Archive for Information
A Moving Experience
Posted by: | CommentsEighty years ago, a Kansas bird-bander witnessed one of those events most of us would give our eye-teeth to see:
I can hear it now: “I told you kids not to get so close to the edge of the roof!”
The 2013 ABA Bird of the Year
None for Me, Thank You!
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I’m not an adventurous eater by any means, but one evening in Arles, more to show off than anything else, I ordered oursins, the “fuzzy bears” of the sea. They arrived at the table, and I could hardly bear to breathe in: they smelled, well, like sea urchins. But I’d ordered them, so I ate them — and they were delicious.
Hoopoes smell worse. I won’t recite the notoriously scatological folk names this spectacularly plumed bird has been saddled with through history; let it suffice that the bacterium responsible for the stench is called Enterococcus faecalis. Enough said?
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover this passage in Jean Crespon‘s famous ornithology of the Camargue:
Here in Provence we find Hoopoes in the woods, the vineyards, and the clearings, as well as in parks with tall trees. They nest in many areas in our Department. It is in September and October that these birds make their return flight to Africa. At this season they are extremely fat, and their flesh makes a delicious meal; they are also less shy then than on their arrival in the spring.
Delicious? The Biblical “bird of abomination,” the “stinky rooster” of the Germans and the “poopoo bird” of the French? Can’t be.
Can’t be, but is. This species with its “well-known stercoraceous inclinations“ was a greatly appreciated seasonal treat in Mediterranean France. Pierre Belon, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, assures us (Hist. nat. oyseaux VI.x) that though no one wants to eat it,
properly seasoned and roasted, a Hoopoe has been found to be no less tasty than a Blackbird.
More than two hundred years on, the great Buffon weighs in in great detail on the Hoopoe’s qualities:
the migrant birds in Egypt are very fat and very good to eat. I say migrating Hoopoes, because in that same country there are resident birds often seen in the date orchards in the vicinity of Rosette, which one never eats. They are also found in great numbers in the city of Cairo, where they nest with full impunity on the terraces of the houses. One can imagine, in fact, that the Hoopoes living apart from man, in the inhabited countryside, are better to eat than those that live within a large city or along the major roads that lead to it: the former seek their sustenance, which is to say insects, in the mud, the gravel, the moist earth — in a word, at the breast of nature — instead of, like the latter, in the manifold filth that abounds wherever large numbers of people are gathered; this cannot fail to inspire disgust at the Hoopoe of the city and even to give its flesh an unpleasant odor…. That musk seems to be the reason, too, that even cats, normally so ravenous when it comes to birds, never touch these birds.
In his annotated edition of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, Geoffroy St-Hilaire adds the helpful kitchen hint that “the most frequently recommended method to remove this musky taste is to cut off the bird’s head as soon as it has been killed.”
Maybe they’re like sea urchins.
We won’t get to taste them, but we’ll see plenty of Hoopoes in southern France next April!
Yes, This Is New Jersey
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I’ve spent most of the past two days in New Jersey’s other wilderness, the forested mountains of Sussex County.
I get to visit this extreme northwestern corner of the state again in June, first with a group from the Brooklyn Bird Club and then just a couple of days later with Daniel.
June in Sussex means one thing and one thing only: breeding warblers. And so I set out to see if I could pin any of the more “desirable” species down in preparation for next month.
Most people think of warblering in New Jersey as something you do in May at Garret Mountain and in September at Cape May and Palmyra, when — if the weather and the season are right — migrants pour through. But the great open secret is that this state has a list of something like 27 breeding parulids, most of which can be found reliably every year in places like High Point, Stokes State Forest, and the Pequannock Watershed.
If I count right, I was able to find 21 of the area’s breeding species, plus a very lovely Brewster’s Warbler (it’s likely, of course, that every single one of the many phenotypic Blue-winged Warblers I saw were also of “impure” blood). That is not to say that we’ll succeed in relocating all of them on our June visits, but at least we’ll know where to look.
It always saddens me to actually go looking for Cerulean Warblers in Sussex County: I can remember a time, not that long ago, when this lovely little bird was simply part of a nice day under the tall trees, but now, suffering from habitat destruction on its narrow wintering grounds to our south, the species is often the target for birders in the New Jersey skylands and southward along the Delaware River. I didn’t check every location I’ve had birds in the past, but three of the more reliable produced males, persistently singing and nicely visible up in the greening canopy. I stopped in to pay my respects to one of them yesterday at high noon, and he was still at it, buzzing away in just the same tree where I’d left him the day before. Fingers crossed.
The Louisiana Waterthrush is another specialty of the area, though it’s widespread elsewhere in the state, too. The problem with this big, handsome brown warbler isn’t so much scarcity (though it’s nowhere truly abundant) as detectability.
Early arrivers and early nesters, these streamside breeders tend to sing most in the morning, and go silent entirely in early summer, when their procreative duties are done. They’re fairly shy even when they’re singing, and tend to take low, inconspicuous perches in the dense foliage along noisy creeks, making them hard to see in the best of circumstances. I was happy to get great looks at two singing males on Friday — but we’ll see whether they are as obliging a few weeks from now.
Northern Waterthrushes, much more abundant, more familiar, and more easily seen, are also much scarcer in Sussex County, and I was able to find only one, an invisible singing male at a traditional and very beautiful site in High Point State Park.
Kuser Bog is about as wild as it gets anywhere, and some loud crashing made me hasten my steps on the way out (I saw not a single bear either day). A Hermit Thrush, a singing Black-throated Blue Warbler, and a couple of Blackburnian Warblers were probably on breeding territories, but I couldn’t find any Nashville or Canada Warblers, or, ominously, a Ruffed Grouse, all species I’d been hoping to find among the hemlocks, spruces, and rhododendrons.
Most of the other, more common parulids fell into place fairly easily, at least whenever a pause in the din from the innumerable Ovenbirds and American Redstarts let me hear them. Chestnut-sided Warblers were more common than I remembered them, rolling out their cheerful songs on parking lot edges and in picnic areas. By far the most startling sight of my entire expedition was the ferocious battle between two males, locked in struggle on a branch; the bird on top managed to push the underdog into space, but held on to him by the bill, so that the second bird dangled for more than a second, squeaking and tiny feet flailing. Next time I need muscle, I’m hiring half a dozen chestnut-sides!
If some of the warblers require a little searching, another of Sussex County’s specialty breeders, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, is hard to miss on an early May morning. Still a major rarity just 15 years ago, sapsuckers seem to be fairly common now in High Point and Stokes, where their explosive tapping can drown out everything else (everything, that is, but the Ovenbirds and American Redstarts). They’re especially fond of the campgrounds, which can make early morning visits to the nest trees a bit ticklish, but I did find one male hammering on the edge of a big beaver pond in Stokes State Forest, classic habitat for this northern woodpecker.
Like Chestnut-sided Warblers, many of the area’s special birds prefer clearings and hedges to deep forest. Blue-winged and Prairie Warblers join Field Sparrows along the quiet back roads, and Gray Catbirds yowl from the thickets.
At one of these locations I heard the unmistakable nails-on-chalkboard squeals of a Broad-winged Hawk, and scanned the trees to find a pair copulating on a branch, the second year in a row I’ve unintentionally intruded on the privacy of a pair of that species. The male took off, but the female lingered in the tree for a while.
It looks like a great place for a nest, tall trees bordering wet thickets and fields, and it would be great if the pair would stay through June. Wouldn’t it?
This time of year, the birds stay active most of the day. That may be different next month, when the heat and humidity may have set in. If that’s the case, we’ll have good birding for a few hours, then switch to watching other winged things, some of which were already assembling in puddle parties on the dirt roads.
Not warblers, but pretty enough — and one more reason to love the Jersey highlands.
Alexander Wilson’s Thrush
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It’s spring, and over much of the continent “the Veeries sing their songs of long ago.”
Here in New Jersey, too, that weird spooling, swirling buzz is heard of a warm evening. But when we hear it here in the mid-Atlantic, some of us are likely to call the cinnamon-backed songster not by its official, onomatopoetic name, but by another, one that commemorates the name of the man who first described it to science.
Especially this year, of course, the bicentennial of Alexander Wilson’s death.
Oddly enough, though Wilson recognized that the bird he was describing was new and clearly different from any of the other American thrushes he was familiar with, he assigned to it the names, both Latin and English, of another bird.
Gmelin’s 1789 description of the Wood Thrush, Turdus mustelinus
With reference to the rich brown of the bird’s back, he called his novum Turdus mustelinus, the Tawny Thrush, both of which, as Wilson himself noted, were in use already for the bird we know as the Wood Thrush.
Pennant’s 1785 description of the Tawny (=Wood) Thrush
The difficulty Wilson’s sloppiness had created was noticed almost immediately. When James Francis Stephens copied out Wilson’s description of the bird for the General Zoology of 1817, he observed politely that
it is not a little surprising that Wilson in his American Ornithology should increase the confusion by giving a name that was applied by Pennant to the [Wood Thrush], when he was confident this bird was a distinct species.
Stephens gave the bird new names, both English and scientific, calling it the Brownish Thrush Turdus fuscescens; we still know the species under that latinized epithet today.
Seven years later, in 1824, Charles Lucian Bonaparte was able to overlook Stephens’s name to give the bird a new one of his own devising.
The name of mustelinus must … be restored to the [Wood Thrush]; and as the present species will then be destitute of a name, I propose for it that of T. Wilsonii.
Bonaparte, like so many Philadelphians, was a great fan of his late colleague’s work, but even he seems to have had a niggling worry or two about pushing it too far:
I do not consider myself censurable for the frequent repetition of the name of this great ornithologist, as applied to species in different genera; it is a tribute of respect which I conceive justly due to one who has done so much for the benefit of my favourite science.
Interestingly, however, Bonaparte does not appear to have suggested changing the English appellation as well, continuing to cite his Turdus wilsonii as the Tawny Thrush. The vernacular name Wilson’s Thrush appears to have been used first by John Richardson and William Swainson (himself of thrush fame, of course) in the Fauna boreali-americana, where they describe the Wilson’s Thrush in part from specimens killed right here in New Jersey.
It is with peculiar satisfaction that … we find our own observations confirm, in their full extent, the judicious remarks made upon this species by the Prince of Musignano (i.e., Bonaparte); and gladly do we follow him in commemorating it by the name of the great American ornithologist.
Unlike Bonaparte, Swainson knew that the bird already had a properly formed, properly published scientific name: but it didn’t matter.
True it is, that, by the strict rules of priority, we may not perhaps be justified in so doing; this species having received, in a popular compilation [take that, Stephens!], another name. But not even the laws of nomenclature … must upon every occasion impose shackles upon superior minds. Few ornithologists will be disposed to withhold from the memory of Wilson the only honour it is now in their power to give.
One who might, just might, have been so disposed was John James Audubon.
In the text of the Ornithological Biography, Audubon does, once, use the name Wilson’s Thrush, but the full species account and the plate are labeled Tawny Thrush, a typically ambivalent rhetorical move on the part of the man who just never could come to terms with his “illustrious” predecessor (and who, incidentally, seems to have mistaken the song of the Hermit Thrush for that of this bird).
Thomas Nuttall had no such compunctions: his account of the species is headed “Wilson’s Thrush, or Veery,” the first published use of the modern name I am aware of. Coues, too, used those two names, in that sequence, in the first edition of his Check List — but retained only Wilson’s Thrush in the second. Following Coues’s lead, the American Ornithologists’ Union also used the patronym in the first two editions of the Check-list.
The Fifteenth Supplement, published in 1909, changed a large number of English names, some of them for reasons that seem to range from arbitrary to inconsistent. (“Prairie Hen” was changed to “Prairie Chicken,” but “Sage Grouse” to “Sage Hen,” to adduce just one example.) Among the victims was the name “Wilson’s Thrush,” apparently deemed a “book name” and replaced by Veery, as a name more “in use where the birds live.”
I for one regret the loss of the old name. “Veery” may, to more imaginative ears than mine, recall the song, but it indicates relationship no better than such other inscrutable names as “Sora” or “Bufflehead.” And it misses out on another chance to commemorate the Father of American Ornithology, who deserves a little remembering this year.
Avant la lettre: What Is Audubon’s Snow Bird?
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been unfair to Audubon.
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.
In late April I saw Audubon’s original painting, the model for this junco plate, and suddenly it all came clear to me. (Click on the image symbol on the NYHS site to see that painting.)
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.
