Category: Information

It’s François Levaillant’s 262nd birthday, occasion once again to wonder why there is no modern biography of an explorer and ornithologist whose works, now forgotten by all but the bibliophile, were tremendously influential in the nineteenth century.

Part of the reason is no doubt Levaillant’s tendency to exaggeration — a tendency that, to my mind, makes him an even more fascinating subject. The obvious errors in some of his ornithological studies have also rendered him persona less grata in scientific circles, but again, those slips simply serve to point out how busy he was and how far-flung his interests.

Levaillant hasn’t always been under-appreciated. Three years after the explorer’s death in 1824, Johann Georg Wagler, that most critical of critics, had this to say about the Frenchman’s publications:

After making two journeys through the interior portions of southern Africa, Levaillant published a report of what he had seen and observed; one cannot overstate how much his observations have enriched our knowledge of ornithology.

The high expectations that all experts in the field had for the untiring effort of this man’s natural history investigations were not just met but thoroughly exceeded by the vast store of outstanding observations he provided on not a few southern African birds that had eluded all investigators before him.

Wagler was not a great stylist, but you get the point. Levaillant’s eventual biographer — you know you’re out there — could do worse than to start with the words of his contemporaries and immediate successors.

Are mute swans really silent?

No, of course not, as anyone who’s ever been hissed and grunted at in a city park can tell you. But they’re much less talkative than the other wild swans of Europe, and it is this silence, surprisingly, that seems to be behind the old idea of the swan’s dying song.

At least that’s how Antoine Mongez explained it in a lecture delivered to the Académie des Inscriptions 232 years ago today, on July 29, 1783.

Mongez’s first concern was to confirm that there were two white swan species living in Europe, not just one. In best Lumière style, the lecture began with a summary of ancient opinions on the matter, proceeded to the reports of dissections, and ended with Mongez’s own experience with living captives. The two species, he concludes, are the “tame” swan — our mute — and the “wild” swan — probably our whooper swan.

Only the latter, Mongez reports, can sing, and he has recently heard it with his own ears:

On July 13, I went to the zoo of Chantilly, where I watched the captive swans for a long time, with one of the keepers, M. l’Ecailler…. The keepers used a cleverly thought-out trick to let me hear the birds. They brought in a domestic goose and put it over the netting that surrounded the pond. Hardly had that bird touched the ground when the swans came up, proudly, one after another in single file, the male in the lead, to do battle with this new enemy. They approached the goose slowly, puffing out their necks, which gave them a sinuous motion like that of reptiles, and uttering strangled sounds. The scene was about to become bloody when the keepers grabbed the goose by the wings and removed it from the enclosure. Then the two adult swans faced each other and rose up on their legs, spread their wings, lifted their heads, and began to sing their victory over and over.

Yes, there are two species of swan, and one of them can sing. But whence this strange notion that it sings only at the moment of its death? Mongez tells us: for the authors of antiquity,

the wild swan, the singing swan, was quite rare in their countries, and so they had not seen it often. Desiring to reconcile the old tradition of the song of the swan with the silence of the mute swans that lived on their canals — individuals of the wild swan species being encountered only accidentally and very poorly studied even then — they assured us that they sang only at the moment of their death, and only in remote places, where their death was witnessed not even by other birds.

It’s a good story, not least, as Mongez points out, because it was so hard to disprove.

One would have attempted in vain to follow a dying swan into the clefts of rocks or across endless desert…. Plus, the swan lives for such a long time, they claimed, that it is very rare to actually see one die.

And why, if they were so silent for so long, should they decide to sing only in the hour of their death?

They said that the feathers of the crown would suddenly begin to grow into the skull, and the pain caused by the damage to the brain drew these melodious sounds out of the dying birds,

a natural history factlet that Mongez uses to gloss Ovid’s lines about the plucked string’s

plaintive rhythms, as when the swan sings its song, its frost-white brow transfixed by a rigid feather,

in which the word “penna” is a synecdoche for an arrow.

Mongez’s peroration that evening is inspiring even today to a certain type of reading birder:

And so, by virtue of research that has proved as pleasant as it useful, I have relocated in the writings of the Ancients almost everything that observation has taught me about the singing swan. This song of the swans … which has become proverbial can no longer be doubted: the Ancients are avenged. May my success inspire other modern Naturalists to cast the torch light of observation onto the tales of the Greeks and the Romans! One will see with astonishment that their knowledge was solid and extensive. As to me, heartened by the favorable reception with which I have been honored today, I embrace such work with zeal and dedicate myself to it.

The publications committee of the Academy — no less a trio than Daubenton, Brisson, and Vicq d’Azyr — finding that it would be of equal interest to natural historians and literary scholars, deemed Mongez’s talk worthy of being printed in the Mémoires.

I think they were right.

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.]