Category: Information

On June 3, 1903, Jonathan Dwight and Louis Bishop discovered a dozen red phalaropes near Monterey, California. They promptly started shooting.

Those secured before a maternal government interfered were assuming nuptial dress.

I would like to have been there that day.

Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was born three hundred years ago today in Montbard, where his statue looks down over the city from the park named for his cousin and colleague Buffon.

Daubenton’s accomplishments in natural history were considerable, his bibliography vast. Co-author of the first volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, he was also the first director of the new National Museum, and Cuvier himself gratefully acknowledged Daubenton’s work in laying the foundations of comparative anatomy.

But today, more than two centuries after his death in 1799, Daubenton is best remembered for one thing: his connection to the merino sheep.

Alongside his other duties, Daubenton spent the better part of three decades breeding merino rams with French ewes, hoping to produce a cross as hardy as the latter but with the fine, soft wool of the former. This was not a purely academic exercise. As Lacépède put it in Year X of the first Republic, with a nervous glance at England,

success would result in lifting the heavy yoke of foreign competition under which our own industries labor.

Similar political, scientific, and commercial interests led to the sheep crazes of the early nineteenth century. For a brief time in the United States, merino rams were fetching more than a thousand dollars at auction, and there was widespread fear that the country’s entire wool manufactory would collapse under the strain.

By then, though, Daubenton was at rest in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, leaving to future generations of scientists and natural historians a shining example of those qualities we all could use more of:

concentration, reflection, perseverance, the wise use of our time, and the unstinting application of our energies.

It matters no more to me than it does to the birds themselves what we call the warblers of the genus Myioborus. Names, after all, don’t signify in the same way as other words. Call these tropical flitters redstarts or whitestarts or falsestarts: each of those names is just as “good” and just as “bad” as the others.

Thus, the AOU check-list committee’s judgment on Proposal 2016-A-2 can go with equal appropriateness either way, retaining the traditional name “redstart” or adopting the neologism “whitestart.” It’s hard to get terribly exercised about onomastic housekeeping like this.

But what does have my dander just the slightest bit up is the argument presented in the Proposal to make the change. It seems to go like this: the outer rectrices in Myioborus are white, not red; and

“start” of course is the modern English reflex of Middle English stert, Old English steort, tail of an animal.

Ergo, the vernacular name applied to Myioborus, with their flashy white tails, is a “misappropriation” that would “perpetuate ignorance.”

That’s not true at all (“of course”). “Start” hasn’t meant “tail” in English for more than six hundred years; if you don’t believe me, ask any other native speaker. The bird name “redstart” has been etymologically opaque for just as long. In other words, “redstart” doesn’t mean “red-tail” to any English-speaker; it refers, depending on which continent you spend most of your time on, to either a chunky chat or an active wood warbler. 

The Myioborus warblers are nothing if not active (whether they are wood warblers or not is a question for another day). Only naive pedantry can claim that their white tails disqualify them from redstartness.