Category: Information

Even a century ago, it was a red-letter day when a bird was added to the California list. Just such a day was New Year’s Eve 1916, when Laurence M. Huey went out to set some mammal traps in his yard, a few miles north of Bard.

I noticed a thrasher scratching on the shady side of a neighbor’s wood pile. On collecting the bird, I was surprised to find it to be a Palmer Thrasher.

The bird Huey shot was the first record of the species ever in California, where it is still a rarity.

A fine way to end the year — less so, perhaps, for that adult female thrasher, now reposing in the San Diego Natural History Museum.

It’s an honest question. Jean Cabanis’s forebears were French Huguenots, but I have assumed, lo these many, that by the time he was born, two hundred years ago this year, the family name had been teutonicized at least to the extent that the final consonant was pronounced.

I’m beginning to think I was wrong. Look what I found this afternoon:

These clunky Hildebrand long-lines were the work of Carl August Bolle, the Berlin naturalist and collector, on the occasion of Cabanis’s elevation to the rank of professor. In the second strophe, the name stands in end rhyme — with the word “sie.” For poetic purposes, at least, we are to pronounce the name as if it were still French, with the emphasis on the last syllable and the final consonant silent.

Was Bolle just being cute, pushing poetic license for the sake of an easy rhyme? Or is this genuine evidence of genuine usage?

Anybody know?

Seventy years ago today, on December 1, 1946, Ben and Lula Coffey with Mr. and Mrs. B.F. McCarney discovered the largest flock of European starlings ever seen to that date in Mexico.

This was not the first record for the country, but the band of 500 individuals encountered just south of Nuevo Laredo was some 20 times the cumulative total reported since the species’ arrival in Mexico a dozen years earlier.

The rest is history, as they say.

Marcus Charles Rich died seventy-five years ago today, on November 12, 1941.

I did not know him, and I doubt that anyone living now did, at least not well. I have never heard his name in conversation, and as far as I know there are no memorial bird walks, no annually awarded prizes, no commemorative park bench plaques in his honor.

And I find that comforting.

Rich, a securities broker in New York City, was a prominent figure in the Central Park birding scene in the 1930s, eventually becoming “the unofficial compiler” of records from that famous site. His eulogist, Eugene Eisenmann, praised him for the ardor with which he approached his role, the encouragement he and his wife offered young birders, and his efforts to make city officials more aware of the park’s value to migrants and their watchers.

His passing was a great loss to his many friends.

And now, just a lifetime later, he is forgotten. That circumstance could be a source of introspection, even regret; but Rich’s life, his death, and our oblivion remind me instead that all of us are links in a chain of tradition and transmission, and that though history may not remember and posterity not much care, each of us makes a contribution that is essential to the way the future will be.