A fine wild turkey from François-Nicolas Martinet’s Ornithologie.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Armistice Day
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.
Demonic Laughter
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.
Tischbein the Birder
On October 29, 1786, Goethe arrived in Rome, where he was met by the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. The rest, as they say, is history: the two traveled Italy together, and their long friendship would be commemorated in Tischbein’s most famous painting, the most famous image of Goethe ever produced.
A century and a half later, Roger Tory Peterson posed for a portrait of his own — striking a pose that I have always suspected was modeled on Goethe’s.
Whether that connection is real or — just barely possibly conceivably — imagined, there is another, more easily demonstrated. For Tischbein, the creator of so many famous portraits and classicizing history paintings, was a lapsed birder.
From Rome, the artist wrote to Johann Heinrich Merck
I was once a great amateur of birds and knew almost all the species, especially the native ones. In Holland I saw some very fine ones. I like birds very much; it seems to me that they occupy the same place in living nature as flowers in a nature morte. The bright, beautiful colors and the feathers in themselves are a beautiful thing. I’ve seen some here I didn’t know before: a green bird that resembles a kingfisher but is a type of thrush; a blue thrush; and another little birdlet like a wren.
Tischbein, who had etched some of the early plates for the Nozeman – Sepp Nederlandsche vogelen, even considered producing an illustrated guide to the birds of Rome:
If I could be certain that these birds were not already known, I would have them drawn and their life histories added.
It didn’t happen. And maybe that’s just as well.
Wanted: A White Crow
The Latin word cornix — the crow — has been beloved of punsters for millennia now. Medieval schoolboys learned that
cornix est alba si cor tollatur ab illa.
Giordano Bruno recorded another one in his Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, mocking the “childish sophistry” that could delight in a line like
cor est fons vitae, nix est alba, ergo: Cornix est fons vitae alba.
Silliness aside, it turns out that by 1687, we actually knew how to produce white crows — or at least one bird seller did.
In the markets of Frankfurt in that year, eight white crows were offered at a very high price; their owner shared his recipe with the Eisenach physician and scholar Christian Franz Paullini:
Rub newly laid crow’s eggs, the fresher the better, with the grease of a white cat; coat them with the brains of the same cat, then give them to a young white hen that has laid only her first egg to incubate. During the entire period of incubation, keep the hen in a place out of the sun, and lay white cloth everywhere in that place. The crows that hatch from the eggs will be white.
Paullini was skeptical, and he didn’t even bother trying it.
