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.
Ten Years, A Decade
The Recalcitrant Woodpecker
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.
Degrees of Separation: McKinley and the Meadowlark
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.
Other People’s Bird Books: B.H. Swales
There’s a name familiar to Michigan ornithologists and birders: Bradshaw Hall Swales. On his premature death in 1928, Swales left some 2000 skins and his entire library to his alma mater michiganensis, which in gratitude renamed its ornithological holdings as the Swales Memorial Library.
His widow, Mary Rhoda Medbury Swales, later endowed a graduate scholarship in ornithology in Ann Arbor, one still awarded today in her name — though the annual announcement barely mentions her otherwise, treating her as the wife of a famous dead man instead.
Some of Swales’s bird books were marked with just a simple stamp:
Others, though, still carry his bookplate, as delightful a specimen of the genre as can be imagined.
I assume the choice of a marsh bird was a pun on Swales’s name; note that both the heron and the book’s owner are wearing the same spectacles.
One thing still puzzles me, though. Why does the bird of the swales perch on “Ornithologie”? The fact that the word on the spine is not in English suggests that it denotes not a discipline but a title, that the heron is standing on a specific book from Swales’s collection.
Any ideas?
Why I So Rarely See Eagles and Creepers Flocking Together
It’s bothered me for a long time, but at last I’ve come across the explanation. Writes Bartolomé Aneau in his Déscription philosophale,
The eagle is in a state of war with the treecreeper, which does the eagle great harm, breaking the larger bird’s eggs whenever it notices that the eagle is away from its nest.
Good to know.