The Experience of Birding
Alexandria and Cairo have nearly as many owls as pigeons, and they fly around both day and night. I don’t believe that these owls hunt smaller birds as they do in Italy, as though they are quite commonly seen by day, the little birds pay them none of the startled attention that causes them to gather when they see an owl in Italy. Thus we failed more than once to capture small birds here, whereas in Italy we have often used an owl and birdlime to hunt birds with great success.
Original description: Fringilla melodia Wilson 1810
Taxonomic history in AOU/AOS Check-list
AOU 1 (1886): Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata [fasciata]; Desert Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata fallax; Mountain Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata montana; Heermann’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata heermanni; Samuels’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata samuelis; Rusty Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata guttata; Sooty Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata rufina; Aleutian Song Sparrow, Melospiza cinerea
AOU 2 (1895): Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata [fasciata]; Desert Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata fallax; Mountain Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata montana; Heermann’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata heermanni; Samuels’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata samuelis; Rusty Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata guttata; Sooty Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata rufina; Brown’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata rivularis; Santa Barbara Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata graminea; San Clemente Song Sparrow, Melospiza fasciata clementae; Bischoff’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza insignis; Aleutian Song Sparrow, Melospiza cinerea
AOU 3 (1910): Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia melodia; Desert Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia fallax; Mountain Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia montana; Heermann’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia heermanni; Samuels’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia samuelis; Rusty Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia morphna; Sooty Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia rufina; Brown’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia rivularis; Santa Barbara Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia graminea; San Clemente Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia clementae; Dakota Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia juddi; Merrill’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia merrilli; Alameda Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia pusillula; San Diego Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia cooperi; Yakutat Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia caurina; Kenai Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia kenaiensis; Mendocino Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia cleonensis; Bischoff’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia insignis; Aleutian Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia sanaka; Suisun Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia maxillaris
AOU 4 (1931): Eastern Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia melodia; Atlantic Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia atlantica; Mississippi Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia beata; Dakota Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia juddi; Mountain Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia fallax; Modoc Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia fisherella; Merrill’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia merrilli; Kenai Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia kenaiensis; Yakutat Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia caurina; Sooty Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia rufina; Rusty Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia morphna; Mendocino Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia cleonensis; Samuels’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia samuelis; Suisun Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia maxillaris; Modesto Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia mailliardi; Alameda Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia pusillula; Heermann’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia heermanni; San Diego Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia cooperi; Santa Barbara Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia graminea; San Clemente Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia clementae; Coronados Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia coronatorum; Desert Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia saltonis; Brown’s Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia rivularis
AOU 5 (1957): Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia: Melospiza melodia melodia, Melospiza melodia atlantica, Melospiza melodia euphonia, Melospiza melodia juddi, Melospiza melodia montana, Melospiza melodia inexpectata, Melospiza melodia merrilli, Melospiza melodia fisherella, Melospiza melodia maxima, Melospiza melodia sanaka, Melospiza melodia amaka, Melospiza melodia insignis, Melospiza melodia kenaiensis, Melospiza melodia caurina, Melospiza melodia rufina, Melospiza melodia morphna, Melospiza melodia cleonensis, Melospiza melodia gouldii, Melospiza melodia maxillaris, Melospiza melodia samuelis, Melospiza melodia pusillula, Melospiza melodia mailliardi, Melospiza melodia heermanni, Melospiza melodia cooperi, Melospiza melodia micronyx, Melospiza melodia clementae, Melospiza melodia graminea, Melospiza melodia coronatorum, Melospiza melodia fallax, Melospiza melodia saltonis, Melospiza melodia rivularis
AOU 6 (1983): Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia
AOU 7 (1998): Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia
IUCN Conservation Status: Of least concern
Detailed description and measurements drawn from standard reference works
Adult, subspecies melodia: Brown to faintly reddish brown tail feathers, the central pair with a dark shaft streak and, occasionally faint narrow bars; outer web of outermost rectrices paler brownish gray but never white. Rump and upper tail coverts gray-brown with blackish or brown streaking. Mantle and scapular feathers brown with black centers, lining up into streaks. Primaries and secondaries dull gray brown with paler edges, tertials black with broad brown edges and grayish tips. Greater coverts brown with large blackish teardrops and inconspicuously paler tips. Median coverts brown with dark brown centers and inconspicuous dull gray tips. Marginal coverts of under wing white. Nape brown-gray with variable brown streaking. Underparts white to off-white; faint buffy or gray wash on flanks. The wide jaw stripe and throat are dull buffy white, separated by a strikingly broad wedge-shaped or even triangular black lateral throat stripe; the throat is flecked dark. Breast, sides of breast, and flanks with wide black streaks, the feathers edged in fresh plumage with rust. Under tail coverts and vent buff-white with brown streaks. Brown crown with narrow black streaks and black-streaked gray median crown stripe. Long, broad supercilium pale tan-gray, paler on the lore. Olive-gray ear coverts surrounded by narrow brown eye line and whisker. Bill dark above, paler pinkish brown below; tarsi and toes dull brown.
Juvenile, subspecies melodia: Buffier and less neatly marked above, the crown less regularly streaked than in adults. Creamy white to buffy underparts with narrower, messier streaking.
Length 146-150 mm (5.7-5.9 in)
Wing chord 65-67 mm (2.6 in)
Tail 64-67 mm (2.5-2.6 in)
W:T 1.04
Adult, subspecies rufina: Tail feathers dusky brown, the central pair with obscurely darker shaft streaks. Rump and upper tail coverts dark dull rusty brown. Mantle and scapular feathers dark ashy brown with sooty streaks and very indistinct dark shaft streaks. Primaries and secondaries dull dark brown, outer webs of tertials brighter rust. Greater coverts chestnut with large blackish teardrops. Median coverts dusky brown with dark brown centers. Marginal coverts of under wing white. Nape dark brown-gray with dusky streaking. Underparts dull gray; faint olive cast to flanks. The wide jaw stripe and throat are dull grayish white, separated by a broad wedge-shaped or even triangular sooty brown lateral throat stripe; throat flecked dark. Breast, sides of breast, and flanks with molasses brown streaks, the feathers usually without darker shaft streaks. Under tail coverts and vent grayish white with brown streaks. Sooty brown crown with narrow black streaks and only a poorly defined median crown stripe. Brown-gray ear coverts surrounded by narrow dark brown eye line and whisker. Bill dark above, paler brown below; tarsi and toes dull brown.
Juvenile, subspecies rufina: Less neatly marked above, the crown less regularly streaked than in adults. Buffier underparts with slightly narrower, messier streaking.
Length 145-160 mm (5.7-6.3 in)
Wing chord 67-72 mm (2.6-2.8 in)
Tail 64-70 mm (2.5-2.8 in)
W:T 1.03
Adult, subspecies cinerea:
Length 181-188 mm (7.1-7.4 in)
Wing chord 81-85 mm (31.-3.3 in)
Tail 78-83 mm (3.0-3.3 in)
W:T 1.02
Adult, subspecies morphna: Tail feathers dark ruddy brown, the central pair with darker shaft streaks. Rump and upper tail coverts deep rusty brown. Mantle and scapular feathers rusty olive with rusty streaks and indistinct black shaft streaks. Primaries and secondaries dark brown, outer webs of tertials rusty. Greater coverts dark rust with large blackish teardrops. Median coverts dark rust with dark brown centers. Marginal coverts of under wing white. Nape dark rusty with dusky streaking. Underparts olive-gray. The wide jaw stripe and throat are yellowish gray, separated by a broad brown lateral throat stripe. Breast, sides of breast, and flanks with chestnut streaks, the feathers usually without darker shaft streaks. Under tail coverts and vent dull gray-white with brown streaks. Dark rusty crown with narrow black streaks and variably conspicuous gray median crown stripe. Rust-brown ear coverts surrounded by narrow dark chestnut eye line and whisker. Bill dark above, paler brown below; tarsi and toes dull brown.
Juvenile, subspecies morphna: Less deep rusty and less neatly marked above, with blackish mantle streaking. Slightly whiter, buff-washed underparts with less well-organized and less vividly brown streaking.
Length 150-153 mm (5.9-6.0 in)
Wing chord 65-68 mm (2.6-2.7 in)
Tail 63-66 mm (2.5-2.6 in)
W:T 1.03
Adult, subspecies fallax: Tail feathers pale rusty brown, the central pair with darker shaft streaks. Rump and upper tail coverts pale rusty brown. Mantle and scapular feathers pale brown-gray with reddish-brown streaks and no or very inconspicuous black shaft streaks. Primaries and secondaries brown, outer webs of tertials rustier. Greater coverts pale rust with mid-sized blackish teardrops. Median coverts pale rust with darker centers. Marginal coverts of under wing white. Nape gray-brown with dusky streaking. Underparts white. The wide jaw stripe and throat are white, separated by a narrow, sometimes incomplete chestnut lateral throat stripe; throat flecked brown. Breast, sides of breast, and flanks with fairly sparse rusty streaks, the feathers usually without darker shaft streaks. Under tail coverts and vent white with sparse rusty streaks. Pale rusty crown with narrow brown streaks and variably conspicuous whitish median crown stripe. Pale rusty ear coverts surrounded by narrow, slightly darker eye line and whisker. Bill dark above, paler brown below; tarsi and toes dull brown.
Juvenile, subspecies fallax: Less rusty and less neatly marked above, with brown streaking on buffy-brown mantle. Buff-washed underparts with sparse pale-brown streaking.
Length 140-146 mm (5.5-5.7 in)
Wing chord 64-67 mm (2.5-2.6 in)
Tail 66-69 mm (2.6-2.7 in)
W:T 0.97
Adult, subspecies cleonensis: Tail feathers rusty olive, the central pair with darker shaft streaks. Rump and upper tail coverts deep rusty olive. Mantle and scapular feathers dark olive-brown with dark chestnut and brown streaks and black shaft streaks. Primaries and secondaries brown, outer webs of tertials rustier. Greater coverts brown with mid-sized blackish teardrops. Median coverts olive-brown with darker centers. Marginal coverts of under wing white. Nape gray-brown with dusky streaking. Underparts with strong yellow-olive wash. The wide jaw stripe and throat are olive-white, separated by a broad black lateral throat stripe. Breast, sides of breast, and flanks with heavy dark chestnut streaks, the feathers with darker shaft streaks. Under tail coverts and vent yellow-oilve with sparse streaks. Dull rusty crown with narrow black streaks and variably conspicuous gray-olive median crown stripe. Brown ear coverts surrounded by narrow, black eye line and whisker. Bill dark above, paler brown below; tarsi and toes dull brown.
Juvenile, subspecies cleonensis: Less neatly marked above, with brown streaking on buffy-olive mantle. Yellow-washed underparts with sparse darkbrown streaking.
Length 137-138 mm (5.4 in)
Wing chord 59-62 mm (2.3-2.4 in)
Tail 58-60 mm (2.3-2.4 in)
W:T 1.03
There are but few things I miss from those long-ago years in Urbana, and this clown-faced calcariid is one of them.
Like clockwork, end of March every year we would get out and walk the foxtail-choked stubble of last year’s corn, and there they were — the first northbound Smith longspurs of the spring.
There was an extra piquancy to finding these birds in our neighborhood, as the first individuals ever met with by western scientists in the US had been found not all that far away, in southern Illinois, in April 1843, as Audubon’s last expedition was preparing to leave St. Louis for the upper Missouri.
Edward Harris and John G. Bell, Audubon’s New Jersey patron and his hired preparator, respectively, had left the old man in the city and set off for the prairies to the northeast, where they busied themselves for two weeks exploring and collecting. Bell reported that they had found an unfamiliar bird “very abundant,”
generally in large flocks, and when on the ground began at once to scatter and divide themselves, rendering it difficult for us to shoot more than two at one shot; they run very nimbly….
Harris and Bell were up to the challenge, though, and eventually secured “several specimens,” two of which made their way into the Smithsonian collections (first, it seems, as personal gifts from Audubon to Spencer Baird) and one of which apparently remains there (it is impossible to reconcile the locality and age information provided in the electronic specimen record with what Baird says of the skin).
Audubon did not recognize the little dead finches, either, and he published them as representing a new species, the Smith lark-bunting, Plectrophanes Smithii. The name honored his “good friend Gideon B. Smith, Esq., M.D.,” the entrepreneurial entomologist whom Audubon had visited in Baltimore at the start of his 1843 voyage.
The practiced eye will have noticed in that last paragraph that while Smith is still commemorated in the bird’s official English name, he goes unmentioned in the current scientific name, Calcarius pictus (“painted spur-bird“). This not uncommon circumstance — have a look at the hawk and the sparrow named for Edward Harris, to take two well-known examples — typically arises when a competing scientific name is found to have priority only after the English name has attained currency; it’s no surprise in North American ornithology that Audubon, a powerful voice and a not always careful bibliographer, is so often prominent in these stories.
In the case of the longspur, it is entirely understandable that Audubon and his companions in St. Louis overlooked the fact that the species had been published and named more than a decade earlier. William Swainson’s handsome lithograph of a single male shot on the banks of the Saskatchewan River in April 1827 (the specimen once in the collections of the Zoological Society of London, but now apparently lost) was completed in 1829; the formal description and name, Emberiza picta, were published in the volume dated 1831 of the Fauna boreali-americana.
Swainson’s lithograph, the first image above, shows the bird in all its springtime glory, but Bell and Harris were less fortunate. Though these longspurs can be quite bright indeed as they pass through Illinois, Audubon’s plate, the second above, shows that his companions encountered, or at least shot, only females or males still early in their pre-alternate molt. Though Audubon’s use of the name “lark-bunting” suggests that he may have recognized the novum as somehow longspurrish, there is really no reason to expect that he, Harris, and Bell should have recognized their smudgy brown birds as identical to the dapper badger-faced creature from Carlton House.
And that in spite of the fact that Audubon himself had experience, in the field and in the hand, with Swainson’s “painted buntling.” (Extra credit, by the way, if without benefit of google you can identify the tail in Audubon’s image.) To prepare his plate for the Birds of America, Audubon borrowed the original Saskatchewan skin of “this handsome species” from the Zoological Society. Examining the specimen in the 1830s, he was reminded of something he had seen himself on the wintertime prairies:
That the Painted Bunting at times retires far southward, probably accompanying the Lapland Longspur, is a fact for which I can vouch, having seen one on the shore of the Mississippi in December 1820, which however I missed on wing after having viewed it about two minutes, as it lay flat on the ground.
Though is not entirely unheard of for male Smith longspurs to appear in breeding aspect in early winter, Audubon was certainly fortunate to witness the phenomenon — and to remember it so clearly nearly two decades later.
The phantom from Illinois survived in the scientific literature for the better part of a decade, listed on Audubon’s authority as distinct from the Swainsonian picta by no less than George Robert Gray, Jean Cabanis and Charles Bonaparte.
Sometime in the 1850s, it was somehow determined that Audubon’s Illinois bird — the longspur he named for Smith — was in fact simply the “immaturely marked” plumage of Swainson’s painted buntling. Whatever debate and discussion may have taken place seems to have gone on behind the published scenes, but the ever so slight broadening of the specimen record available to Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway may have helped: the two Robert Kennicott skins (neither of which I can find in an NMNH search) bracket the migration of the species through the Mississippi Valley, and I assume (dangerous thing, that) that they provided the points of triangulation to finally confirm the identity of the earlier Illinois specimens.
It was Baird and his collaborators who struck the nomenclatural compromise by recognizing the priority of Swainson’s picta/us but retaining Audubon’s vernacular tribute to Gideon Smith. We should continue to think of the good doctor whenever we see this species, but I hope that next time we run into one — on the breeding grounds or on migration through a chilly midwestern field — we try to remember, too, that it took years of effort by some of the century’s most important ornithologists to figure out that two species were in fact only one.
Of all the breathtaking lot of parrots, few are as likely to leave the birder agulp as the stunning blue-headed parrot, a widespread and common bird from southern Central America to Bolivia and Brazil.
The dazzling swarm in the photo above was at one of the famous clay licks of Peru, but this species burned its way into my memory years before I saw them there, when a single individual flew beneath me as I was perched high on a tower in Panama, its head out-bluing the tropical sky.
And being who and what and as I am, at the very same moment a question pierced my mind, one that has nagged me ever since: What’s so menstruous about Pionus menstruus?
Nowadays, questions about the scientific names of birds are easily answered. We have James Jobling’s considerable store of erudition at our fingertips, and in the few cases where that doesn’t help, all the wealth of the Biodiversity Heritage Library is there for the mining.
But I’m stymied.
The name is Linnaean, appearing first in the twelfth edition of 1766.
The Archiater’s Latin diagnosis of the newly named parrot is quite thorough, beginning with the fact that Dr. Petrus Bierchen reports from Suriname that the bird has a voice like a jackdaw.
The body is the size of a turtle dove’s. The head and neck are bluish, the feathers dusky but blue at the tip. The back and wings are green. The wing coverts are yellowish green. The belly is greenish, the feathers bluish at their tips. The remiges are green, dusky on the inner vane. The rectrices are green, becoming blue at their tips, but numbers 1, 2, and 3 are blood-red on the inner vane, from their base halfway out; the outer vane is entirely blue. The crissum is red, the tips of the feathers yellowish blue. The bill is horn-colored: the upper mandible reddish on the edges. The eyes are black. The eye rings are bluish grayish.
No real onomastic clues here, and neither of the authorities Linnaeus cites — George Edwards’s 1758 Gleanings and the fourth volume of Mathurin Brisson’s Ornithologie — offers any hints. It is notable — if purely incidental to my question — that all three of the scientists relied on different sources for their knowledge of the bird: Linnaeus’s type had been supplied from Suriname, Edwards was working from a live individual in London, and Brisson had access to a specimen labeled as originating in Martinique.
Buffon and his collaborators likewise seem to know nothing about the odd Linnaean name. The OED and the Century are of no use, and we’re stuck with the prospect of a systematic search through “the older literature,” which in North American ornithology tends to mean anything before the publication of Ridgway, a scant century ago.
Johann August Donndorf’s Zoologische Beyträge, a commentary on Gmelin’s edition of the Systema, is one source Ridgway overlooked or declined to exploit for his North and Middle America (he would not have been the first to rail against Donndorf’s sloppiness as a bibliographer), but it is often productive of otherwise obscure eighteenth-century names and publications. In this case, it sends us to Statius Müller’s translation of Linnaeus, where the German systematist coins the name “Blauhals” (“blueneck”) for this species — and incidentally asks himself the same question that occurred to me more than 200 years later in Panama.
We have named it the Blauhals because we are unable to explain the name “menstruus.” I suspect that in the case of many names Linnaeus did not even intend that their meaning be understood, as otherwise he would have explained the more obscure among them himself, or assigned clearer names.
Vieillot, usually a bright light in the otherwise dim bibliographic jungle, has no comment on “menstruus,” but to make up for it, he tells us that in Paraguay the bird is called “siy,” an echoic name. Levaillant likewise says nothing about the Linnaean name; his two accounts of the species, though, are a really fine example of this explorer and ornithologist at his best, addressing everything from sex and molt to land use changes in coastal South America.
And so it continues, right up to today: as far as I can find, no one seems to have known Linnaeus’s motivation, or even to have speculated about it in print. Time to widen the search, perhaps.
If I google correctly, the blue-headed parrot is the only bird in the world currently in possession of a species or subspecies epithet “menstruum/a/us.” In 1786, though, Giovanni Antonio Scopoli gave a formal diagnosis and Linnaean binomial to a woodpecker that had been collected in the Philippines by Pierre Sonnerat a decade earlier. Sonnerat described his bird:
… the green woodpecker of the Isle of Luzon [has] the entire body a somewhat dirty green; the top of the head is faintly spotted with gray; the flight feathers of wing and tail are blackish; the upper tail coverts are very bright scarlet red, forming a large patch; the feet and bill are blackish.
Scopoli assigned this bird the name Picus menstruus, like Linnaeus before him offering no hint of an explanation. What do the two birds have in common, the parrot and the picid? Linnaeus distinguishes his parrot from the one that precedes it on the page by undertail color: he writes that the latter is “similar to P. menstruus, but its undertail is not red.” Scopoli adds to his summary of Sonnerat’s woodpecker account that “the rump and undertail are red” (my emphasis to show the addition).
Can it be that “menstruus” here means not simply “monthly” but “catamenial”? Entomology provides what may be a significant parallel: the sarcophagid name Syctomedes menstrua is a junior synonym of Syctomedes haemorrhoidalis, both names alluding to the red genitals, as if colored by flowing blood.
I know very little about Scopoli, the namer of the Luzon woodpecker and the eponym of a shearwater and a drug that helps when looking for the shearwater. Linnaeus, though, was more than capable of ignoring the blue-headed parrot’s blue head to reach for a more scurrilous name. His own contemporaries reproached him for the poor taste of some of his inventions, that notorious
Linnaean obscenity [and] licentiousness…. Science should be chaste and delicate. Ribaldry at times has been passed for wit; but Linnaeus alone passes it for terms of science.
Psittacus menstruus appears to be yet another example.
What’s new? you may ask. But you should rather ask, what’s old?
The readers of Bird-Lore a hundred one years ago were anxiously waiting for the Migratory Bird Treaty to be given effect.