One of the earliest nature periodicals published expressly for use in the schools, Birds: Illustrated by Color Photography had a two-year run at the end of the nineteenth century. The promised photographs are indeed colorful — but they are all of stuffed birds, most of them in the collections of friends of the magazine’s Chicago publisher, W.E. Watt.
Each of the images is accompanied by two pages of text, one obviously addressed to the young reader:
What do you think of this bird with his round, puffy head? You of course know it is an Owl. I want you to know him as the Snowy Owl.
The other text, more densely printed and in smaller type, is intended for the teacher, and usually comprises a plumage description, a note about distribution, an account of the bird’s food habits, and, more interestingly, the odd (and always unattributed, alas) anecdote:
The large round eyes of this owl are very beautiful. Even by daylight they are remarkable for their gem-like sheen, but in the evening they are even more attractive, glowing like balls of living fire. From sheer fatigue these birds often seek a temporary resting place on passing ships. A solitary owl, after a long journey, settled on the rigging of a ship one night. A sailor who was ordered aloft, terrified by the two glowing eyes that suddenly opened upon his own, descended hurriedly to the deck, declaring to the crew that he had seen “Davy Jones a-sitting up there on the main yard.”
Watt’s apparent source for this story (and for much of his Snowy Owl text in general) paraliptically explains the allusion:
It is perhaps unnecessary to state that “Davy Jones” is the sailors’ name for the evil spirit.
I wonder how many teachers repeated the story to their young charges: nightmare stuff, it seems to me.
It’s almost Thanksgiving, and time once again to trot out the old and long discredited chestnut about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey. That one’s been debunked enough by now, I think. But what about the other bird in the Franklin story, the one that actually became our national feathered symbol?
Franklinian irony aside, the Bald Eagle was a really good choice: big, powerful, “majestic.” And in the eighteenth century, the species was sufficiently widespread and sufficiently abundant that you could often as not just go outside, look up, and be reminded that you were a citizen (well, so long as you were white and male and owned property) of a country that aspired to some of those same slightly dubious qualities.
Admittedly, that name is a little awkward. But as generations of gullible American birders have been told (thanks, National Geographic!),
Hm. Hm hm hm. Shall we try to think this one through?
First, there is no such Old English word as “balde.” Second, the Middle English “balled” means not “white” but “marked with white on the forehead,” an excellent fit for, say the Eurasian Coot, but a bit strange for our eagle.
But why are we getting bogged down in philologicalities anyway? I find it very hard to imagine that the seventeenth-century ornithologists and explorers who coined the name “Bald Eagle” — a New World species unknown, of course, during the Old English and Middle English periods — would have sought out an English epithet that was already then obscure, oblique, and obsolete.
What I can or can’t imagine, of course, doesn’t matter nearly so much as what the early natural historians themselves had to say about the name. And not one of them — not one — makes so much as an allusion to any “Old English” word meaning white.
One of the earliest accounts of the birdlife of the English colonies in North America is that in a letter from the Virginia planter John Clayton to the Royal Society, published in 1693 in the Philosophical Transactions. Clayton was first and foremost a botanist, but he devotes nearly ten printed pages to the birds of Virginia, among them
the Bald Eagle … the Body and part of the Neck being of a dark brown, the upper part of the Neck and Head is covered with a white sort of Down, whereby it looks very bald, whence it is so named.
Clayton clearly means “naked,” not “white.” Twenty years later, Mark Catesby also uses the word “bald” in that same normal, modern sense:
This bird is called the Bald Eagle, both in Virginia and Carolina, tho’ his head is as much feather’d as the other parts of his body.
The epithet “bald,” applied to this species, whose head is thickly covered with feathers, is … improper and absurd … and seems to have been occasioned by the white appearance of the head, when contrasted with the dark color of the rest of the plumage.
Wilson, White-headed Eagle
Audubon, perhaps mindful of Wilson’s scorn for the name, avoids it entirely in the Ornithological Biography, giving the bird instead the more literal moniker “white-headed” and remarking
that the name by which this bird is universally known in America is that of Bald Eagle, an erroneous denomination, as its head is as densely feathered as that of any other species, although its whiteness may have suggested the idea of its being bare.
We could yield to the temptation of internet abundance and go on piling up examples, but the point is clear by now.
None of the earliest and none of the most important ornithologists in the first two centuries following the English settlement of North America understood “bald” in the eagle’s name to mean anything other than “naked,” “bare,” “hairless.” None so much as hints at a (non-existent) Old English or an (obsolete) Middle English word meaning “white-blazed,” which would be a poor description of the bird’s plumage in any case.
This is another instance of a “solution” being cobbled together well after the fact — to a problem that never existed.
The harder thing to think about is who is responsible for that convoluted and illogical tale and how it became the standard explanation for what is likely, at its root, a gentle joke (you can always tell it’s a joke if Wilson gets exercised about it).
Choate is surely largely to blame for the recent popularity of the story, but alas, he simply reports it as if it were true, without attribution. So here’s the challenge: Find the earliest attestation of the story, and help me trace this bit of inane but influential folklore to its source.
Or am I the only one who finds it hard to keep all those sapphires and brilliants and emeralds and rubies and topazes straight?
There are so many hummingbird species, and their classification has been revised so many times over the past two centuries, that the vernacular names have inevitably become a hodgepodge of historical relics and well-meaning neologisms, often enough reflecting neither relationship nor similarity.
In 1854, Ludwig Reichenbach, director of the royal zoo in Dresden, set out to clear the decks and introduce some of that good deutsche Ordnung into trochilid nomenclature.
The hummingbirds, like many another group of beautiful and popular creatures, have been worked on more in a spirit of pleasurable dilettantism than according to the stricter requirements of scholarship.
Firmly grounded in the powerful traditions of German Idealism and organicist aesthetics, Reichenbach lays out his taxonomic principles with great clarity:
It is necessary in a scientific work that we have always before our eyes the clear need to trace the development of the Type through its degrees of intensification, that we correctly evaluate the individual components in their significance to the whole, and that we be able to demonstrate the culmination of the Type as well as its deflection to heterogeneity.
Reichenbach goes on to observe that
Heaven and earth and all sciences and arts, even music in its chords and systems of tuning, are all four-parted, just as are all living things… and this quaternary system of divisions, whose accord echoes through all of Nature, … can be called a system that rests stable in itself.
All that theoretical hoohaw behind him, Reichenbach goes on to establish (you guessed it) four large categories –families, I suppose, though he doesn’t use that word — of hummingbirds: Nymphs, Fairies, Sylphs, and Gnomes.
Each of those four large groups is further subdivided into four smaller categories — subfamilies — one of which is “typical” and the other three of which are “deflected into heterogeneity” by their similarity to one of the other families.
Thus, for example, there are “nymph-nymphs,” but there are also “fairy-nymphs,” “sylph-nymphs,” and “gnome-nymphs.”
Each of those subfamilies in turn comprises four genera, each of which in turn can be broken into four subgenera (again, only loosely translating Reichenbach’s categories into modern taxonomic terms). All of the known species of hummingbirds are then fitted into this scheme.
Our White-chested Emerald, for example, one of the most abundant and familiar trochilids of Trinidad and Tobago, would be a member of the family Fayae, the Fairies, which Reichenbach defines as “creeper-like” hummingbirds without head ornaments and with arched bills.
That family “culminates” in the subfamily Ochrurae, the Fairy-Fairies, but the emerald and its close relatives apparently tend to the “heterogeneous,” making them members of the subfamily Hylocharinae, the Nymph-Fairies, the third genus of which is Amazilia.
Richenbach’s “perfect” hummingbird, the culmination of the Type, has to be a Sylph, a member of the “genuine or typical Trochilideae: adorned with helmet, crest, ear-tufts, or extensive brilliant iridescence.” Naturally (or artificially, one might say), there are sylphs and then there are sylphs, but the ultimate hummer should be a Sylph-Sylph, of the subfamily Trochilinae. The first genus listed there is Trochilus — and the first species Reichenbach cites is Trochilus Colubris Linn. 1766.
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.
