Information – Page 70 – Birding New Jersey

September 5, 2013September 26, 2016

Different Bird, Different Alice

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.

This lusciously beautiful Marañón endemic was first met with by the German collector Oscar Theodor Baron, who in March 1894 found 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

Alice Robinson (fl. 1895) wife of US collector and explorer Col. W. Robinson.

Although that suits chronologically, there’s a problem.

Not only have I been unable to retrace Jobling’s path to that conclusion, but the one hummingbird we know absolutely to have been named for that particular Alice goes unmentioned in the Dictionary, suggesting some confusion. And nowhere have I found any evidence that Salvin knew either of the Robinsons.

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’s Superciliated Wren, described by Hellmayr, and the Baron’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.

In August 1923, on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial tablet to the men, Science described their relationship:

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.

His widow: Dame Alice Godman.

According to the dedication page of the Biologia, Dame Alice took “the deepest interest” and offered “much assistance and sympathy in the completion of this work.” I know nothing of her ornithological pursuits, but she had considerable enthusiasm for botany and gardening, providing a subvention for the publication of Elwes’s Monograph of the Genus Lilium and lending her name to several plant species, some of which can still be seen on the grounds of the former Godman estate. She and her husband traveled very widely, in the New World and the Old, even joining a paleontological expedition to Africa.

She was also a skilled needleworker,

a founder of the British Girl Guides, and Vice-President of the Horsham Division of the British Red Cross during the First World War.

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?

September 2, 2013April 13, 2014

A Precious Package

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.

And the pigeon? Her name was Martha.

Passenger Pigeon, Pauline de Courcelles Knip

September 1, 2013August 25, 2018

Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson

Anna’s Hummingbird

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.”

A few years later, Ernst Hartert reclassified Robinson’s discovery as just a subspecies of the Copper-rumped Hummingbird, and Alice’s Hummingbird and Alice Robinson alike slipped from birders’ memories.

flickr photo: John van Noate

Anita Alice Mathilde Phinney Henderson (1860-1918) was thirty years old when she married Wirt Robinson; it was her second marriage. A woman of background and breeding — the New York Times regularly reported on her activities — she could have stayed at home while her husband, soldier, “ardent sportsman, fisherman, and naturalist,” traveled the Americas in search of birds.

She didn’t.

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.

August 28, 2013August 21, 2014

Point Breeze

After yesterday afternoon’s cold front, we thought we had it made this morning. The woods along the Delaware River would, we thought, be swarming with warblers and vireos and flycatchers and tanagers. All we needed to do, we thought, was get there.

“There” in this case is a very special place in the history of American ornithology.

Point Breeze was the country estate of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of the first Napoleon and erstwhile king of Naples and of Spain. At the mouth of Crosswicks Creek in Bordentown, New Jersey, Point Breeze was also the home for some five years of Charles Lucian Bonaparte and his cousin-wife, Zénaïde, and it was here on the banks of the Delaware that the Prince of Musignano and Canino conducted much of the work that would lead Coues to call the 1820s “the Bonapartian Period” in American ornithology.

Bonaparte had better luck with the birds than we did. But still we enjoyed treading the same paths trod almost two hundred years ago by the man Coues styled “the princely person.”

Back in Bonaparte days, the marsh at the bottom of the hill was a lake, formed by damming Thornton Creek. The view down Crosswicks Creek to the Delaware is still impressive, and this would be a great place to simply set up and wait on a day when migrants really did decide to show up.

The house Joseph built above the lake for his daughter and son-in-law is long gone, replaced by tall beeches and tulip trees.

The tangled banks held chipping Northern Cardinals and mewling Gray Catbirds; on a warbler day, the edges could be lively.

The most evocative spot we discovered was this crumbling stretch of carriage road.

The only intact structure from Bonaparte’s day is the old Garden House, a modest building now overlooking lawns and a sparse orchard but once guarding the entrance to Joseph Bonaparte’s formal gardens.

This little house, too, has its place in ornithological history. You can read about that, and more about Charles Bonaparte and American ornithology, tomorrow at the newly remodeled ABA Blog. See you over there!

Thanks to Alison and to Hidden New Jersey‘s Sue and Ivan for the excellent birding company, and to the Divine Word Mission in Bordentown for allowing us access to their grounds.

August 8, 2013May 31, 2023

Murres’ Eggs and Bullocks’ Blood

Click to read Joe Metzler's essay on eggers in the Farallones. — *Click to read Joe Metzler’s essay on eggers in California’s Farallones*.

Tens of thousands of cars, back and forth, every day, all night long, without cease: the Garden State Parkway bridge over Great Egg Harbor is as busy as it is dramatic. Whoosh. Whoosh. On to Cape May. On to Atlantic City. On to Philadelphia and New York.

Of the human hordes crossing the bridge, only a vanishingly few look out at the vastness of the salt marsh to ask where this place got its name; I even know birders who have never thought about it, too absorbed in the Great Black-backed Gulls and the occasional Peregrine Falcon perched atop the light poles whizzing past at 65 mph.

A moment’s consideration, or a quick glance at google, answers the question: this is one of the many sites worldwide whose wild birds — ducks, gulls, terns, shorebirds — once supplied eggs to nearby urban markets, often in astonishing numbers.

The locus classicus for such activities is Audubon’s description of the eggers of Labrador:

At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause…. But nothing of this sort occurs to the Egger, who gathers and gathers, until he has swept the rock bare. The dollars alone chink in his sordid mind…. With a bark nearly half filled with fresh eggs they proceed….

The year before, Audubon’s party had encountered a similar scene two thousand miles to the south, beneath the glare of a Dry Tortugas sky:

At Bird Key we found a party of Spanish Eggers from Havannah. They had already laid in a cargo of about eight tons of the eggs of [the Sooty] Tern and the Noddy. On asking them how many they supposed they had, they answered that they never counted them, even while selling them, but disposed of them at seventy-five cents per gallon; and that one turn to market sometimes produced upwards of two hundred dollars….

A hundred twenty years later, James Fisher did the math for us, determining that eight tons was about 250,000 tern eggs.

I’d always assumed that all those eggs were for eating. But then I read this, in the prose notes to James Jennings’s Ornithologia:

The Torda, Razor-bill, Auk, Common-Auk, or Murre …. lays one very large egg, size of a turkey’s of a dirty white colour, blotched with brown and dusky, on the projecting shelves of the highest rocks…. The eggs of this bird, and of the foolish guillemot, are an article of trade in several of the Scottish isles; they are used for refining sugar.

Though I wouldn’t call Jennings the most reliable source on the shelf, he turns out to be right. David A. Wells, in his Principles and Applications of Chemistry, informed a no doubt eager public that crude sugar is refined

by dissolving the brown sugars in water, adding albumen (whites of eggs, or bullocks’ blood), and sometimes a little lime-water, and heating the whole to the boiling point. The albumen, under the influence of heat, coagulates, and forms a kind of network of fibers, which inclose and separate from the liquid all the mechanically suspended impurities.

I assume that the process today does without auks’ eggs and cow blood, presumably substituting manufactured chemicals for those earthy ingredients.