Category: Information

I’ve been having a great time this evening reading around in the new National Geographic guide: learning new things, being reminded of old things, and all in all admiring the book more with each turn of the page.

But how does it stack up against the competition?

That competition includes the previous editions of Nat Geo, of course; I hear scandalous rumors that not everyone buys each new edition as it appears. You’ll continue to be happy no matter which edition you have and use, but this seventh has so many improvements, large and small, that I can’t imagine not wanting to move along.

Take, for example, the Lapland longspur, a common bird and familiar to most birders, but one that can be hard to get a first handle on for new observers, especially in the east and southwest. The new Nat Geo retains the paintings of the species from the first edition, of 1983, but like the sixth, it annotates the figures with neat and concise summaries of the most important field characters. There is one critical difference, though: where the sixth edition simply points to the wingtip of one of the perched birds, noting the “very long primary projection,” the seventh adds an additional image of a disembodied folded wing, indicating that this is the “longspur with the longest primary projection past the tertials.” Each of the other longspur species now has a similar picture and a similar note, making explicit in word and image what before was available only in the facing-page text. 

Shifting that information from the main text onto the plate (and ever so slightly reducing the white space on the page) makes room for a slightly larger and noticeably more legible font, and also lets the authors add a line about the subspecific affiliation of a specimen collected in the outer Aleutians. Trivial? Not if you happen to be so lucky as to be birding Attu — and not if you are interested, as all birders are, in continuously expanding the range of your knowledge.

 The big Sibley guide has only four images of perched Laplands where the new Nat Geo has six, including a stub-tailed juvenile. But Sibley gives the reader four views of birds in flight, from above and below, which after all is how most longspurs are seen in the field. There is a picture of the folded wing here, too, with an annotation pointing out the length of the primary projection. Sibley’s feathers are more realistically shaped and the bunching of the outermost primaries more accurately depicted, but the whole wingtip is too short; the actual length is presented much more clearly in Nat Geo. Ten of one, five sixths of a dozen of the other. 

Both books show all the characters necessary for field identification, but only Nat Geo explicitly points out the usefulness of the warm brown or rusty nape. Nat Geo illustrates and briefly describes the juvenile, an age class not mentioned in Sibley. The Sibley guide offers a much richer description of the species’ song, but leaves unmentioned the fact that this longspur intersperses whistles in its rattled flight call — a characteristic noted in Nat Geo as “distinctive.” Nat Geo’s map includes the bird’s range in Greenland, and its statement of range and abundance, though equally brief, is more differentiated than that in Sibley. All in all, there is a bit more information in Nat Geo, though Sibley’s illustrations of the bird strike me as rather better in this case. 

The true acid test is a comparison with a book many birders might not think of at first. Birds of Europe by Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney, and Dan Zetterström is widely acclaimed as the very best field guide to any avifauna anywhere in the world, and it is always worth consulting to learn more about any species that occurs in both the Old and the New Worlds. Its influence on North American field guides is most obvious in the use of annotations directly on the plates, an innovation meanwhile adopted by both the Sibley guide and, beginning with the sixth edition, Nat Geo. 

Svensson et al. crowd illustrations of three species onto their plate, while both Sibley and Nat Geo have only two. But the European guide manages to show eight individuals, including three birds in habitat, one in flight, and one facing away; there is also a skylark for comparison. Four different plumage aspects are shown: a first-cycle bird, an adult female, and three adult males at different seasons. There is no juvenile, though the species breeds in Iceland, Scandinavia, and western Russia, and has nested in northern Britain. 

The text here is remarkably long and detailed; naturally, that means that the type is quite small, tiny even when the book is open next to Nat Geo, but legible nonetheless. It begins with a coded summary of the species’ abundance and seasonal distribution in Britain, a neat feature impractical or impossible in a guide covering much of North America. Birds of Europe continues with a description of the breeding habitats, going beyond Nat Geo’s “arctic tundra” to mention some of the plant species with which nesting birds are associated. Alone among the guides compared here, this one warns the reader that the species is “rather wary,” creeping away or freezing when approached, then towering in powerful flight. These are essential details hinted at, but not completely laid out, in Nat Geo’s introduction to the family Calcariidae. 

The identification paragraphs (plural!) in Birds of Europe are very thorough; salient characters distinguishing the species from other buntings are printed in italics. Structure, soft part colors, and the precise breast pattern of males in winter are all described. Calls and songs are described in even more detail than in the Sibley guide, and this is the only guide to describe the song flight, performed “with fanned tail and intermittent hovering.” 

If Svensson et al. happened to cover the birds of North America, the choice would be clear. As it stands, though, for most birders, the choice between Nat Geo and the big Sibley will come down to taste and habit. The chief exception: beginners, who will be served much better by the more extensive prose and more complete information in the new Nat Geo. Every birder, however, will want to read this new edition and incorporate what it says into her store of birding lore.       

“Bobolink” is a fine example of that rare thing in English-language ornithology: a genuine, honest-to-goodness folk name that managed to make its way into the bird books. Along the way, those three syllables have conquered “reed bird,” “rice bird,” “maize thief,” “conquedle,” “whiskodink,” “winterseble,” and who knows how many other alternative names, naive and sentimental, accrued over the centuries.

Surprisingly enough, the earliest written attestation of “bobolink” I’ve encountered is not found in a natural history context at all, but rather in a petulant diary entry composed by John Adams during an early session of the Continental Congress. In October 1774, the future president complained that he found that body’s “consultations very tedious,” and singled out for special criticism one of the South Carolina delegates:

Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln—a Swallow—a Sparrow—a Peacock—excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, and puerile.

Edward Rutledge, racist, slaveholder, and ditherer in the matter of independence, was no prize. But what did the poor bobolink ever do to be cast into such bad company?

It turns out that early America saw in the bobolink more than just another pretty feathered face. For at least some observers, the bird’s habits and plumages provided an allegory of human life—an allegory most decidedly in malam partem.

Washington Irving preserves the clearest view into this sinister reading of what seems to us a harmless and attractive bird. In Knickerbocker’s History, Irving makes an offhand mention of “the luxurious little bobolink,” a phrase that seems innocuous, even complimentary, until we remember that “luxurious” retained well into the nineteenth century the meaning of “given to self-indulgence.” That is no praise.

And neither is Irving’s description of the bird as a “little feathered voluptuary.” As a boy, Irving writes, he admired and envied the bobolink for its freedom:

No lessons, no tasks, no hateful school; nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields, and fine weather.

But watching the bird over the years, Irving discovered that

he gradually gives up his elegant tastes and habits, doffs his poetical and professional suit of black, assumes a russet or rather dusty garb, and enters into the gross enjoyments of common, vulgar birds. He becomes a bon vivant, a mere gourmand, thinking of nothing but good cheer, and gormandizing on the seeds of the long grasses on which he lately swung…. He grows corpulent with good feeding…. Last stage of his career, we hear of him spitted by dozens, and served up on the table of the gourmand, the most vaunted of southern dainties.

Just in case the message is not clear, Irving lays out a moral, “worthy the attention of all little birds and little boys,”

warning them to keep to those refined and intellectual pursuits, which raised him to so high a pitch of popularity, during the early part of his career; and to eschew all tendency to that gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this mistaken little bird to an untimely end.

Irving’s nephew Pierre, commenting on his famous uncle’s work, was even more blunt: the bobolink, like the voluptuous scholar, “degenerates into a fat epicure,” and richly deserves his fate when he “is shot for the table.”

William Cullen Bryant’s famous spinking, spanking bobolink takes on a somewhat darker significance if we read that poem against this background. Robert o’Lincoln is a braggart, the very prince of braggarts, who “frolics about” while his pious wife patiently incubates their eggs.

Family life, he fears, “is likely to be/ hard for a gay young fellow like me.” When the “six wide mouths” appear, he grows “sober with work and silent with care.” He sets aside his fine plumage and his taste for “fun and frolic,” transforming into a “humdrum crone” before flying off for the winter.

For Bryant, as for Irving, the bobolink stands for the singer — the poet — who abandons his true calling for something less, something merely worldly, molting out of his wedding-suited bravado into fatal concern with the luxuries of the flesh. “Come back again,” Bryant’s lyrical voice cries, “when you can pipe that merry old strain,” when the bird can set aside once more what Irving called the gross enjoyments of everyday life.

Today, the bobolink no longer carries its burden of moral signification. We read — or we once read, I suppose — Bryant’s poem as merely an imagined conversation with a cute bird in a field. But a century and a half ago, this species meant something to Americans and the literary lights of the day.

You’d think that cactus wrens would get plenty of sun just living where they do, but this one in Bahía de Kino the other day made a special effort to expose itself, writhing into postures startlingly reptilian even for this so saurian species.

It turns out, says BNA, that sunbathing in this desert wren is rarely observed and little understood.

I suspect that this bird’s contortions, which went on for a full five minutes while I watched in the mid-day heat, had something to do with the ragged state of its plumage, in turn likely the result of an ill-timed and itchy infestation of something or other during the pre-basic molt.

I’m eager to hear if you’ve seen this behavior. I’ve spent a lot of time watching cactus wrens, and can’t remember having witnessed anything quite this extravagant before myself.

The great Welsh litterateur and naturalist Thomas Pennant was born 291 years ago on this date. Friend and correspondent of Gilbert White, colleague and competitor of John Latham, Pennant, though not nearly as famous today as those contemporaries, is still remembered by some in Britain. But here in North America, he is almost entirely forgotten.

There’s a reason.

In February 1785, Pennant described the genesis of his recently published two volumes on the animal life of North America:

This Work was begun a great number of years past, when the empire of Great Britain was entire, and possessed the northern part of the New World with envied splendor…. I thought I had a right to the attempt, at a time I had the honor of calling myself a fellow-subject with that respectable part of our former great empire; but when the fatal and humiliating hour arrived, which deprived Britain of power, strength, and glory, I felt the mortification which must strike every feeling individual at losing his littler share in the boast of ruling over half of the New World.

Even in his pique at the loss of the American colonies, Pennant decided not to discard his Zoology of North America. He did, however, change the title.

Simultaneously, he expanded the geographic scope of the work to include much of the Old World Arctic, too, simultaneously making the book more valuable to naturalists worldwide and re-asserting the unity — scientific, if no longer political — of the cooler reaches of the Northern Hemisphere.

And with only slightly grudging generosity, he wished his erstwhile “fellow subjects” well and assured them that someday the New World, too, would see “the powers of literature arise” in a native naturalist. Meanwhile, though, Pennant reminded his American readers of what they had lost in giving up their share of imperial glory, namely,

the peculiar spirit of the English nation, which has, in its voyages to the most remote and most opposite parts of the globe, payed attention to every branch of science.

We did catch up, eventually, and then we made Pennant’s birthday into Flag Day.

Thanks to David for correcting my math!