Category: Information

On December 2, 1932, “following some heavy gales and a spell of zero weather,” Stuyvesant Morris Pell discovered a gray goose “floundering” on the ice of the Housatonic River in western Massachusetts. Pell captured the bird alive, and took it to New York City, where he showed it to John Todd Zimmer, who “positively identified it” as a graylag goose.

When found, the bird showed bullet marks on the primaries of one wing, its feet were a bright pink, showing no signs of recent captivity, and its behavior was that of a wild bird.

Pell modestly observes that his had been preceded by other reports in North America, but he hints broadly that this seems to be the first “authentic record” of this Old World goose in the New.

Pell, it would appear, was given to enthusiasms, and in the excitement of discovery, he neglected in the initial report to mention a couple of critical facts about his wild goose:

Later Mr. Pell became convinced that the bird had escaped from captivity, since it could not fly and was too heavy for a wild bird. This was also the opinion of Bartlett Hendricks, who saw the bird, examined the skin, and obtained this information.

The retraction, a sensible one, was issued not by Pell but by Dorothy E. Snyder, curator of natural history at the Peabody Museum, who published it “at the suggestion of Dr. Alexander Wetmore.”

The published record for this bird totals less than two pages in the Auk, but what a rich real-life story must have lurked behind it all: Pell slipping and sliding on the frozen river, then transporting the huge and no doubt cantankerous bird to New York; Zimmer looking up from his desk at the honking noise so different from that heard every day on Central Park West; Pell gleefully trumpeting the identification but ignoring the most important evidence of provenance; Wetmore raising an eyebrow and sending Hendricks out to have a look at the now-dead bird; Hendricks and Snyder deciding how to proceed without offending their colleague….

All very tangled and touchy, I’m sure. How nice that American birding is so much more straightforward nowadays!

A fine wild turkey from François-Nicolas Martinet’s Ornithologie.

The Sixth International Ornithological Congress was scheduled for late spring of 1915, in Sarajevo.

It never took place.

As Maurice Boubier wrote in his Evolution de l’ornithologie,

the World War came, alas, and broke the bonds that were being formed among ornithologists from around the world. May peace and friendship among the peoples be reborn, soon and everlasting, for the greater good of scholarly relations.

Boubier’s words were published in 1925, but they seem, sadly, only too urgent today.

These two squirrel cuckoos were shot in Sinaloa 150 years ago today, by the ornithological explorer Andrew Jackson Grayson. Grayson — the would-be Audubon of the West — painted the birds in a way that, alas, makes the reasoning behind the “would-be” portion of the epithet clear.

Grayson was not the first to illustrate this common and widespread species, which had been discovered by European science in northern South America more than a century before Grayson commenced his ill-fated work in Mexico. Jacques-François Artur, royal physician in Cayenne, sent the first specimen to Réaumur, in whose collection it was catalogued by Mathurin Brisson in 1760; there may also have been one, slightly larger, in the cabinet of Mauduyt de la Varenne. Brisson commissioned François-Nicolas Martinet to prepare an engraving of the exotic novum, which he named, logically enough, “le coucou de Cayenne.”

Martinet produced a second, less dramatic portrait of the cuckoo a few years later, for Buffon’s Natural History.

When Buffon and his collaborators came to write the text for the species, they adopted a new name, calling it “le coucou piaye,” borrowing the native American name that would later be pressed into formal nomenclatural service. But, they added, they could not carry over

the superstition that has given the bird that name: “piaye” in the native language of Cayenne means “devil,” and also “priest,” such that among these idolaters the name refers to the minister or messenger of the devil. This is why, they say, the natives and even the blacks find its flesh repugnant….

This rather startling story (with its richly suggestive “even”) is not found in Brisson, and the Natural History provides no citation to its source. A bit of reading around, however, traces the poor cuckoo’s demonic reputation all the way back to the sixteenth century.

Francisco Hernández introduced his patrons and colleagues back in Spain to an American bird known as the Quapachtototl:

When this bird sings, it imitates laughter, and for this reason it is considered by the natives a bird of ill omen.

Just why the sound of giggles, otherwise so innocent, should have been deemed so sinister would be explained in Eusebius Nieremberg’s 1635 “edition” of Hernández’s Mexican zoology. Nieremberg heads the account with what has all the hallmarks of a proverb or, more likely, the superscriptio of an emblem:

Saepe non secura laetitia,

translated later in the century by Willughby as “mirth is often insecure.” This bird is not just demonic, it’s deceptive.

Modern ornithology isn’t certain, and probably can’t be certain, that this laughing cuckoo and the squirrel cuckoo were actually the same species. But I for one will never look at a squirrel cuckoo the same way again.