The Experience of Birding
I didn’t really expect Rothschild’s bird, obviously, but here in New Jersey, I am always on the lookout for rosy starlings this time of year. It hasn’t happened yet, and it didn’t happen this morning in Brookdale Park, either. But a first scan of the flock of 190-some starlings there did turn up an oddity.
I rarely see leucism in European starlings at all, and this blond beauty was certainly the most nearly white I’ve ever encountered.
Today we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the death of one of the real characters in French natural history, Jean-Baptiste Leblond, a physician, utopian politician, and the most restless of explorers.
Starting at the age of 19, in 1766, Leblond spent nearly 20 years walking the South American continent, from Grenada to Peru. On his return to France in 1785, he brought with him 250 pounds — pounds! — of platinum, along with a rich collection of natural history specimens.
No rest for the weary, though, and shortly thereafter he was ordered back to Cayenne, in search of new sources of quinine.
After all the effort, exhaustion, and suffering devoted to acquiring his collections, M. Leblond has made the exceedingly generous sacrifice of donating the specimens to the Paris Society of Natural History and certain of its members.
Among the donated objects were 111 South American birds, listed in the Actes of the Society for 1792. Most are identified with their Linnaean names and a citation to Buffon or Brisson, but not a few are brought down only to the genus level, with a brief description in hopes that someone someday might recognize them.
I don’t know where those specimens are now, or how many of them were eventually identified. It’s not easy, but if you want to try your hand at it, let us know how you do.
Ten years — that’s years — ago today I wrote my first entry on this blog.
Who’d have thought the medium would still be around — or that I would, for that matter.
The number of “rainbirds” around the world is legion. Rarely, though, is the explanation of the behavior as detailed as in this legend from southwestern France:
When the good Lord was creating the oceans, the rivers, and the springs, he asked the birds of the skies to help with the digging. They all set to work except for the green woodpecker, which mutinied and refused to budge. Once the task had been completed by the other birds, the good Lord took care to announce that the green woodpecker, having refused to help dig in the soil with his bill, would have to dig in wood to all eternity, and that not having contributed to excavating all of the earth’s bodies of water, the woodpecker would never drink any water but rain, which it would have to catch as it fell. And this is why the miserable bird never ceases to summon the clouds with its call, pluie-pluie, and why it always perches vertically, so that it can open its bill like a funnel to collect the raindrops that fall from the clouds.
Now you know. And you can test the theory with me this coming spring on either of my Birds and Art Tours to France.
The Lilian meadowlark was named by Harry C. Oberholser for Lilian Hanna Baldwin, who had donated the type specimen to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Baldwin was the wife of Samuel Prentiss Baldwin and the sister of Marcus Alonzo Hanna.
Mark Hanna is credited with (and blamed for) running both of William McKinley’s successful presidential campaigns.
That one was easy.
