The answer, as often as not, is a rail. And here in northeastern North America, it’s often the Sora, that pudgy yellow-billed denizen of muddy cattail marshes.
Even with so many of its breeding sites gone — especially in the southern portion of the species’ range — this remains a fairly common bird. But numbers are nothing like they once were.
New birders learn early on, sometimes to their startlement, that birds are not distributed generally across the landscape. There’s this thing called habitat, you see, and as a well-known birder once wrote,
You would never expect to see a Meadowlark in the woods, although the Flicker might leave its grove of trees to dig up an ant’s nest at the edge of a field.
With a little experience behind us, most of us most of the time can remember that and many other of the often subtle relationships between birds and their environments. At least, that is, in the breeding season. We are — by which I suppose I mean “I am” — less keenly aware of the habitat preferences of the birds we see in migration and winter. And that’s a shame, since even in fall, when many southbound birds are more catholic in their choice of stopovers, a careful eye for certain landscape features can still increase your chances of running into some of the sought-after migrants.
Looking for migrating Connecticut Warblers? Check open field edges with dense stands of goldenrod and ragweed.
Wintering Sagebrush Sparrows? Look for patches of inkweed among widely scattered mesquites.
On September 12, 1914, at West Grove, Chester Co., Pa., … I observed three Cape May Warblers … feeding upon ripe grapes…. for several days a few of them might be seen at almost any time in the tree over which the grapevine grew.
Isaac Roberts‘s observation might seem just an incidental curiosity. But exactly a year earlier, Frank Burns had found that species to be “a destructive grape juice consumer at Berwyn, Pennsylvania,” where two trees in his yard had been taken over by “fugitive” grape vines:
on September 12, 1913, I took a specimen … and on the 14th and 15th observed twenty and thirty adult and immature female Cape Mays…. six shots failed to drive the survivors from the tree…. on the 20th, I saw an individual alight on a bunch of Niagara grapes, deliberately puncture the skin and eat greedily; this and several other specimens were taken with dripping bills.
Cape Mays gorged themselves on Burns’s grapes until October 7, 1913, laying on important energy reserves for the rest of their flight south:
Specimens secured early … were rather lean, but after some days of feeding became fat, inactive and even sluggish; an adult female shot in the act of eating from a grape … was positively enveloped in fat, and the skin became so saturated with oil I had the greatest difficulty in saving it.
The following year, Burns found Cape May Warblers in his grapevines beginning September 6; within ten days, his entire grape crop, red, purple, and white, was “utterly destroyed.” The last bird was seen six weeks later, on October 20.
Like Roberts, Burns’s neighbors suffered the same depredations:
complaints of the ‘little striped yellow bird’ were many, and so far as I am able to learn, all unbagged grapes were ruined; the loss must have been many tons worth several hundred dollars.
A century later, I’ll be paying special attention to grapevines these next few weeks.
It’s mildly old-fashioned now, I think, but “Alice” was all the rage in the nineteenth century, a naming fad inspired in Britain, Germany, and the US by Alice Mary Maud, daughter of a British empress and mother of a Russian one. (I am married to one of her more recent namesakes, born of British and Hessian parents almost a hundred years after the Grand Duchess’s death.)
The popularity of the name coincided with a great boom in descriptive natural history, and today there are dozens, no, hundreds, of plants and animals named for one Alice or another. There’s the Alice sundew, the Alice wood-boring beetle, the Alice cream-spotted frog, and on and on. There are even a few birds.
A quick look at the Handbook of Birds of the World turns up something like twenty species named for an Alice, among them –unsurprisingly — four hummingbirds. One of them is the threatened Purple-backed Sunbeam, Aglaeactis aliciae.
Purple-backed Sunbeam, J.G. Keulemans
This lusciously beautiful Marañón endemic was first met with by the German collector Oscar Theodor Baron, who in March 1894found several of the birds in Succha, Peru, “above an elevation of 10,000 feet … feeding from parasitic flowers which abound on alder and other trees.” Before returning to Europe himself, Baron divided the large collection he made in Peru into two lots, “containing many novelties” besides this hummingbird, and shipped one set of specimens to Walter Rothschild, the other, jointly, to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, then some 35 years in to their collaboration on the vast Biologia centrali-americana.
When Salvin published the formal description of Baron’s new hummingbird in early 1896, he named it Aglaeactis aliciae. Alice’s Sunbeam, a pretty name. But he didn’t bother telling us who Alice was
James Jobling’s unbeatable Dictionary, our first and usually last resort in such questions, identifies the mysterious eponym as
So it’s back to the drawing board, which in this particular case is already covered by a messy sketch of a very large haystack and a very slender needle.
Baron, the collector of the first specimens of the sunbeam, remains a little known figure even in lepidoptery, his apparent specialization. It would be almost as nice for us as for him if he was happily married to a lovely Alice, but I can discover no mention of any matrimonial circumstance anywhere in any of the sparse documents available from his life. Arguments ex negativo are the most dangerous kind, but there is further, if equally circumstantial, support for the belief that this well-traveled naturalist was without an help meet to him. See what you think of this.
In 1893, Salvin had described another hummingbird taken by Baron as Metallura baroni, the Violet-throated Metaltail. Had there been a wife in the picture, I suspect that Salvin, gallant Victorian gentleman that he was, would have honored her rather than her husband, if by nothing more then at least naming the bird baronae.
That’s a slim straw to grasp at, but there’s more. Ernst Hartert, Rothschild’s curator at Tring, named two hummingbird species for Baron, a Eutoxeres sicklebill in 1894 and a Phaethornis hermit three years later. Both bear the epithet baroni, a potentially inexcusable slight — and one that would certainly have been avoided by Claudia Hartert, co-author with her husband of the description of Eutoxeres baroni.
The Baron’sSuperciliated Wren, described by Hellmayr,and theBaron’s Spinetail and Yellow-breasted Brush-Finch, both named by Salvin, all commemorate a masculine eponym, too. Either Mrs. Baron did not exist, or she had somehow made herself persona non grata with much of the ornithological establishment of her time.
What about Osbert Salvin? We know that he was married, but we also know that his wife’s name was Caroline Octavia Maitland, and that they had one daughter, Viola. No jesuitical squirming and wriggling required here: our Alice was clearly not a member of Salvin’s immediate family.
But we’re not out of possibilities yet.
Recall that though Salvin was the author of the formal description of Baron’s new sunbeam, the specimens were not his alone. In the Novitates Zoologicae for February 1895, Salvin wrote that
during the past summer Mr. Baron, who is now traveling in Peru, sent to Mr. Godman and myself his first collection of birds made during the first half of the year 1894 in Northern Peru.
Godman and Salvin were the powerhouse natural history team of the second half of the nineteenth century.
these two distinguished men of science were intimately associated in research and the results of their labors form an important part of the treasures of the Natural History Museum. The friendship between them dated from the fifties of the [nineteenth] century, when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge, and lasted until the death in 1898 of Salvin, who was survived twenty-one years by Godman, the latter dying in 1919, in his eighty-sixth year. In 1876 [probably much earlier] the two friends conceived the idea of the monumental work entitled Biologia central-americana, which has been described as without doubt the greatest work of the kind ever planned and carried out by private individuals.
In 1885, Godman and Salvin decided to donate the specimens and library gathered in the course of their work on the Biologia, which they owned in common,to the British Museum; Science reports that the combined collection comprised more than 520,000 — that’s more than half a million — bird skins.
The memorial to the two ornithologists had been paid for by subscription. So great was the respect for their work that more contributions had been received than needed:
Lord Rothschild, in presenting the tablet on behalf of the subscribers, explained that the committee had decided that any subscriptions left over after the memorial had been paid for should be devoted to a collecting fellowship…. Such names, such acts, such memories and such lives should not be forgotten by those who looked at the specimens and collections the museum contained.
The Godman family agreed:
a further sum of £5,000 [was donated] to the Godman Exploration Fund
by his two daughters, Edith and Eva, and by his widow.
I think it more than likely that Salvin named the sunbeam for this Alice, his friend and colleague’s wife, who had borne their first child in summer 1895 (and would have the second at the end of 1896). Anyone with access to the correspondence between Salvin and Godman should be able to prove that supposition with ease. Meanwhile, I think she deserves her hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Don’t you?
Ninety-nine years ago today, a package arrived at the Smithsonian, dispatched by express train from Cincinnati.
“Stone,” of course, is Witmer Stone, and the writer Charles Wallace Richmond, Associate Curator of Birds at the National Museum. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, dismissed from the Museum over the Audubon affair 17 years earlier, is the great osteologist and pioneering photographer of birds and other untamed organisms. William Palmer was a second-generation staff taxidermist at the Smithsonian.
It’s no great revelation to point out that there are lots of birds named for women.
There are also lots of birds named for men.
Rivoli’s Hummingbird (remember?)
That seems only fair — but in fact there are some significant asymmetries in the ways that women and men have been assigned the role of eponym. The men thus honored have often collected or described or painted or identified the bird in whose name they are commemorated. It’s different for women: in the great majority of cases, the giving of their name to a bird is nothing more than a gallant gesture, a sentimental gift to someone who is thereby summed up as the wife or the daughter or the mother of an ornithologist or an artist.
To make matters worse, the men who named the birds almost invariably used only the first names of the women they meant to honor, infantilizing them and making it that much more difficult for us looking back to be sure in any given case that we’ve found the right Grace or Virginia or Anna.
Some of the brightest examples of such difficulties are provided by the names of hummingbirds. All through the nineteenth century, and into our own day, too, those feathered jewels have been more closely associated with the feminine than any other birds, a gendering that is immediately obvious just by a look at their nomenclatural history: there are dozens upon dozens of hummingbirds named for women, giving the family Trochilidae a higher percentage of female eponyms than any other.
Many of those women, too, are identifiable — if at all — only by their relationship to the namer. But every once in a while we run across one whose individuality has survived.
In 1895, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian received a lot of 200 bird skins collected on Venezuela’s Isla Margarita. Among the birds were eight specimens of an Amazilia hummingbird apparently unknown to science. The collector, Wirt Robinson, later recounted the circumstances of his discovery: on July 4, 1895, such birds
became more abundant until when I had reached the perpetual clouds that hung about the peak and entered an atmosphere of mist, they were seen in all directions. The type specimen, a finely plumaged male, I shot from a mango tree as I sat in its shade drinking the milk of a cocoanut. It [the bird, I assume, and not the “cocoanut”] fell within a few feet of me and was at once seized by a wandering chicken which made off at full speed followed by me in hot pursuit. Fortunately there were no thorns to impede me, and although I broke down a banana plant in my headlong chase, I pressed the chicken so closely that it finally dropped my prize.
At the Smithsonian, Charles W. Richmond wrote the formal description of the new species, which he named Amazilia aliciae, “in honor of Mrs. Robinson.”
In 1892, Robinson and her husband (in the old days, we’d have written “Alice”) set out on a voyage to South America. The trip was (if we are to believe Wirt) her idea: tired one evening of listening to him complain about how dull the birding was around West Point, she responded simply, “Well, why don’t we go to the tropics sometime?” Her brother-in-law, Cabell Robinson, joined the party, and on June 11, the trio embarked for Colombia.
Only the men were seasick. Once ashore, though, everyone shared in all the discomforts of travel on the frontier: in one ironically named inn, the Consuelo, the Robinsons
were given a little room in which were two wooden frames with cowhides stretched over them for beds. These we found to be swarming with fleas, bedbugs, and a kind of flying roach an inch and a half long, so we spent a wakeful night, tormented by bites.
In those days before cipro, Cabell and Wirt were more or less continuously ill, but Alice, other than feeling faint and hungry after a sleepless, vermin-plagued night, seems to have been more robust — until, in mid-July, she contracted malaria. Quinine helped, as no doubt did the forced relaxation of the three days’ return voyage to Curaçao, and by the time the ship arrived there, she was well enough to join her husband on a sightseeing drive before reboarding for the homeward cruise.
At sundown on August 4, 1892, the Robinsons passed Barnegat Light, and their “flying trip” to South America ended in New York the next morning. Alice Robinson seems to have recovered from her fever, and it was back to society-page life as normal: dinner parties in Newport, visits to family, golf outings in Virginia.
I don’t know whether that normality included any more ornithological expeditions with her husband, and neither do I know how she died at so very young an age. Alice Robinson was not mentioned in her husband’s NYT obituary, most likely because he had remarried, and doesn’t appear to have merited one of her own. Only a little bird even reminds us that she lived.
Note that I have been able to find no evidence supporting Jobling’s identification of Alice Robinson as the eponym of another hummingbird, Aglaeactis aliciae. Stay tuned for more about that one.
![2009 Top One Hundred Countdown # 1: Cabinet Card---Mrs. Wirt Robinson (Anita Alice Mathilde (Phinney) Robinson) [Brought Forward For Pure Greatness]](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3435/3980086523_29d436d19a_z.jpg)
