Category: Information

Birders all across western Europe — and yes, some die-hards in North America, too — are always on the lookout for this fancy bird, which occasionally moves west, far west, of its Asian and east European range. My VENT group in Catalonia last year was fortunate enough to discover an adult near Barcelona, but we can’t really hope for pink lightning to strike twice.

It’s not impossible, though, as the astonishing Italian incursion of June 1875 shows. The gentleman-naturalist Edoardo de Betta wrote:

The rosy starling arrived in Villafranca on June 3. Around 4:00 pm on that day a small flock of 18 to 20 of these birds perched on the high, crumbling interior walls of the fortress, and was followed half an hour later by a second flock of about 100 individuals; their constant vocalizing drew the attention of everyone living inside the fortress bounds…. Towards evening, still more, thousands and thousands, of these starlings appeared, and joining those that had preceded them, remained until dark, at which point they all flew out and scattered through the open countryside in very many flocks.

The gathering human crowd was unhappy that these “strange and beautiful birds, which they had now seen for the first time in their lives,” should disappear so promptly.

But around 3:00 the next morning, the residents of Villafranca were unexpectedly awakened by the deafening calls of twelve to fourteen thousand rosy starlings that had arrived to take definitive possession of the fortress….

 

Wikipedia, by Ugo Franchini 

Five days later, the starlings commenced their breeding activities, to the delight of the human residents:

Copulation was undertaken with unbelievable ardor, atop the fortress walls and the roofs of the houses; these birds proved so concupiscent that they lingered in their embrace even if they accidentally fell from their high perches, with the result that it was easy for all the people to obtain some as the birds fell in pairs to the street below.

Some “speculators” made hundreds of lire by selling those birds on what seems to have been a very lively black market centered on the Villafranca train stataion.

The surviving pairs went about their business, and by July 10 all the nestlings were entirely feathered. Four days later, the adults and their newly fledged young all left Villafranca for sites to the south. But de Betta reports that they left behind them a three-fold legacy:

The birds carried out an immense massacre of the locusts in the agricultural fields; they were a source of great fortune for a few clever entrepreneurs; and finally, what matters most to us, they added an entirely new chapter of the greatest significance to the history of Italian birds.

I would like to have seen that.

It was a common enough fate in the early days of American ornithology: the same species of bird formally described and named more than once, swelling the synonymies and causing confusions great and small until the polynomy was resolved.

It happened to this fine-looking passerellid, the black-chested sparrow. Jean Cabanis published the name humeralis in 1851, taking it from a specimen label in the Berlin museum; thirty-five years later, Robert Ridgway innocently described the species as new, again, naming it for Fernando Ferrari Perez Aimophila ferrariperezi. The mix-up was minimal, not least because the bird was still so very little known, and it was cleared up just a few months later when Osbert Salvin and Frederick Ducane Godman established the two nominal species’ identity — notably, basing their conclusion on photographs rather than on examination of Ridgway’s type in skin.

All very collegial, all very straightforward, all very helpful.

And all very different from Charles Bonaparte’s comments, published just a couple of years after Cabanis announced the new species. Bonaparte wrote in 1853

I had dedicated a sparrow to Mr. Dubus [curator of the museum in Brussels], who had planned to illustrate it in his beautiful ornithological plates [Dubus’s Esquisses ornithologiques]…. I now find it published by Cabanis as [Aimophila] humeralis. Here is what I wrote about it several years ago on the basis of a fine specimen collected near Mexico City and now no. 3026 in Brussels….

Bonaparte goes on to copy out the Latin diagnosis he composed but failed to publish in time.

We all get scooped now and then, and it doesn’t feel very good. But really, Prince?

It’s a familiar enough phenomenon to most birders in temperate North America. Every spring, birds more typical of southern climes appear north, sometimes far north, of their usual breeding range. As if the frenzied impulse of northward movement has simply become too much to control, warblers and rails and flycatchers just keep going, joining little flocks of residents or more expected migrants to startle and delight the human observer.

We call these birds “spring overshoots.”

It’s been happening forever, of course. But what I want to know is who first noticed it and who coined the term “spring overshoot.”

In 1892, Samuel N. Rhoads defined such events with great precision, as

the annual over-stepping of faunal limits by many species belonging to a more southerly district, and their subsequent disappearance toward the end of the spring migration,

but he doesn’t use our modern term, and neither does he explicitly claim to be the first to notice it.

Some student of migration out there knows the answer. Fill us in.

I’ve been throwing together some new pages here with links to digital versions of useful books and papers, from some of the earliest lists of American birds to the once-standard, now shamefully ignored handbooks.

Eventually, given world enough and time, I suppose all of my e-bookmarks will show up on a page. Meanwhile, let me know if there is a corpus you’d like to see appear: if I have the links, I can post them.

Many, many thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library for making so much of our ornithological heritage available to us.