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.
The Song-Sparrow
Max’s Musical Jungle Thrush
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.
Maximilian in Brazil — Almost
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.
A First
Want to know what the nest and eggs of a North American breeding bird look like? Just google it. Full descriptions for almost every single species are at your keyboarding fingertips, and though I haven’t checked, I’m betting that there are photos of each one, too.
But bird-nesting is like everything else: Somebody had to be the first to find one. And our North American avifauna included some tough customers. The Harris sparrow, the Ross goose, and the bristle-thighed curlew, all high-latitude breeders, led researchers a merry chase for long decades before they gave up their secrets.
One hundred years ago today, and much closer to home for most of us, another long-sought nest was finally discovered. On July 11, 1915, Frederick C. Lincoln, Harold R. Durand, and A.H. Burns were able to “place on record … the first nest and eggs of the brown-capped rosy finch (Leucosticte australis) known to science.”
Even if Colorado’s Mt. Bross wasn’t the Arctic, the nest-seekers faced some challenges. At 13,500 feet,
the nest was found [on] a short cliff about forty feet in height, of Lincoln porphyry, protruding through the upper edge of the schists and shales which occur just below the granite cap. The face of this cliff had suffered considerably from erosion, resulting in “chimneys” and cavities from a few inches to several feet in diameter….
Fortunately, the female of the pair was “extremely solicitous,” and once flushed, she went back again and again to her eggs, leading the explorers to the precious nest.
Poor Pompadour
Poor Mme de Pompadour. I suppose it’s one of the occupational hazards when you are official mistress to the king, but not everybody at the court of Louis XV seems to have liked her.
Even the king found her difficult at times.
I really want to please Louis, but alas, sometimes he thinks I’m a scoter.
An odd insult, but a cruelly skillful one indeed. As a cookbook published for the preceding Louis had explained,
The scoter is a fish-bird…. It counts as a fish because it has cold blood, which is the only criterion for us to distinguish between foods that can be eaten on fast days and those that cannot.
Poor Mme de Pompadour — née Poisson.