Information – Page 44 – Birding New Jersey

June 9, 2015

Meanwhile, Audubon

The history of the discovery and naming of the cliff swallow is as full of twists and turns as, well, a swallow’s flight.

And inevitably, John James Audubon had to get mixed up in it.

In 1824 — rather late in a game already won by Say and Rafinesque and Vieillot — Audubon submitted to the Lyceum of Natural History of New York a paper in which he, fairly unsubtly, claimed his own priority.

In the spring of 1815, I saw a few of these birds for the first time at Henderson, 120 miles below the falls of the Ohio, on the banks of that river. It was an excessively cold morning in the month of March, and nearly all were killed by the severity of the weather. I drew up at the time a description under the name of H[irundo] Republicana, Republican swallow, in allusion to their mode of association for the purposes of building and rearing their young.

Sadly enough, though,

the specimens, through the carelessness of my assistant [who?], were lost, and I despaired for years of meeting with them again,

and so Audubon’s name, which would otherwise have enjoyed priority, went unpublished.

Now things get interesting.

In the spring of 1819, Robert Best, the curator of the Western Cincinnati Museum, told Audubon about “a strange species of bird … building nests in clusters affixed to walls.”

In consequence of this information, I immediately crossed the Ohio, to Newport in Kentucky, where [Best] had seen those nests the preceding season [that is to say, 1818], and no sooner were we landed, than the chirrups of my long-lost little strangers saluted my ear.

Without so much as mentioning him, Audubon here pulls the rug out completely from under poor Rafinesque, who had described his Hirundo albifrons in February of 1822 — from specimens in the Museum of Cincinnati, taken “near Newport in Kentucky” or Madison, Ohio.

What Audubon’s account boils down to is the claim that he, Audubon, had been there first — in Henderson in 1815, in Newport and Cincinnati in 1819 — and most significantly, well before the famous meeting with Rafinesque in 1820. Audubon does not come out and exactly say that he introduced Rafinesque to the bird, but the implication is clear.

Audubon saved his explicit vitriol for another European colleague, Charles Bonaparte. In the addendum to his account of the species in the Ornithological Biography, he writes

Although the Prince of Musignano [Bonaparte] saw my original drawing, and read the account of the habits of this species in my Journal, as written on the spot, both at Henderson in Kentucky, in the spring of 1815, and again in the same state opposite Cincinnati, in the spring of 1819, and concocted his article on this bird from these sources, he has refrained from making any mention of these circumstances.

That’s not entirely fair: though Bonaparte fails to distinguish those places where he is copying Audubon verbatim from the passages based on his own observation, he does acknowledge his sources at the beginning of the account:

Mr. Dewitt Clinton has recently published a paper on the same subject, accompanied by some observations from Mr. Audubon. Combining what these gentlemen have made known with the information previously given by Vieillot and Say, we can present a tolerably complete history of the Cliff Swallow.

Justified or not, Audubon’s peevishness here is eloquent testimony to just how tangled the naming of the cliff swallow was — and how much it mattered to those involved.

May 30, 2015June 23, 2018

How About the Genus Pipilo … Back Then?

In 1896, Robert Ridgway proposed to make of the green-tailed towhee

the type of a new genus, Oreospiza, whose characters are intermediate between, or rather a combination of, those of Pipilo and Zonotrichia.

Sensible enough, given the bird’s wing structure and head pattern, and the AOU adopted the new name in the next year’s Supplement to the Check-list.

Thereupon roared forth, in a manic mood, Elliott Coues.

In a short and malignant letter to the editor of the Auk, Coues confessed himself inclined to agree that the green-tailed was generically distinct from other towhees, but at the same time felt the need to point out that

I could produce some manuscript, in my own handwriting, of date 1862, in which I took the bird entirely out of the genus Pipilo; though I never published that screed, chiefly because my mentor at that time, Professor Baird, was vexed at something I did with Bonaparte’s genus Kieneria.

Resentment piles up atop 35-year-old resentment. But Coues’s real difficulty is the sequence of the towhees: the AOU has, in both editions of its list, “interjected forcibly” the green-tailed towhee

in the middle of its supposed genus, with the black or green and white Towhees in front of it, and the brown Towhees behind it; with the interesting result, that Oreospiza, the heterogeneous element or unconformable factor in the case, now splits Pipilo apart!

Coues is not to blame, though, as he hastens to add:

I gladly leave this case to the tender grace of any one who will admit his responsibility for putting “Pipilo” chlorurus in that fix. I decline to assume any responsibility myself; the bird will be found in several of my works since 1872 in what I took to be its proper position.

Indeed, in all the successive editions of the Key, published in 1872, 1884, 1887, 1890, and — posthumously — 1903, the green-tailed is placed at the end of the towhees. Starting with the second edition, Coues included a note about the bird’s affinities: it is, he writes,

of no intimate relations with any other; it has long been placed conventionally in Pipilo, for want of a better location; it is not easy to see how it differs in form from Zonotrichia or Embernagra.

If I’ve kept track correctly, this short letter efficiently sideswipes Robert Ridgway — for failing to acknowledge Coues’s intellectual priority — Spencer Baird — for disagreeing with Coues’s treatment of Kieneria — Charles Bonaparte — for raising the genus in the first place — and the rest of the AOU’s checklist committee — for forcing the green-tailed into an unnatural position in the tally.

Baird and Bonaparte were dead, and Ridgway, apparently declining to respond to Coues’s outburst, simply pointed out that he had himself been pondering the distinctness of the green-tailed towhee for some time.

The AOU, however, was still restive. In 1915, Charles Richmond pointed out that Ridgway’s Oreospiza was pre-occupied, having already been used (and more appropriately, at that) by the specimen dealer G.T. Keitel for the snowfinches. Richmond coined the new genus name Oberholseria for the green-tailed towhee, and that name was used in the fourth edition of the Check-list.

Screen Shot 2015-05-30 at 2.39.58 PM

In 1947, on the determination that Chlorura was available and predated Richmond’s name — it had first been published, as a subgenus name, for the towhee in 1862 — the twenty-second supplement assigned the bird to yet another genus, making it Chlorura chlorura, the green-tailed greentail, in the fifth edition of the Check-list.

And it wasn’t over yet. Things came full circle in 1955, when Charles Sibley argued cogently that the green-tailed towhee was best assigned to the same genus as the spotted and collared towhees — namely, Pipilo, the genus from which it had been removed it in 1896.

No response so far from Elliott Coues.

May 29, 2015May 26, 2015

The Pygmy of Fort Whipple

One hundred fifty years ago today, on May 29, 1865, Elliott Coues wrote to the editor of the Ibis from his posting at Fort Whipple, near Prescott, Arizona.

It’s a delightful letter, humorous and good-natured, the source of the famous Couesian line about feeling “a sort of charitable pity for the rest of the poor world, who are not ornithologists, and have not the chance of pursuing the science in Arizona.”

Coues reports on the habits of the avian inhabitants of northern Arizona’s pine forests, then tentatively reports an apparent novum,

another new one among the host of [difficult] Empidonaces … already on record …. nothing like any northern one. It is considerably smaller than E. minimus — a veritable little pygmy, so that I thought it was a Regulus [kinglet] when I shot at it…. I have distinguished it in my notes and letters as E. pygmaeus.

This turns out to be the first record of the buff-breasted flycatcher from Arizona, and the type description of the subspecies pygmaeus (which Coues later attempted to rename pallescens).

Coues was right, though, in wondering whether the bird might not have been described before: J.P. Giraud had in fact named the bird in 1841, describing it from a specimen said to be from Texas but most likely from somewhere south of the United States. Giraud called it the “buff breasted fly catcher, Muscicapa fulvifrons,” the names it still — mutating the mutanda — bears.

The great historical curiosity attending this species is that it does not occur with any regularity in either of its type localities: there are hardly ten records of the bird in Texas, and in Arizona this sweetest-faced of the Empidonax no longer ranges north to anywhere near Prescott.

Coues’s Fort Whipple pygmies were more special even than he suspected.

May 28, 2015May 27, 2015

The Pious Vulpanser

Even if, like Augustine, we’re not certain whether to believe it or not, everyone has at least heard of the sacrifice of the mother pelican, who opens her own breast to nourish her young with the blood.

We may be less familiar, however, with the story of the generous vulpanser, another remarkable example of selfless love in the bird world.

According to the Italian iconographer and emblematist Ioannes Pierius Valerianus,

when the Egyptian priests wished to denote parents’ love for their children, they used the hieroglyph of the vulpanser.

He reports that

this bird attends to its offspring with so great a love that should it ever happen that it encounters hunters and finds that it and its chicks have been spotted, both father and mother rush to surrender themselves to the hunters and to draw their attention away from the young…. And so it seemed to the Egyptians that an animal of such piety should be regarded with great veneration.

The British, Pierius tells us, once considered this bird the finest of foods, but by the time of Caesar, they too had decided that it was a sacred creature not to be eaten.

But what is it, this vulpanser, this “fox-goose”?

Buffon knows:

one can readily see, thanks to one of the natural attributes of the bird — more decisively than by any erudite conjecture — that the name belongs exclusively to … the only species in which one can discover a unique and singular similarity to the fox, namely, its finding shelter, like the fox, in a burrow.

The vulpanser of the ancients and the not-so-ancients is the common shelduck,

first designated by the name “renard-oie”; not only does this bird shelter itself like a fox, but it nests and lays its eggs in holes which it normally expropriates from rabbits.

Not very nice to the rabbits — but at least they love their offspring.

May 22, 2015May 22, 2015

Fallout

Much of the snow melted by 2:00 pm.

It’s one of those sentences I didn’t expect to speak on May 20 in Nebraska, but snow it did, a good inch and a half on the ground, the roofs, and the car tops when we got up that morning.

And what do we do in unexpected weather in migration? We bird, of course.

Alison’s attire required a little extemporization, but once that was done, we set off for the Soldiers Creek Campground at Fort Robinson, where we’d seen large numbers of lark sparrows, clay-colored sparrows, chipping sparrows, and lazuli buntings the day before, when it was just drizzling.

This snowy morning, the campground came through for us once again.

It’s always been one of my favorite birding sites in one of my favorite landscapes, the Nebraska Pine Ridge, but it’s rare for me to be there when the campers aren’t. On this morning, we shared the wooded grounds along the creek with a grand total of one rv’er (uncertain how to spell that one) — and loads and loads of birds.

Most impressive of all were the Swainson’s thrushes. This is a common May migrant in the Nebraska Panhandle, but we were unprepared for the flock of at least 20 bouncing around on the lawns and in the brush. We looked hard for rarer birds, but all were Swainson’s, and all the Swainson’s were olive-backed thrushes. No complaints from us, though.

The sparrow flock had grown considerably in numbers, with at least 120 lark sparrows feeding frantically on the snow, and perhaps half that many chipping sparrows joining in. Spotted towhees, probably but not certainly local breeders, whined and mewled and trilled everywhere, occasionally bounding out from their thickets to show off. These arcticus birds are the most heavily marked of all the spotted towhees, and Alison, who had most recently seen the bland oregonus birds of coastal British Columbia, exclaimed again and again when one flashed through her field of view.

There were less expected sparrows, too. A Lincoln’s sparrow was a bit on the latish side, even for western Nebraska, and a gloriously white-striped white-throated sparrow was both geographically and chronologically slightly out of place: generally uncommon at best in the Panhandle, this species is usually gone from the state entirely by May 20.

Most interesting among the emberizids were the white-crowned sparrows. At first glance, they seemed all to be dark-lored birds, thus presumably leucophrys (or maybe, just maybe, oriantha); but a closer look revealed that even though the black lateral crown stripes were thick and reached or nearly reached the base of the bill, there was invariably a gray loral patch separating that stripe from the eye line. The bill color was also intermediate between the darker-billed birds of the far north and west and the paler-billed Gambel’s sparrow; we put them down as “subspecies indeterminate,” not an uncommon label when you’re dealing with migrants — of just about any species — on the western Great Plains.

A high-pitched squeal revealed another surprise.

Broad-winged hawks are rare in extreme western Nebraska, but the weather had put down a mini-flock of three juveniles in the campground’s cottonwoods, and as the weather warmed, slightly, they took to the air, flashing from tree to tree and studiously avoiding the nervous Cooper’s hawks nesting in a tall tree nearby.

If I were a county lister, I’d have checked this one off for two, as it soared against the Cheyenne Outbreak Buttes, back and forth across the Sioux County line.

Meanwhile, the passerine show never let up. Red-eyed vireos and a locally scarce Bell’s vireo sang from the trees and thickets, and as the air attained its balmy 40 degrees F, yellow warblers, common yellowthroats, American redstarts, and an ovenbird started to hunt and sing. All of those species breed in the campground, but there were also two migrants: a nice-looking celata orange-crowned warbler, and then, feeding with the American goldfinches and pine siskins in the cottonwood buds, a grassy-backed Tennessee warbler. As abundant as that bird is in eastern Nebraska in May, I’d never seen it in the Panhandle, where it is surprisingly rare at any season.

Three hours later, we left the campground to explore a couple of other sites.

There were birds everywhere, but the true fallout seemed to be concentrated in the riparian thickets. Up in Smiley Canyon, where our way was first blocked by American bison, we found no obvious migrants at all, though a flock of seven black-billed magpies was a welcome sight — the only representatives of the species we would see anywhere in Nebraska. The Icehouse Ponds were slightly more productive, with numbers of Swainson’s thrushes plicking and plocking everywhere we turned; chimney and white-throated swifts hunted among the flock of cliff, barn, and violet-green swallows. Alison, less reverent of rarity and more easily swayed by mere beauty than I am sometimes, decided that a male Bullock’s oriole, perched out on the grass in the middle of a small flock of western kingbirds, was her favorite bird of the day.

And mine? Impossible to choose on a day like this, when the weather and the season combined to make one of the best birding experiences I’d had in a long time. Or at least since the day before.