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Icepipers

With the shore ponds of Monmouth County mostly frozen, Alison and I spent a short hour at the tip of the Manasquan jetty yesterday mid-day, relishing the sunshine, grateful for the lack of wind, and dispassionately observing the gradual congelation of the blood in our toes.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

There weren’t huge numbers of birds, but as always, the birding was fun. Common and a few Red-throated Loons put the fear of God into the fish at the mouth of the inlet, and small flocks containing all three scoters — the vast majority, as expected, Black Scoters — were in constant view on the water or slithering through the air in loose lines offshore.

The paved portions of the jetty were nearly ice-free (else we would not have been out there), but the giant tinker toy structures were still coated in a thick frosting.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

That glaze was the source of some consternation for the Purple Sandpipers. 

Purple Sandpiper

Just a few moments after we arrived, a nice flock of about 80 Purples, probably flushed by the adult Peregrine Falcon that kept buzzing us and them, flew in to land at the base of the structure.

Birders birding Manasquan Inlet ice

In best purple piper fashion, every time a wave hit the jetty the flock would fly up, chittering, to land above the spray on top of the hexagonal pillars. And then, slowly at first, ever faster, and finally entirely out of control, they slid on splayed orange legs to the edge and fell fluttering off, landing, if they were lucky, on a more or less dry and more or less horizontal surface.

Purple Sandpiper

After a pause to catch their breath, they were back down, busy, along the water’s edge, only to repeat the whole drama with the next wave.

I almost think the birds were having fun. I know we were.

Purple Sandpiper

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A Narrow Escape

Slate-colored Junco

This Slate-colored Junco is easy to pick out as it feeds on the ground outside my work room window.

Not so easy to pick off, though: it looks like one of our neighborhood Cooper’s Hawks — or, heaven forfend, a house cat — wound up with a mouthful of rectrices.

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The Russet-clothed Brotherhood

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I knew in advance how this one was going to work out: the OED would lead me to the earliest citations for the English hummingbird label “hermit,” and a little bit of e-drudgery would let me push the name back to its apparent source, probably among the French trochilidistes of the early nineteenth century. And along the way, perhaps I would find an unexpected motivation for the now opaque metaphor that compares these birds to the early desert ascetics.

That, after all, is how scholarship works — even when it comes to so trivial a question as that and so ephemeral a medium as this.

Little Hermit

Well, not always. In this case, the citation hunters in Oxford fail us. The French ermite appears to be modeled on the English hermit. And if we trust John Gould, the name seems to be due entirely to the bird’s

frequenting the darkest and most retired parts of the forest … affecting dark and gloomy situations.

As far as I have been able to discover, it was Gould who introduced the name to ornithology. Interestingly, though, he makes no claim to originality: Gould’s Introduction to the Trochilidae expressly says that these hummingbirds, “remarkable for being destitute of metallic brilliancy,” are “popularly known by the name of Hermits.”

I was surprised to learn that hermits were “popularly known” at all in the English-speaking world of the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, though, Gould wasn’t referring to the streets of London. In the 1849 description of Phaëthornis eremita, he explains the source of the species epithet (later elevated by Reichenbach to generic status): this bird, he writes, is the

Little Hermit of the collectors of Para

in Brazil. And just who were those collectors?

The residents of many parts of Brazil employ their slaves in collection, skinning, and preserving them for the European market; and many thousands are annually sent from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco.

One segment of the clientele didn’t care much for dull hummingbirds, though: the Brazilian collectors

also supply the inmates of the convents with many of the more richly coloured species for the manufacture of artificial-feather flowers.

It is my guess — an especially safe guess, given that it can never be tested or disproved — that the Luso-Brazilian “eremita” originated at the door of one of those monasteries, where a monk or a nun declined to pay for a brown hummingbird, rejecting it as too drab, like the sackcloth-clad hermits of the wilderness, what Alfred Newton would later call “the russet-clothed brotherhood.”

 

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Catesby’s Dopchick

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A funny bird with a funny name, the Pied-billed Grebe was first depicted and described by Mark Catesby nearly 300 years ago. The bird in Catesby’s painting was a male, collected in South Carolina, and its description is headed by a Latin phrase that very neatly sums up most of what most birders know about this species: Podicepes minor rostro vario, a “rather small grebe with a marked bill.”

For all its technical clumsiness (the bird and the water do not exist in the same space at all), Catesby’s painting is a remarkable piece of ornithological illustration. The distinctive markings of bill, throat, face, and eye are accurate and precise, and the strange, hair-like, silky texture of the feathers is admirably well drawn. The challenge of showing the most characteristic feature of all grebes, the outsized, extravagantly lobed foot, is neatly met by depicting the bird mid-preen, the body slightly a-list.

The visual eloquence of the painting contrasts strangely with Catesby’s description, which is taciturn and bland:

The Pied-Bill Dopchick.

This bird weighs half a pound. The Eyes are large, encompassed with a white Circle: the Throat has a black spot; a black list crosses the middle of the Bill; the lower mandible, next to the Basis, has a black spot: the Head and Neck, brown, particularly the Crown of the Head and Back of the Neck is darkest: the Feathers of the Breast are light brown, mixt with green; the Belly dusky white; the Back and Wings are brown.

These Birds frequent fresh water-Ponds in many of the inhabited parts of Carolina. This was a Male.

That’s it: no mention of the bird’s habits, its voice, or the structural peculiarities so carefully depicted in the plate.

The terseness and partially garbled syntax of the description and the unusually conspicuous typographical lapse in its title (P[R]ODICIPES) make me wonder whether something didn’t go wrong at this stage in the production of the book; had the printer perhaps spoiled or lost Catesby’s manuscript text, which was then hastily and carelessly replaced?

The first in a monthly series about the world’s grebes. 

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