Category: Information

This picture, from a manuscript of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur produced in the famous workshop of Diebold Lauber, is mysterious in more ways than one.

The bird is identified as a zanclaffer, a “tooth chatterer,” a name that to my knowledge occurs nowhere else for what is obviously the white spoonbill.

Only adding to the apparent confusion, the facing text treats of a bird called “strix” in Latin, and indeed, the description is that of a nocturnal bird known for its call, likened to the sound of a scythe being drawn through the air — a descriptive tradition that is ultimately, if distantly, behind the modern name “saw-whet” for the cutest of our strigids.

The mismatch between text and image, extreme as it is in this case, is not overly unusual in the manuscript tradition of the Buch der Natur. Nearly 20 years ago, Gerold Hayer pointed out that the illuminators responsible for the illustrations rarely bothered to adapt their work to the words of the text, simply lifting traditional iconographic types from herbals and bestiaries.

What I find most striking, and most puzzling, though, is the bird’s right foot. It seems not to be just standing on that fecklessly grinning fish, but grasping the poor creature in its threskiornithid talons.

Probably not a realistic scene.

I don’t know whether there is a standard spoonbill iconography in the late Middle Ages, but if there is, I’d bet this departs from it. How to explain this bird’s weird pose?

Hayer’s observation about the illuminators’ lazy reliance on older models points to a possible answer. Another large wading bird, the crane, is a standard member of the bestiary cast, where its spiritual vigilance is indicated by the stone it holds in its foot. I wonder whether the designer of the leaf in this Buch der Natur had that tradition in mind — or perhaps, even, a bestiary on the table in front of her or him — and decided, in a fit of contaminating inspiration, that those long legs needed something to hold. Not a stone, but, say, a fish.

We’ll never know. But maybe it isn’t that much of a reach.

 

The Sulawesi dwarf kingfisher is neither common nor especially well known. But does that justify naming the poor bird “the trickster,” as Hermann Schlegel did in 1866?

It’s not an infrequent name in the history of ornithology, fallax, and in this case, the original namer fills us in on his reasons for calling a newly discovered bird sneaky:

Messrs von Rosenberg and Renesse van Duivenbode have sent us the skins of a species of kingfisher that, because of its small size and coloration, one would at first glance be tempted to think belonged to the three-toed species that make up the modern naturalists’ subgenus Ceyx. Our new species, however, is furnished with four toes, and thus, it forms, so to speak, the transition from the Ceyx kingfishers to the others — while at the same time showing that the distinction based on the number of toes is entirely secondary and artificial.

Tricky!

Poor Charlie Bonaparte.

Not even death and a Corsican grave could save him from the withering criticism of his colleagues and successors in ornithology — the witheringest among them, unsurprisingly, Elliott Coues. Twenty years after Bonaparte had shuffled off his mortal coil, Coues was still after him, calling his later scientific contributions “not only a worthless but a pernicious aggregate.”

Bonaparte’s greatest crime, though, exceeding even his “pedantries and pleasantries,” was what Coues called “juggl[ing] other authors out of the way to make room for himself,” appropriating bird names already properly published by other scientists. The result:

we have a state of things that is a disgrace to himself, a scandal to science, and only to be adequately characterized by the word abominable…. an ultra-Napoleonic piece of fatuity.

All that’s bad enough, but Coues in his fury overlooked one Bonapartean act even ruder than the theft of names.

Bonaparte’s Conspectus generum avium is, as the title announces, a list of the genera of birds, with representative species given under some genera. For the most part, that’s it: names and authorities, nothing else. The entry for the green-fronted lancebill, however, concludes with a very odd little note:

This bird, whose name comes from “gifts to be carried,” and whose forehead bears hope — I command this bird to greet that Louise who gave hope to the exile and to whom he owes assistance and consolation!!!

Yes, those are Bonaparte’s exclamation points; we can be happy that his printer had no i‘s dotted with hearts and daisies.

But what is this note all about?

First of all, Bonaparte willfully misreads the hummingbird’s genus name. “Doryfera” has nothing to do with a geek’s bearing dona, but rather, as Cabanis told us, refers to the bird’s bill: “spear bearer” could hardly be more apt for this, well, lance-billed trochilid.

The notion that the bird’s forehead carries positive anticipation, weird at first glance, is presumably meant to invoke the hokey iconographic tradition of green as the color of hope.

And then there’s “that Louise.”

This species was first described by Bourcier and Mulsant two years before Bonaparte got his hands on it. They dedicated the bird to Louise Blacque-Belair, the wife of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Mme Geoffroy seems to have been a favorite in French zoological circles; Milne-Edwards praised her

tender and delicate graciousness, her kindness, the distinction of her bearing, and the high-mindedness of her spirit.

I assume that Bonaparte is referring to the same Louise, who, with her husband, stuck by him through the thick and thin of his years of exile; Stroud tells us that Isidore, in fact, was the most important intermediary between the naturalist and his cousin the emperor in the negotiations to end Charles’s banishment from France.

How nice of him to be grateful. But by commanding the bird to greet “his” Louise, Bonaparte rather horns in on the original, graciously simple dedication, hijacking Bourcier and Mulsant’s act of naming to thrust himself forward (a bit like a pushy lance bearer, I suppose).

It’s all in very poor taste, and if Coues had noticed, this computer screen would be smoking, I’m sure.