Information – Page 16 – Birding New Jersey

July 2, 2018

Houseguests

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.

July 1, 2018June 30, 2018

The First Racket-tail

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.

June 28, 2018June 28, 2018

The American Pygmy Bison

Inches, not feet.

In August 1828, “V,” a correspondent to the Loudon Magazine, reported on his examination of a mounted specimen of the American pygmy bison in the possession of a Hastings dealer named Murray. The creature was said to have been among the holdings of the comte de Bournon, at the time of his death three years earlier the director of the mineralogical cabinet of Louis XVIII.

V found the animal to be 7 or 8 inches tall, “quite perfect in horns, coat, and every other which distinguishes the adult male bison.” And, unfortunately, an example of “the summit of the art of deception.”

It appeared to me to have been grounded on a well-formed model of wood, very tightly covered, in the first instance, by the skin of a pug-dog of corresponding size, the long hair about the head, hunch, and belly being added with consummate skill from the skin of a young bear, while the horns and hoofs were formed out of the black horn of the buffalo.

A fake, yes, but “the tout ensemble so elegant” that V thought it entirely worth the price of 40 guineas set by Mr. Murray.

Where is it now?

June 22, 2018June 23, 2018

Sharpe’s Pygmy Finch

Also known, as of this latest Supplement to the AOU Check-list, as the Morelet seedeater.

The re-split of the white-collared seedeater into the Morelet seedeater and the cinnamon-rumped seedeater will strike many birders as a “no-brainer,” and the NACC’s decision in this case aligns the AOS taxonomy with most other authorities’ treatment of these tiny tanagers. The only thing we’re likely to have trouble with is the spelling of the name of one of the “new” species.

As the NACC points out, both the scientific and English names of the northern bird commemorate the Burgundian natural historian, novelist, and illustrator Pierre Marie Arthur Morelet, active in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, the Azores, Middle America, and the Caribbean. In 1850, two years after Morelet’s return from Central America, Charles Bonaparte published a new seedeater in his honor — but misspelled the explorer’s name in the species epithet, an error that has never been corrected and likely cannot ever be.

Morelet had collected the first specimens in northern Guatemala in 1847; Bonaparte examined them at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle shortly thereafter. I understand Bonaparte’s mention here of the MNHN curator Jacques Pucheran as identifying the author of a manuscript name, probably on the specimen label, adopted and then misspelled, or at least not corrected, by Bonaparte. In any event, we are stuck with the error, and with the disparity between the number of consonants in the English name and in the scientific name.

Less than a year after Bonaparte’s publication, John Porter McCown collected two male seedeaters in Brownsville, Texas, the first records of the genus north of Mexico. Now numbers 41295 and 41296 in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, these birds were at first identified by George N. Lawrence as white-throated seedeaters, a species known only from northeastern South America. In July 1856, Philip Lutley Sclater demurred, suggesting that the individuals Lawrence had described were probably in fact representatives of the Morelet seedeater. Two years later, with at least one of the McCown specimens at hand, Spencer Baird — in an authoritative book written with the assistance of George Lawrence — agreed.

We know today that Sclater and Baird were right, but it took decades for the matter to be settled. In 1888, Richard Bowdler Sharpe determined that the Texas birds were female ruddy seedeaters; in what should have been a sweet piece of poetic justice, Lawrence himself had described that species six years earlier.

In gentlemanly response, Lawrence re-examined other Texas specimens belonging to George Sennett, then on deposit at the American Museum. He was able to dismiss their allocation to the ruddy seedeater, but found at the same time that they were not identical to “the true S. morelleti,” either. He accordingly described the northerly specimens as a new taxon, S. morelleti sharpei, recognizing in the subspecific epithet his “friend, Mr. R.B. Sharpe, as he is the only one to have recognized it as being distinct” from nominate morelleti.

The source of all that confusion was the dull plumage of males in the northern portions of their range. Generations of birders have been mildly disappointed on seeing their first Texas seedeaters at how far from truly “white-collared” the birds there are. Robert Ridgway, in declining to recognize Lawrence’s sharpei, speculated that “fully adult males have simply not yet been taken” north of Mexico, and that it was just bad luck that we in the US did not get to see the more dramatically marked individuals. The AOU quickly removed sharpei from its list of recognized subspecies.

In 1907, with a wider range of specimens available to him, Joel Asaph Allen figured it out. It was not a case, he wrote, of coincidence, but one of genuine geographic variation:

the adult males of the Texas form do not acquire the broad black pectoral collar and the black back of typical morelleti, and … in consequence … have been considered as … immature.

The differences extended to females as well, and Allen found them sufficient to reinstate Lawrence’s sharpei. The bird variously known in English by such names as the little seedeater, the Sharpe finchlet, and the Sharpe pygmy finch re-entered the AOU Check-list the next year. It is still recognized as a valid subspecies by the most authoritative world lists.

Next time you get to see a Morelet seedeater, remind yourself who Morelet was. But also give a thought or two to those who dedicated so much time to figuring out just what the French naturalist had collected on that day in 1847.

June 21, 2018June 23, 2018

The 2018 Check-list Supplement

Thanks to the skill and industry of the members of the NACC, the July 2019 Supplement to the venerable and authoritative Check-list of North American Birds is out now. Much is new, much is new again, and everything is food for good thought.

Most important of all may be the implicit guidance the Committee provides writers and editors struggling with the recent merger of the former American Ornithologists’ Union and the former Cooper Ornithological Society as the American Ornithological Society. It’s a great thing not to have to worry any longer about the wanderings of that blasted apostrophe, but it can apparently be challenging to find the correct and consistent way to identify the work and the works of the three organizations. The NACC here draws us a bright editorial line: The authors and publishers are still to be identified under the corporate names in effect at the time of publication, even as authority and “ownership” have been passed down to the new joint organization. Thus, the author and publisher of the 1998 Check-list and its predecessors is and ever shall be the American Ornithologists’ Union, but the responsibility for that book now belongs to the AOS. Perhaps now we will see less anachronism when the organizations are named in print.

Those of us destined, alas, to spend most of our time birding north of Mexico will find this year’s Supplement adding four species to the list of birds found in the ABA Area. The common shelduck moves to the main list on strength of two Newfoundland records; the Committee notes with apparent (and appropriate) approval Ned Brinkley’s suggestion that many other records from the east coast of North America may also pertain to wild birds, but suggests (again, appropriately) that shelducks found on the Pacific Coast are “more problematical.”

The Cuban vireo, amythest-throated hummingbird, and pine flycatcher also make the list. The vireo and the flycatcher were long-awaited species, each of them discovered exactly where one might expect: two separate Cuban vireos in two successive Aprils at two southern Florida localities, and the pine flycatcher in early summer 2016 in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains. Calling these records “long-awaited” and “expected” should not let us forget that birders’ detection, identification, and documentation of these subtle species was a significant achievement.

The amythest-throated hummingbird’s second occurrence north of the Mexican border could be described in much the same terms: a male photographed in the Davis Mountains of Texas in October 2016. But little could have been less expected than the first, a male discovered in Quebec a few months earlier.

Changes to English names are always of particular interest to us birders. The red-breasted blackbird, familiar to travelers to the American tropics, is now known as the red-breasted meadowlark, an eminently sensible revival of a name more clearly reflecting the bird’s appearance and evolutionary affinities.

The replacement of the name “gray jay” by “Canada jay” probably represents the only act of the NACC ever to have penetrated into the semi-popular consciousness, thanks to efforts over the past couple of years to have the species declared the national bird of Canada. The Supplement lays out the arguments in favor of this nomenclatural innovation, unfortunately leading off with the misapprehension that the new name “was used for P[erisoreus] canadensis in the first and second editions of the Check-list” and concluding with the one truly cogent observation that the use of “Canada” for this bird “is symmetrical with the geographical names of the other jays in this genus.” I have (and can have) no objections to the Committee’s conclusion, but it is poor strategy to argue from the sloppy typography of others.

Taking the view from taxonomic eternity (which is, what, about eighteen months?), alterations to official vernacular names are trivial to the point of irrelevance, and I am mildly surprised that the Committee still spends its time on such matters.

Of far greater significance are the Committee’s determinations of phylogenetic relationships, relationships that are expressed in formal scientific nomenclature. This Supplement offers two big changes of interest to birders in the US and Canada, one in the passerellid sparrows, the other in the woodpeckers.

In keeping with the latest genetic work, the Committee (re-)splits the old catch-all genus Ammodramus, leaving under that name only the grasshopper sparrow and its two South American relatives.

The Baird and Henslow sparrows are returned to the genus Centronyx (“spurred nail”), a fitting restoration given that the genus name was coined by none other than Spencer Baird, eponym of the ochre-faced sparrow of the northwestern Great Plains.

The LeConte, Nelson, seaside, and saltmarsh sparrows return to Ammospiza (“sand sparrow”). I can imagine that the various Seaside sparrows are destined to find themselves re-split at the generic level someday, too, in which case Oberholser’s Thryospiza would apply to them.

Even in making these splits, the Committee kept the Ammodramus, Centronyx, and Ammospiza sparrows together in the Check-list‘s linear sequence. This is not in accord with recent studies finding that Ammodramus (in its new, strict sense) diverged from the others very early on; I expect that the position of this genus will shift in another Supplement one of these years.

The large woodpecker genus Picoides has also been split, retaining (in North America) only the six-toed black-backed and American three-toed woodpeckers. All of our other “pied woodpeckers,” including the downy, hairy, Nuttall, ladder-backed, red-cockaded, white-headed, and Arizona woodpeckers are placed in Dryobates (“tree runner”), a genus name replaced long ago, in the Twenty-second Supplement, by Dryocopus.

Changes in family assignment are even less frequent than those in genera. The storm petrel family Hydrobatidae is now split in two, the new family of Southern Storm Petrels going under the name Oceanitidae and including the Wilson, white-faced, and black-bellied storm petrels and their congeners.

Another new family includes several “flycatchers” known (so far!) only from south of the southern US border. The family Onychorhynchidae now includes the ruddy-tailed flycatcher, the flycatchers of the genus Myiobius, and the royal flycatcher(s). That (or those) last species are officially burdened with a hyphen (“royal-flycatcher”), and I imagine that the others will be, too, at some point.

The species-level splits here will be of interest to birders lucky enough to travel in the southern portions of our hemisphere. Among them is the division of the red-eyed vireo into “our” familiar northern species and the resident Chivi vireo of South America.

The tufted flycatcher, suddenly familiar to many birders thanks to its continued (and probably increasing) presence in southeast Arizona, has also been split; the southern bird is now known as the olive or olive tufted flycatcher.

This is far from the only change in our understanding of the tyrant flycatchers. The entire family has been reorganized to reflect a new scheme of subfamily allocations, and the linear sequence of species has been altered as well.

The same fate has befallen the family Accipitridae. Most striking here is the fact that the kites, once thought of as somehow belonging together (and so depicted in most field guides), are spread over three subfamilies: Elaninae for the pearl and white-tailed kites, Gypaetinae for the hook-billed, gray-headed, and swallow-tailed kites; and Acciptrinae for the Mississippi and plumbeous kites, which fall in the new linear sequence between the Steller sea eagle and the black-collared hawk.

As always, there is a great deal more to read and to ponder in this Supplement, and as always, some of the most interesting actions are those the Committee declined to take. Thus, for example, we still have two species of bean geese, but only one Cory shearwater and Mallard and barn owl and Audubon shearwater and LeConte thrasher and white-eared ground sparrow.

Given the Committee’s activism in the case of the gray jay, I am surprised to find that they declined to change the eminently confusing and uninformative English name of the common gallinule — but grateful that they left the official vernacular name of Columba livia alone.

What will next year bring? Your guess is as good as mine, and probably better, but it won’t be long before the first proposals for the 2019 Supplement appear. Stay tuned.