had seen before. He gave it the English name “Louisiana Hawk,” and in its scientific name commemorated his generous patron, sometime traveling companion, and constant
friend Edward Harris, Esq., a gentleman who, independently of the aid which he has on many occasions afforded me, in prosecuting my examination of our birds, merits this compliment as an enthusiastic Ornithologist.
Harris, the sesquicentennial of whose early death we commemorate this year, was in the room that afternoon in Philadelphia, and it must have been uncomfortable for him when Cassin pointed out that “his” hawk had never been Audubon’s to name: Temminck had already published the species a dozen years earlier, based on an immature specimen from Brazil collected by the great explorer and botanist Auguste de St-Hilaire and donated to the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Temminck called the bird Falco unicinctus, the “hawk with a single band,” not a bad name and not a bad description. In addition to a very full description of the species’ plumage, he noted, for the first time, that in its structure this raptor falls somehow “in between” what we now know as the buteos and the accipiters:
In its general aspect it rather resembles a buzzard or even a harrier. Its wings, though pointed, are not as long as those of the buzzards; the way in which the flight feathers are arranged is precisely the same as in the European bird hawks, but it creates a profile that is more elongated and pointed. The curved edges of the bill place it nearer our bird-hawks than our buzzards. This species serves to remind us of the numerous subtly intermediate features that link our European raptor groups.
Audubon must have known Temminck’s description and the accompanying plate (Cassin most certainly did). But to give the American Woodsman the benefit of a slight doubt, he probably assumed that a species found “au Brésil” could hardly be expected to occur in the swamps lying “between Bayou Sara and Natchez.”
Audubon’s proclamation of his sp. nov. in the Ornithological Biography is as terse as Temminck’s was detailed.
A label attached to one of its legs authorizes me to say that it was a female; but I have received no information respecting its habits; nor can I at present give you the name of the donor….
The only real “ornithological” information he can provide is an assignment
to the group of what may be called indolent or heavy-flying hawks.
Anyone who has spent any time around Harris’s Hawks will be surprised by Audubon’s terminology here. The birds are often tame, hanging out in desert backyards and perching on urban lampposts, but they are “impressive sprinters as well, accelerating quickly at the first sign of prey.”
It turns out that Audubon’s class of “heavy-flying hawks” is a category nearly congruent with the modern birder’s notion of the “buteo.” In addition to the Harris’s (since 1874 in the genus Parabuteo), Audubon’s group includes the Golden Eagle (in the great eagle genus Aquila), the Red-tailed Hawk, the Harlan’s Hawk, the Broad-winged Hawk, the Red-shouldered Hawk, the Common Buzzard, and the Rough-legged Hawk. This is a “natural” grouping based on wing shape and flight habit: all these birds
can, indeed, soar to a very great height, but this [they] accomplish by a circling or gyratory flight,
precisely the behavior that birders today use to narrow the possibilities when they see a large raptor.
But Audubon also had a moral judgment in mind. He calls the flight of these birds “slovenly,” and all of them, he says, are to be considered
more or less indolent; one might say that they are destitute of the power of distinguishing themselves in any remarkable manner, and none of them shew a propensity to remove any great distance from the place of their birth, unless, indeed, when very hard pressed either by want of food or by very intense cold.
A positivist reader might find here a description ex negativo of Audubon’s own career and accomplishments, which echo in his description a few pages on of the “True Falcons“:
they appear to delight in following the myriads of the feathered tribes from which they have derived their subsistence.
Absent any more information about the Harris’s Hawk‘s lifestyle, Audubon’s use of the word “indolent” to describe this species created a veritable topos in nineteenth-century American ornithology.
Henry Eeles Dresser, in Texas in 1865, described the present species as “heavy” and “sluggish”; that latter adjective would become the species’ signature in Elliott Coues’s great Key, first published in 1872 and running through five editions before 1903. James C. Merrill, working in Texas a dozen years after Dresser, compared the birds’ behavior unfavorably to that of Crested Caracaras, calling them “not so active” as even those leisurely scavengers. Even Charles Bendire, whose extensive ornithologizing in Arizona should have taught him dramatically otherwise, found this species “a lazy sluggish bird, their flight slow, and not graceful.”
Ironically, it was John Cassin himself who in 1858 added another layer to the Audubonian cliché of the “indolent” raptor. In the ornithological volume summarizing the results of the 1853-56 Pacific Railroad surveys, Cassin and Baird moved Temminck’s Falco unicinctus into John Gould’s (“gratingly” and “inelegantly” named) genus Craxirex, which the British ornithologist had erected in 1841 to accommodate a new hawk discovered during the Beagle‘s explorations of the Galapagos.
In fact, Cassin and his co-authors went so far as to suggest that Temminck’s (and Audubon’s) hawk might even be conspecific with Gould’s, which he had described as
a most interesting link in the chain of affinities, by which the true buzzards pass into the great American sub-family of carrion-feeding hawks,
a characterization closely recalling Temminck’s mention of the “nombreuses nuances intermédiaires.” And unlike Temminck and Audubon, Gould was also able to communicate something of the Galapagos hawk’s habits:
These birds will eat all kinds of offal thrown from the houses.
That was all it took. On no other basis, it seems, than Gould’s description of a bird that might or might not be the same as the one found in the US, Baird and Cassin simply transfered the account of the Galapagos bird’s prandial preferences onto the Harris’s Hawk, which, they write, is not only “dull and heavy,” but “subsists for the greater part on dead animals.” Audubons’ picture of indolence was complete, and the notion of the lazy scavenger was entrenched. In the first edition of the Key, Coues said that the Harris’s Hawk “approached” the caracaras in its habits, an observation expanded on explicitly in the final, posthumous edition of the work, where it is described as “a sluggish, carrion-feeding bird” — and where the genus Parabuteo is called “Carrion Buzzards.”
The notion that the Harris’s Hawk was identical to Gould’s Galapagos bird would be definitively rejected by Robert Ridgway in 1874, but the damage was done. Dresser described the birds he encountered in Texas as “heavy” and “sluggish… subsisting, so far as I could see, entirely on carrion… regaling themselves on some offensive carrion.” Charles C. Nutting reported from Costa Rica in 1882 that this “abundant” species
“associates with the Carrion Crow [=Black Vulture], and eats offal.” A.K. Fisher, the patron saint of economic ornithology, reassured the American farmer in 1893 that this species “does very little damage to poultry or beneficial birds,” as its food “consists largely of offal, the smaller reptiles and mammals, and occasionally birds.” (Refreshingly, Fisher also defended the Harris’s Hawk against the usual charge of lethargy, noting that many observers had mistaken its habitual fearlessness for stolidity.) Even Salvin and Godman‘s Biologia centrali-americana, published at the very turn of the twentieth century, still reported that it was “frequently described as sluggish… eating offal.”
The only early dissenting voice seems to have been George Sennett‘s, who in the late 1870s found the crops of the birds he shot in the Rio Grande Valley full of such speedy little prey items as mice, lizards, birds, and ground squirrels, “proving them active hunters, and not the sluggish birds they appeared.” But it was not until the twentieth century that our swashbuckling Harris’s Hawk finally shook off its reputation for indolence. Bent, writing in 1937, acknowledges the traditional view of this species as “sluggish, heavy… slow of flight and not graceful,” but objects rightly that “no very slow or sluggish hawk could catch the lively creatures recorded in its food,” and quotes Allan Brooks on his experience of “this bird in action”:
a flutter of wings as a flock of teal rise in confusion with a dark shape striking right and left among them with all the dash of a goshawk…. the next attack may be on a group of small herons, one of which may be singled out and followed until killed.
Such noble prey is as unlike “offal” as can be, and “indolent” is the last word one would apply to “the dash of a goshawk.” Honest observation was finally, a hundred years later, casting off the weight of Audubonian authority.
From The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors
Nowadays, we think of this species as able to “accelerate like lightning, turn on a dime, and anticipate a rabbit’s movements.” We admire the species’ extremely complex social structures, and few are the hearts that don’t quicken when we’re lucky enough to see a “pack” of these hawks on the hunt.
These and many other appealing aspects of the Harris’s Hawk’s biology and behavior went “essentially unrecognized” until the 1970s. It wasn’t that the birds were rare or elusive, but that we had already been told what they were like: lazy, sluggish, indolent, and dull, with an immoderate fondness for decaying flesh. Audubon, Cassin, and Baird had told us all we thought we needed to know.
To read more about raptors, raptor watching, and books about raptors, visit The Birder’s Library.
It’s funny to think that of all the tens of thousands of birds names published over the years, there was a first.
But it’s true. At the very head of the chronological list stands Linnaeus’s Vultur Gryphus, the great Andean Condor, followed by an equally impressive creature, the Harpy Eagle. And then, third on the page and third in the history of the ornithological binomial, comes this bird:
Linnaeus based his description in part on this painting in Eleazar Albin’s Natural History of Birds. Albin had encountered this specimen in the 1720s or early ’30s, “at the George Tavern at Charing-Cross, with the Cassowares,” and he adopted the name given by the bird’s “keepers” there, the Western King of the Vultures, Rex Warwouwerum Occidentalis. George Edwards, too, though he complains about the inaccuracies in Albin’s painting, takes over his predecessor’s name, calling the bird The King of the Vultures in his own work a decade later.
The Archiater cites both men as he names the Vultur in 1758, but he declines to follow either in his choice of epithet for his “new” species. Instead of christening the bird V. rex, Linnaeus (perhaps, if I read Jobling right, inspired by a manuscript note in his copy of Edwards) looked to another form of monarchy and called it Vultur papa, the Pope Vulture.
I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.
The 1758 edition of the Systema marks the beginning of modern taxonomic history, but that same fateful year was also when all of Linnaeus’s published writings were placed on the Index and condemned to be burnt as dangerous and immoral. It’s not clear whether the Vatican’s censors had objected to Linnaeus’s graphic descriptions of the salacious lives of plants or had discovered in the Systema some hint of an attack on the “fixity” of species — but whatever the reason, I’d be surprised if the son of a Lutheran vicar took it well.
There’s no flattery, and maybe much of its opposite, in the way those terse Latin words lie on the page:
The pope (3) is a vulture with nostrils covered by warts and a naked crown and neck.
That end of the bird is further described in unappealingly suggestive terms:
He can draw the head and neck, which look as if they had been skinned, back into the sheath of the lower neck’s downy skin.
Linnaeus’s Pope Vulture — we’ve gone back to calling it the King Vulture in English, but it retains the epithet papa — stands at the head of a long line of clerical birds, cardinals and monklets and nunlets and maybe even prothonotaries, and I’m sure that some of those names, too, are meant to poke fun at their human namesakes — none of them, though, with quite the same ferocity that I think shines through here.
Ducks are strong flyers, and large bodies of water shouldn’t pose much of an obstacle to them in any case, so it’s no real surprise that so many northern hemisphere species are found in both the Old World and the New.
Some of those shared ducks are more abundant on one continent than on the other, of course. Think of the lovely and bizarre little Harlequin Duck, a vanishingly rare bird in western Europe, but common enough in parts of North America.
In one of those coincidences of distribution that birders so much love to ponder, the harlequin’s range is nearly identical to that of another chubby duck of rocky seacoasts, the bird named in Gmelin’s 1789 edition of the Systema naturaeAnas islandica — a bird that we now know in English, most of us, usually, most places, as the Barrow’s Goldeneye.
Gmelin’s text is really nothing more than a simple translation of that in John Latham’s Synopsis:
General colour black. Head crested: fore part of the neck, breast, and belly, white: legs saffron-colour. Inhabits Iceland. Called by the inhabitants Hrafn-ond.
“Raven duck” didn’t make much sense to Latham, so he gave the bird an English name that reflected its range as then understood: the Iceland Duck. Gmelin was happy to adopt the same name in Latin, Anas islandica, which in turn provided most of the national languages in Europe with a vernacular name for this rare visitor from the land of the Vikings.
Baird (RR Pac., 1858) says that the specimen depicted here was probably given to John Gould, from whom it was later obtained by John James Audubon.
In the course of one of the Franklin Expeditions of the 1820s, John Richardson killed an unfamiliar duck “on the Rocky Mountains” of America. Unaware, it seems, of Gmelin’s Anas islandica, he described it as new and named it Clangula barrovii, the Rocky Mountain Garrot, the scientific name honoring Sir John Barrow and his “unwearied exertions for the promotion of science.” (In a footnote, William Swainson, Richardson’s prim-and-properer co-author, warns against naming birds after people, but admits that Barrow deserves such a tribute if ever anyone did, for his discoveries in “Arctic America, Southern Africa, and China; … high benefits conferred upon the State; and … the possession and encouragement of zoological knowledge.”)
That Richardson’s garrot was, in fact, the same goldeneye species that occurred as a vagrant in northern Europe was first recognized by Charles Lucian Bonaparte.
His Geographical and Comparative List of 1838 arrays the birds of Europe and America in parallel tallies; our little black and white duck occupies the same position in each column, but Bonaparte (unbound by the ICZN, obviously) opts for Richardson’s species name barrovi. The List does without English names, but the clear suggestion, of course, is that the bird would be known in the vernacular as “Barrow’s Duck” — precisely the name used by John Gould on the plate Bonaparte cites to from his Birds of Europe.
The extraordinary scarcity of this species in Europe is neatly attested by Eyton, in that same year of 1838: the author of the Monograph on the Anatidae knew of a grand total of three Old World specimens of Barrow’s Duck — one in his own collection, a recent specimen from Iceland, and a mount of unknown origin once in the collection of Réaumur and illustrated seventy years earlier in Brisson.
By 1842, Bonaparte at least had rediscovered Gmelin’s name, and was calling the duck islandica in his Catalogo metodico. In the English-speaking world, though, where the species was thought of as thoroughly Nearctic, and where the name of Barrow (he would live to 1848) was so celebrated, there was no reason to revive Latham’s old vernacular name — and plenty of cause to retain Richardson’s.
