Category: Information

Getting into the Halloween spirit over at the VENT blog today.

And you thought skimming the occasional milk pail was bad.

The month of Halloween seems a good time to recall that nightjars, those mysterious nocturnal
flutterers, have been rumored to engage in behavior far more treacherous than merely suckling at the udders of defenseless livestock.

In 1750, the Pomeranian ornithologist Jacob Theodor Klein listed as names for the European nightjar “witch,” “night harmer,” and something that seems to mean “child smotherer.”

Some of us may have our doubts, but the terrifying engraving that accompanies Klein’s account convinces me. Myself, I’m keeping the windows closed until Halloween is past.

Even as fall migration is entering what is unmistakably its late phase, the American robin flocks here in northern New Jersey still include the odd bird in mostly juvenile plumage.

This one was in Brookdale Park this morning.

A remnant of summer on a lovely autumn day. 

Mike Baird, Wikimedia Commons

I need to spend more time birding California. Except for the gnatcatcher and the blasted mountain quail, I’ve been fortunate enough to see all of the state’s terrestrial specialties — but many of them, like the dark and lovely California thrasher, only a few times.

Among its other attractions, this sturdy earth-scratcher has one of the oddest scientific names ever assigned a North American bird. After a few changes of genus, the thrasher is now known formally as Toxostoma redivivum, the revivified sickle-bill.

Toxostoma, and the original generic name Harpes, are both straightforward enough. But why did this bird require resurrection?

When William Gambel named this species in 1845, he recognized in it a bird drawn by J.R. Prévost, Jr., for the report of the voyage commanded by the comte de La Pérouse, a hero of the American Revolution. La Pérouse and his expedition were in Monterey in September of 1786, when they shot and stuffed what they believed was an unknown Promerops, a sunbird.

Another expedition, that of Alejandro Malaspina in the early 1790s, returned to Spain with a painting of the species — but no clue to the identity of what they called simply the unknown bird.

In confirming the bird’s existence half a century later, Gambel fulfilled the hopes expressed by Louis-Pierre Vieillot and John Latham

that some future Naturalist may elucidate more fully what La Peyrouse has given a very imperfect description of.

Not everyone was sure that Gambel had actually revived the bird of the earlier explorers. John Cassin wrote that

whether it is the fact … that the figure in La Peyrouse represents the present bird, admits of some doubt,

and suggested that the French might instead have collected specimens of the curve-billed thrasher — a bird, of course, that is extremely rare anywhere in California, and improbable to the point of virtually impossible at Monterey.

Far easier to believe that Gambel was right, and that his collectors had in fact rediscovered the thrasher of La Pérouse. True or not, it makes a good story.

Even if it’s not a sunbird.