But that wasn’t the first fork-tail recorded in the US — or even, amazingly enough, the first for New Jersey.
Sometime before 1825 — the usual date in the secondary literature seems to be “around 1820,” while Boyle gives “around 1812” —
a beautiful male, in full plumage … was shot near Bridgetown, New-Jersey, at the extraordinary season of the first week in December, and was presented by Mr. J. Woodcraft, of that town, to Mr. Titian Peale, who favoured me with the opportunity of examining it.
… the three outer [primaries] have a very extraordinary and profound sinus or notch on their inner webs, near the tip, so as to terminate in a slender process.
That is enough, according to Zimmer, to identify the Woodcraft specimen as a member of the subspecies savana (then known as tyrannus).
That austral migrant, abundant in its range, is responsible for almost all northerly records of this species, though Zimmer identified one New Jersey specimen, of unknown date and locality, as sanctaemartae (a determination adjudged only “possible” by Pyle).
To Bonaparte, it was “evident” that his specimen “must have strayed from its native country under the influence of extraordinary circumstances.”
On this date in 1839, Raymond and Waring opened Cooke’s Circus in Philadelphia. Along with clowns, equestrian artists, and two camels, the show also included a male Asian elephant, Pizarro.
They’re everywhere today, run by government bodies, NGOs, and even individuals in search of a tax break. They staff hawk watches, monitor shorebird nests, and work with landowners and managers to preserve habitat. They do a lot of good work — almost always without a lot of money.
Bird observatories are so much a part of the modern birding landscape that we can easily forget they had to be invented. This is a great day to remember that fact — and to honor the founder of the first such institution in the world, Johannes Thienemann, born 150 years ago today in Thuringia.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Thienemann was living in Rossitten, then a village in East Prussia and now the Russian Rybachy. In October 1900, he was assigned a spot on the agenda at the Leipzig meeting of the German Ornithologists’ Society. His was the final paper in the Sunday morning session; in his remarks, he presented the plan for an ornithological observation station on the Curonian Spit, that long slender bit of sand now connecting Lithuania and Russia.
In mid-December, the Prussian Ministry for Religious, Education, and Religious Affairs issued a decree establishing the Vogelwarte Rossitten, to be run by the DO-G and the observatory’s first director, Johannes Thienemann.
Thienemann had set himself some ambitious goals. The new bird observatory was charged with maintaining thorough migration records, collecting life history information, investigating molt, monitoring crop depredations, undertaking habitat plantings, installing nest boxes, building feeding stations, and establishing a museum and library. Thienemann’s responsibilities would also include the publication of an annual report and occasional papers treating noteworthy observations and experiments; he was no doubt pleased by the assurance in the by-laws that
there are no restrictions placed on any other publication activity on the part of the Director so long as that activity does not interfere with the timely preparation of the official reports.
That must have come as a considerable relief to the new director as he wondered what to do with all his spare time.
Undaunted as only a young German can be, Thienemann set to work immediately, and the observatory was formally opened on January 1, 1901, with funding provided by the Royal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Province of East Prussia, and generous private patrons, among them Secretary of State von Moltke, not otherwise known as a birder.
In 1907, the East Prussian state constructed a building to house the observatory and its staff, which at that time comprised Thienemann and a servant; a local taxidermist, A. Möschler, stuffed and mounted the specimens collected as part of the observatory’s work.
From the earliest days of Rossitten, Thienemann was particularly interested in marking migratory birds in the effort to determine their routes and timing.
If the colors of birds of the same species living in scattered localities were so strikingly different that, for example, eastern German storks had red legs and western German storks yellow, south German ones had green and those from the Russian provinces blue and so on, then we would quickly make good progress in our studies of migration; every migratory bird would carry its own passport, and we would always be informed about the Where From and the Where To of the travelers. Well, nature isn’t that accommodating, but perhaps we can help….
By marking and numbering the birds in a systematic, well-organized way, researchers could “raise the individual above the common run of his conspecifics,” and use the marked birds to discover things about their migration routes, their winter ranges, their ages, the sequence of their plumages:
This would mean the end of hypothesizing and the beginning of factual knowledge.
Concerted banding began at Rossitten in 1903, with tantalizing results coming in almost immediately. Of the more than 900 Hooded Crows captured and ringed in the first seven years, fully 12% were recovered; one bird, marked in October 1903, was shot in May 1909 30 kilometers outside of St. Petersburg.
Black-headed Gulls and White Storks wandered even farther. One of the 40 foreign recoveries among the gulls came from Tunis, 2200 kilometers to the south, while stork bands were returned from Syria, Egypt, Palestine, the Sudan, Rhodesia, and what is now South Africa.
Thienemann died at Rossitten in 1938, nine years after his official entry into what was a very active retirement. The bird observatory remained open until 1944, and was reconstituted after the war as a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; since 1997, its operation in Ribachy has been funded largely by the German Heinz Sielmann Foundation.
Ask almost any English-speaking birder about the history of German ornithology, and the first word out of her mouth will be “Heligoland.” But it all started far to the east, and it’s all thanks to Johannes Thienemann.
Audubon cites the Great Crested Grebe as being “not uncommon during autumn and early spring on all the larger streams of the Western Country….” Does anyone know anything about this?
Well, no, not really — not beyond the general observation that even Homer naps. And this time, the dozing was a doozy.
This handsome plate, number 292 of the 435 that would eventually make up the Birds of America, was engraved in 1835 from a painting about which I know nothing else. It seems likely that Audubon drew the birds during one of his sojourns in England, but we cannot be certain that this plate is not based on specimens he borrowed from one or another American collector.
The passage Nathan mentions is from the Synopsis of the Birds of North America, a much-needed taxonomic concordance to the plates and the Ornithological Biography, published in Edinburgh and London in 1839. Audubon provides a full description of the bird in the Synopsis, but has virtually nothing to say there about its habits in its putative North American range:
In contrast, the complete account in the Ornithological Biography, which appeared in 1835, is lavish in its detail. The technical descriptions, prepared with (or quite possibly by) MacGillivray, are as complete as any offered for any species, and include the measurements of eggs lent to Audubon by William Yarrell.
What startles is not that Audubon should have accounted this exclusively Old World bird an American species — an easy enough mistake in the days when specimens and their labels did not invariably keep the closest of company — but how, in the Ornithological Biography, he compounds his error with what we can read only as a series of scandalously precise fictions. On his own authority, Audubon tells us that “this beautiful species”
returns from its northern places of residence, and passes over the Western Country, about the beginning of September…. I have observed them thus passing in Autumn, for several years in succession, over different parts of the Ohio, at all hours of the day. On such occasions I could readily distinguish the old from the young, the former being in many instances still adorned with their summer head-dress…. on the Ohio’s rising I have observed that they abandon the river and betake themselves to the clear ponds of the interior…. When these birds leave the southern waters about the beginning of April, the old already shew their summer head-dress….
Audubon’s words paint the vivid picture of regular visible migration over the Ohio Valley, “in flocks of seven or eight to fifty or more” — by a species never before and never since reliably reported on the continent. To forestall any suspicion that he was mistaking this species for what was then the only other large podicipedid known from North America, Audubon assures his reader that the Great Crested and the Red-necked Grebes prefer different habitats.
All very odd indeed. But Audubon, it turns out, was not alone in assuming that this large Palearctic grebe also occurred in the New World.
The Great Crested Grebe received its formal binomial from Linnaeus himself, in the authoritative Tenth Edition of the Systema. But the bird, widespread and conspicuous in western Europe, had been known to science for hundreds of years. The descriptions of most of the diving birds given by the ancients can hardly be untangled today, but Severus Sulpicius, the fourth-century historian, is said by Conrad Gesner to have described a grebe with “red feathers like horns on its head.”
Gesner himself, writing in the 1550s, does his best to work out the identity of the larger divers. He appears first to describe the Red-necked Grebe, “known to the Venetians as the sperga,” before turning to a different “genus” found in Switzerland,
quite similar to the others, but crested with plumes sticking up around its crown and upper neck, black at the top and reddish towards the sides, like the hair of a fox.
Not a bad description of a Great Crested Grebe — or of Gesner’s illustration of the species. The Swiss naturalist, like his contemporary Belon, also points out that this, and all grebes, “has its feet at its tail,” an observation behind a great many names for these birds, including the latinizing podiceps, the Dutch arsevoet, and the Savoyard loere, which, Gesner, tells us, is also used as a pejorative for
a fat and lazy person, because of the well-known reluctance of this bird to walk on land.
At the end of the sixteenth century, Aldrovandi copies Gesner’s text into his Ornithologiae — but for some inscrutable reason replaces the perfectly serviceable woodcut there with his own, slightly less successful image of a Great Crested Grebe (Brisson, in a major lapse of taste, calls it “satis accurata”).
First recorded hybrid between a cassowary and a grebe?
We’re on firmer artistic ground with Francis Willughby’s “Crested Diver, or Loon,” a friendly-looking bird with perfectly creditable feet and bill.
Willughby and Ray are at pains to distinguish this bird –which they identify with the one described by Aldrovandi and Gesner — from another, “something less” in size, apparently our Eared / Black-necked Grebe. Unfortunately, the English names they assign each only add to the already enormous potential for confusion. The first they call “The greater crested or copped Doucker,” the second “The greater crested and horned Doucker.” It’s little wonder that even 150 years later Audubon could be confused.
All of these authors agreed on one thing: whatever the bird they were describing and depicting was, its range was Europe. George Edwards was able to cite specimens from Switzerland and England; the Dutch translator of Seligmann’s Recueileven named the bird “de groote Geneefsche Duiker,” the Great Grebe of Lake Geneva.
collapsing slightly the detail given five years earlier by Thomas Pennant in the Arctic Zoology, who had added “every reedy lake” in Iceland and Siberia to the species’ known range.
The first forthright assertion I know of of the Great Crested Grebe as an American bird actually antedates Pennant and Latham. In 1781, Buffon and his busy workshop of collaborators published the eighth volume of the Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, comprising accounts of — among many others — the grebes.
A comparison of the information provided by ornithologists shows that the Great Crested Grebe is found both on the sea and on lakes, in the Mediterranean and on our ocean shores: its species is even found in North America, and we have identified it as the acitli from the Gulf of Mexico of Hernandez.
It is not clear, of course, just what the so steadfastly anti-Linnaean Frenchman means when he speaks of “son espèce,” but Buffon appears to have arrived at the suspicion put forward by Willughby and Ray in their account of the “Water-Hare, or crested Mexican Doucker” described in Hernandez’s Thesaurus.
Between this and the precedent [species, namely, the Great Crested Grebe] there is so little difference, that I scarce doubt but they are the same.
And we can scarce doubt that the Thesaurus does, in fact illustrate a bird with feet set far back on the body and terminating in extravagantly lobed toes. Johannes Faber, the papal physician who provided Hernandez with the description of this bird, was himself not entirely sure what to make of it, as his extremely long, extremely learned, and extremely tiresome discussion shows. He finally concludes that the bird must be “the American Mergus,” a name that in fact tells us nothing, given its vast range of application over the centuries to essentially any bird that spends time in the water and dives. There is no positive indication in Faber’s dissertation that he considers this Mexican diver identical with the Great Crested Grebe of Europe (I suspect that the picture is a semi-fanciful rendering of a Sungrebe); but his use of the vague label “mergus,” coupled with the grebishness of the illustration, made it possible for Ray and Buffon — perhaps independently of each other — to take the next step.
inhabits the north of both continents: rare in the middle states, and only during winter: common in the interior and on the lakes.
John Richardson, in the Fauna boreali-americana, even goes so far in 1831 as to describe a specimen that he says was “killed on the Saskatchewan,” surely — surely — a misidentified Red-necked Grebe.
The extensive account of the Crested Grebe, or “Gaunt,” in Thomas Nuttall’s Manual probably led Audubon more strongly down the path of error than any other source.
Nuttall’s text relies especially closely on Pennant, carefully including Siberia in the species’ Old World range and even borrowing the pretty phrase “reedy lakes” to describes its breeding habitat. His most fateful borrowings, though, are from Richardson, and it is here, in some incautious copying, that we find the immediate inspiration for Audubon’s later misapprehensions.
The Fauna boreali-americana correctly and sensibly informs us that
the Grebes are to be found in all the secluded lakes of the mountainous and woody districts of the fur countries, swimming and diving….
Unfortunately, Richardson and Swainson’s printer set that paragraph, intended as an introduction to the general status of all grebes in the northern reaches of North America, beneath rather than before the header for the species Podiceps cristatus, the Great Crested Grebe, making it seem to the careless reader that the statement applies to that species alone.
A typographic infelicity in the Fauna boreali-americana …
Nuttall’s research assistant was, apparently, one of those careless readers, and this was the result in the Manual:
The Crested Grebe, inhabiting the northern parts of both the old and new continents … [is] found in all the secluded reedy lakes of the mountainous and woody districts, in the remote fur countries around Hudson’s Bay,
a neat compilation of Pennant and Richardson — but not true at all.
… and a substantive error in Nuttall’s Manual.
Audubon did not notice the error — he probably didn’t consult Richardson directly at all — and Nuttall’s statement seems to have been all it took to set Audubon to spinning the wild tale he tells in the Ornithological Biography.
And it took considerable time before that tale was refuted. George Lawrence, in the ornithological report of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, reports no fewer than five specimens of the Great Crested Grebe from North America, two from Shoalwater Bay, in present-day Washington, and three from the “Atlantic coast.” Spencer Baird owned one of those latter skins, said to have been collected by Audubon himself; it’s no surprise, then, that Baird included the species on the list of the birds of North America he published in 1859.
Not until 1881, nearly half a century after the publication of Audubon’s effusions, did a young Robert Ridgway suggest, tentatively, the removal of the species from the North American list. In the appendix to his Nomenclature, Ridgway annotated the name Podiceps cristatus, Lath., with a simple question:
Not North American?
Three years later, Baird and Ridgway provided a definitive answer to that query.
In the Water Birds of 1884, they give the range of the Great Crested Grebe as the “Northern part of the Palaearctic Region; also, New Zealand and Australia. No valid North American record!” The italics and the startling exclamation point are the authors’, and they go on to call
the occurrence of C. cristatus — which for half a century or more has been included in most works on North American ornithology, and generally considered a common bird of this country — …so very doubtful that there is not a single reliable record of its having been taken on this continent.
The American Ornithologists’ Union, graced by late birth, never really had to face the question. The Great Crested Grebe is included in none of the editions of its Check-List, and as far as I know, the nearest this species has been authentically — to use the Couesian term — recorded to North America is Gran Canaria, where a single adult appeared in December 1984.
Not to rule out the possibility, of course. Birds have wings and they fly, as someone long ago pointed out.
But it’s unlikely, at least on the scale of human history, that we will ever see Audubonian flocks of this lovely species flying south through the center of the North American continent. That was a possibility — an imaginary possibility — only thanks to some sloppy printing, some careless reading, and the unbounded fantasy of the greatest American ornithologist of his time.
A book about rocks might not seem the first place to look for ornithological information, but the great lapidary encyclopedia of the Italian physician Camillo Leonardi is full of bits and pieces of arcane bird lore.
Composed right around the year 1500, Leonardi’s book finally made its way into English translation two and a half centuries later; that text tells us that the stone called
Quirus is a juggling Stone, found in the Nest of the Hoopoop.
It’s clear enough what a “hoopoop” might be. But what is a “juggling stone”?
Fortunately, Leonardi wrote in a language more readily comprehensible than that of his eighteenth-century translator.
The quirinus, he says, or quirus,
is a tricky stone — praestigiosus — that has been found in the nest of the Hoopoe.
And sure enough, our friends at the OED confirm that the English adjective “juggling” was in use in the mid-eighteenth century to mean “cheating, deceptive, tricky.” And what is so underhanded about the quirinus?
Its quality is that if anyone places it on the breast of a sleeping person, it will force him or her to confess his misdeeds.
Kunstmann in his well-known hoopoe book records a similar belief, attested in the late fifteenth century by the German poet Hans Vintler; but Vintler attributes the power to the poor bird’s heart:
Some superstitious people, Vintler tells us,
place the heart of a Hoopoe onto sleeping people so that it will reveal hidden things to them.
In other sources, the hoopoe’s innards have exactly the opposite virtus. According to the fourteenth-century natural historian Konrad von Megenberg, the bird’s heart actually helps witches and secret evildoers keep their wicked deeds secret.
