Category: Information

But I didn’t. Not until fairly recently, at least.

Filippo Picinelli’s famous Mundus symbolicus is on line pretty much all over the place. And Book IV, treating the emblematic use of birds, is hugely productive, and hugely under-exploited, font of information about the “properties,” real and imagined, of birds and their meanings.

There is Some.Very.Weird.Stuff in here.

Northern lapwings, for example, can stand for the words of the heretic, attractive at first but foolish and obscene when examined by the intellect. Or they can be the soul cleansed in baptism that falls back into sin. And so on, depending on what you happen to want it to mean.

Note that the Mundus is not an emblem book itself but rather an encyclopedia serving as an index. I’ve found it pretty difficult all in all to track down the actual emblemata Picinelli describes, but practice makes slightly better.

Have fun!

Today we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of the painter of one of my all-time favorite red-breasted mergansers, the Finnish artist and ornithologist Magnus von Wright.

I know rather little about him — wikipedia is my friend, I suppose — and I have never seen his most famous bird illustrations, published in the three-volume Svenska Fåglar. 

I will learn more next July, no doubt, when we assemble in Stockholm on the 151st anniversary to explore the birds and art of the Baltic Sea.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed by Congress on July 3, 1918.

I guess we now know the life expectancy of democratically promulgated legislation, don’t we?

Like stork nests and eagle aeries, the huge stick condominiums built by monk parakeets offer nooks and deep crannies for other creatures to live in, too. I shudder slightly to imagine just what creepy crawlies must be crawling creepily around in there, but vertebrates also take advantage of the shelter these elaborate structures provide for roosting and nesting.

Here in northern New Jersey, I’ve twice seen wintering American kestrels perched atop parrot nests at a suspiciously early hour, making me wonder whether the cold-sensitive little falcons had perhaps spent the night inside — a phenomenon widely known from South America and recently documented in Florida.

And of course, there is scarcely a parakeet nest anywhere in the species’ wide introduced range that does not host a pair or two or ten of house sparrows year-round.

What I really want to see, though, and someday I shall, is ducks cozily at home in one of the dark crevices in the monk parakeet’s abode.

William Henry Hudson reported that

a species of Teal (probably Querquedula brasiliensis) also sometimes occupies and breeds in their chambers,

an observation fleshed out at the turn of the twentieth century by the collector of Andean birds Demetrio Rodríguez and the Buenos Aires museum preparator Antonio Pozzi.

Rodríguez and Pozzi found that the ducks, notwithstanding their hosts’ “combative and boisterous” nature, laid their eggs both in unoccupied chambers and in cavities that already contained parakeet eggs; in the latter case, “confronted by eggs so much more voluminous than their own,” the nonplussed parakeets abandoned the clutch and started over in a different apartment. The duck, finding herself mistress of the manor, crushes the parrot eggs and settles in to incubate, cushioning the floor beneath her eggs with feathers plucked from her breast.

How, though, do the ducklings get from their exalted nest site to water, often some miles distant? Rodríguez found it implausible that they should jump to the ground: if the fall did not kill them, they still would not be able to follow their parents all that distance to the nearest lake or pond. He suggested instead that the mother carried the young in her bill to the ground beneath the nest, one by one, and then carry them to water. A more recent study doesn’t answer the question, but my guess is that teal babies bounce just like wood ducks or merganser ducklings, with nothing more than encouragement needed from their parents.

Rodríguez and Pozzi’s field work was reported by Robert Dabbene, who added a query of his own:

it would be very interesting to know how the female duck would behave if she happened not to break the parrot eggs already in the nest she took over and incubated them instead with her own. Parrots, unlike ducks, are nidicolous, that is to say, the chicks remain in the nest for considerable time, when they are fed by their parents; thus, [should they be incubated and hatched by a duck] the chicks would starve when the duck and her ducklings abandoned the nest, or what I believe would be even worse, would drown if the duck carried them to water together with her ducklings.

Seems unlikely. But fascinating all the same.

 

 

They’re truly implausible little creatures, hummingbirds so tiny as to hardly be there, their feet tucked in to great puffy boots and bizarre spoons trailing behind them.

There used to be (“be”!) just one species, but now — once again — two or three are recognized, differing in the color of their footwear and in vocalizations and other behaviors.

The first description of any taxon of racket-tail was published in 1832 by Lesson, under the scientific name Ornismya underwoodi and the slightly tortured vernacular label “la raquette empennée.” “Ornismya,” which the French trochilidist had coined a few years earlier, is simply the rendering into Greek of the usual “oiseau-mouche,” while the species epithet honors the Englishman who had supplied Lesson with a drawing of the bird, probably the painter Thomas Underwood.

Lesson did not know the bird “en nature,” that is to say, as a skin or mount, but he was assured that there were several specimens in the hands of London collectors of the day.

Indeed, collectors and natural historians had known the bird for some time when Lesson finally got around to naming it. William Bullock had exhibited at least one male in London in the 1820s.

But what neither Bullock nor, apparently, even Lesson knew, and slightly later on neither Jardine nor Gould, was that the “racketed hummingbird” had in fact been described — but not, sadly, properly named — a full fifty-five years before Lesson introduced it as new.

In June 1777, the Paris Journal de physique published a characteristically miscellaneous article describing a beetle, a “water scorpion,” and a hummingbird from South America. The hummingbird was represented by two specimens, one said to be from Guyana — yet another illustration of the danger of confusing collection localities with postmarks.

There can be no doubt about the identity of the hummingbird, which “differs from all other members of the family in the shape of the two long feathers of the tail… Among the birds we know, only this one has the two tail feather widening at the end as is shown in the figure.”

Oddly, neither the text nor what I can see of the figure on line offers any information at all about the strikingly puffed feet, which must have been damaged beyond recognition when the birds were collected or prepared.

The article in the Journal de physique gave the new hummingbird no name at all, scientific of vernacular. Very shortly after its publication, though, Buffon and his collaborators provided an account of “this still little known and apparently very rare” species in the Histoire naturelle, naming it the “oiseau-mouche à raquettes,” which means exactly what one might think it means.

Much of their description duplicates the earlier report, and as there, no mention is made of the bird’s remarkable bootlets. Buffon says that he examined a specimen in the famous cabinet of Mauduyt de la Varenne, but it remains unclear whether that was a third individual or one of the two described earlier in the year.

The usual French failure, or rather refusal, to assign a new bird a Linnaean name has kept these earliest accounts of the racket-tail out of the ornithological synonymies. Just as significantly, the failure by Buffon et al. to mention the hummingbird’s distinctively plumed feet allowed the ornithologists of the next generations to “discover” and name it themselves, without recognizing, or at least without acknowledging, the earlier descriptions.

Lesson gives no sign of having even read the 1777 accounts, and John Gould did not think of the “oiseau-mouche à raquettes” when he described his new Trochilus caligatus (“booted”) in 1848; neither did he cite them in the greatest of all nineteenth-century hummingbird books, the Monograph of the Trochilidae.

Obviously, there is no requirement, there is no obligation, for subsequent authors to adduce every single thing ever written about a species. Never has been. But the story of those first booted racket-tails is an important reminder that sometimes the human history of a bird goes back farther — in this case, nearly half a century farther — than the strictly “scientific” record shows.