The Experience of Birding
Over at the VENT blog today, with some words and pictures about my new tour Birds and Art in Berlin and Brandenburg. We’ll be there at just the right time for tens of thousands of cranes and much, much more.
Daily tallies from the roost at Linum. During the dates scheduled for our tour, the flock has ranged from 23,000 to a very impressive 117,000 common cranes. It’s a great show!
Well, it can’t. It’s a bird. But I’m continually amazed by what the human mind can do with — can do to — the things around us.
It’s been a summer of symbols in the United States, and while the removal of even the most vile of signifiers can’t destroy their signifieds, at least we’ve finally agreed that governments have no business propping up evil by displaying its tokens.
Haven’t we?
Now comes this, just the latest bit of officially sanctioned racist intimidation to hit the e-waves.
It’s ludicrous that there’s debate at all about the three white-sheeted thugs riding mock-heroic beneath a moonlit sky. Scrape ’em off, paint ’em over.
But what about that other wistful reminder of a golden past, the big black and white bird with the red crest in the foreground? It turns out, google informs us, that woodpeckers lead a sinister symbolic life in the violent underworld of American racism. Dina Temple-Raston’s Death in Texas describes the “body art” of one scion of the local aristocracy:
His arms and back were a solid gallery of tattoos and racist symbols. A menacing version of Woody Woodpecker sported a Klan robe on one arm and a tiny black man dangled from a tree limb on the other.
I advise forgoing an image search.
The internet abounds with explanations of the semiotic link between picids and racist hatred, but no one seems to have noticed the obvious: that it all began with the action of one recalcitrant state legislature.
On September 26, 1927, Bibb Graves, the governor of Alabama and “Exalted Cyclops” of the KKK, signed the law declaring the yellowhammer that state’s official bird. Not, note well, the “flicker,” which was the bird’s AOU name at the time, but the yellowhammer.
Why that species, and why that name?
Most state birds were selected for the beauty of their plumage or the charm of their song; a few owe the distinction to crass economic thinking (Rhode Island! Alaska! South Dakota!!). Only two were chosen on historical grounds: Delaware’s chicken, and Alabama’s big brown woodpecker.
No need for me to craft a tendentious paraphrase. Here’s what the Alabama Department of Archives and History itself has to say about it:
Alabama has been known as the “Yellowhammer State” since the Civil War. The yellowhammer nickname was applied to the Confederate soldiers from Alabama…. On the sleeves, collars and coattails of the new calvary [sic] troop were bits of brilliant yellow cloth. As the company rode past Company A, Will Arnett cried out in greeting “Yellowhammer, Yellowhammer, flicker, flicker!” The greeting brought a roar of laughter from the men and from that moment the Huntsville soldiers were spoken of as the “yellowhammer company.” The term quickly spread throughout the Confederate Army and all Alabama troops were referred to unofficially as the “Yellowhammers.” When the Confederate Veterans in Alabama were organized they took pride in being referred to as the “Yellowhammers” and wore a yellowhammer feather in their caps or lapels during reunions.
Alabama’s bird is a pretty bird, with a distinctive voice and habits. But all that mattered in its selection was the chance to commemorate the men of that state who fought to destroy the Union and prop up the enslavement of one human by another. It’s no wonder that woodpeckers have become the secret handshake of people who believe, truly believe, that their lives would be better if we could only return to the days when ivory-billed woodpeckers still flashed through the woods of the south.
[RW: I don’t know whether my 3x-great-grandfather met with any Alabamans, but this is what their war did to him, when as a member of Co. F, 17th Iowa Infantry, he
participated in the battles of Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh, and took part in the many engagements which led to the evacuation of Corinth and Iuka. At the camp at Clear Creek our subject was attacked with the intermittent fever. He was removed to St. Louis, Mo., and placed in the Good Samaritan Hospital, remaining there for some time, and was finally honorably discharged on account of physical disability. At the time of his discharge he was so reduced in flesh that he was merely a skeleton, with an epidermis stretched over it. He rejoined his people in Nebraska [after] endur[ing] without a complaint the terrible experiences had on the fields of Shiloh, Pittsburg Landing and Iuka. Returning home he suffered for years, broken in health, but not in courage or spirit.]
A poem by Annie Adams Field, who died a hundred years ago, and who has too long been dismissed as a “woman poet” and remembered only as Sarah Orne Jewett’s friend.
I think this is a good poem.
After all that, Prince Maximilian and his companions were mighty glad to be on terra firma again, and they spent the next nearly two years exploring the wildernesses of Brazil.
Thanks largely to the expatriate ornithologist Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss, Maximilian was able to record something along the lines of 400 bird species — as then understood — during his time in South America: 30 diurnal raptors, 8 or 9 owls, two dozen parrots, 5 toucans, 3 trogons, 11 cuckoos and barbets, 9 or 10 woodpeckers, 4 kingfishers, a jacamar, about 16 hummingbirds, about 10 woodcreepers, 2 xenopes, 9 orioles and caciques, 6 thrushes, 23 tanagers, and on and on.
Some of these birds, Maximilian writes, are also known from North America or even Europe, but others seemed to be unknown altogether, including this familiar bird of the tropical forest:
In a wild untouched forest of tall, tangled trunks we were startled by the odd choral singing of a bird that was new to us. The whole jungle echoed with its extremely weird, loud whistling, composed of five or six penetrating notes. These noisy forest dwellers had gathered here in whole flocks, and whenever one let its voice ring out, all the others joined in immediately.
Figured it out? Maximilian actually described this species twice, the second time including a helpful recording, à la 1830, of its voice:
The effect is most realistic, he says, if the phrases are played glissando on the A string of a violin. (The brace joining the two staves is an engraver’s error.)
Not to take anything away from Maximilian, Freyreiss, and their collectors, but the screaming piha wasn’t really quite as unknown as they thought.
Fifteen years before the prince and his party had set foot on Brazilian soil, François Levaillant described a bird he called the ashy cotinga. The Frenchman had never seen it in life, only as a skin in the collection of Louis Dufrêne, taxidermist at the MNHN; Levaillant admitted that he was fairly unimpressed.
Nature, who has shown herself so munificent towards the cotingas in general, seems to have forgot that this bird even belongs to the family; for there is nothing more humble and less varied than its plumage.
Be that as it may, Louis Pierre Vieillot gave the bird a scientific name in 1817, simply translating Levaillant’s as Ampelis cinerea; he would repeat the name, this time altered to cineracea, in 1822. Unfortunately for Vieillot, Ampelis cinerea was pre-occupied by another cotinga, the lovely Pompadour, and cineracea, obviously, must yield to Maximilian’s name by simple priority.
The prince called it vociferans, and if you’ve ever stood in the jungle and been deafened, you’ll agree that it’s the best possible name for the noisiest possible bird.
Two hundred years ago today, after seventy-two days at sea that were anything but pleasant, Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied thought he might finally set foot on the continent of South America.
As an almost imperceptible wind had arisen around 11:00, our ship’s progress was barely noticeable, even with the help of all the sails. We decided to use this time of forced inactivity to make our first acquaintance with the soil of Brazil by exploring one of the rocky islands.
The prince, the captain, a few sailors, and two other paying passengers climbed into the boat and set out.
The sailors rowed ahead, but without noticing that our boat was taking on a great deal of water: it had been secured at the back of the ship, and had dried out severely in the heat of the sun. When we’d been working our way through the high swells for half an hour, we found ourselves obliged to bale the water that had seeped in; but we had nothing to do it with, so we had no choice but to take off our shoes and use them.
It got worse. When the boat finally reached the island they’d chosen, the little party discovered that its shores were steep and rugged, covered with an impenetrable tangle of roots and branches.
The enormous surf, crashing into white foam, raged so violent that we had to be respectfully content with admiring the beautiful vegetation of the island from a distance, finding pleasure in the song of the birds that showered down on us…. Great numbers of gulls, white with black backs, stood in pairs atop the cliffs…. we shot at them over and over, without securing a single one.
After an hour or so, the boat turned around to rejoin the ship.
But it was no longer to be seen. Now our situation was troubling. The entrance to the Rio harbor is dominated by ocean currents that cause ships to drift away from their course without the crew’s noticing, and more than a few have been wrecked that way. Our sailors pulled hard against the high swell, without knowing what direction our ship was in.
Finally they saw the masts of the Janus in the distance, and all spent that night aboard, in eager anticipation of their first visit ashore — the next morning, July 17, 1815.