Information – Page 70 – Birding New Jersey

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.

August 7, 2013August 25, 2020

The Ambiguous Sparrow

It’s that time of year again.

The inquiries used to come by telephone, but now they pour in by e-mail, twitter, and facebook: What’s this sparrow in my yard?

And why is it begging from the Song Sparrow / Northern Cardinal / Yellow Warbler … ?

Brown-headed Cowbirds are among my very favorites, with a fascinating breeding strategy evolved over the millennia in parallel with their foster species. Because they stay with the adoptive parents for some time after hatching, the juveniles can be confusing to their human watchers. With a couple of centuries’ experience behind us — collectively, I mean — we know to look for the mid-length blackish tail, the very stout dark tarsus and toes, and the square head with its large eye and short, conical bill.

It wasn’t always so easy, though, and inevitably, the young Brown-headed Cowbird was once described as a new species, the Ambiguous Sparrow, by none other than Thomas Nuttall himself:

Of this very distinct, and plain, mouse-colored Sparrow, I, at present [1832] know scarcely any thing, excepting that it was shot in this vicinity (Cambridge [Massachusetts]) in the early part of the summer of 1830. The specimen is in fresh plumage; and in its general color, both above and below, with the very unusual length and pointedness of the wings, and the distinct graduation of the feathers, it might, without looking at the bill, be at once taken almost for the common Pewee [= Eastern Phoebe, similarly plain grayish].

In 1839, Peabody still listed the Ambiguous Sparrow among the birds of Massachusetts; at that point, there was still only a single specimen known, and Peabody cites approvingly Audubon’s suggestion that the bird might in fact be the “winter plumage” of the White-crowned Sparrow.

Audubon soon bethought himself and rejected what Coues, always eager to call a spade a shovel, dismissed as his “hasty surmise.”

In describing his plate of the Brown-headed Cowbird, the American Woodsman wrote

The young bird from which I made the present figure [3] was sent to me by my friend THOMAS NUTTALL, Esq., through Dr. TRUDEAU. It is the same as that described by the former gentleman under the name of “Ambiguous Sparrow, Fringilla ambigua,” at p. 485 of his Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada. On inspecting it, however, I at once felt convinced that it was nothing else than a young Cow-pen-bird, scarcely fledged, it having been found “in the early part of the summer of 1830.” With the view, therefore, of preventing further mistakes I thought it well to figure it.

Audubon’s hopes “of preventing further mistakes” have gone unfulfilled, and this will continue to be one of the most frequently misidentified birds in North America; but at least now we know that we’re in good company when we find ourselves feeling a little unsure about that ambiguous “sparrow” in the backyard.

August 2, 2013June 23, 2018

The Fifty-fourth Supplement to the AOU Check-list

Is anybody disappointed?

The AOU Committee on Classification and Nomenclature has declined to recognize the big maxima Canada Geese of the prairies and the corporate parks as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize Hanson’s proposed Branta lawrensis as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize the dark little minima Cackling Geese as a separate species, and it has declined to recognize the ring-necked little leucopareia Cackling Geese as a separate species.

From the birder’s perspective, I’m betting that most of you, just like me, are relieved.

There wasn’t ever really any chance: In placing those still startling proposals before the Committee pro forma, Richard C. Banks quite sensibly “urge[d] a vote of NO.” So now we can all breathe a big sigh of relief and get back to studying up on Taverner’s Cackling Goose and Lesser Canada Goose in anticipation of the winter to come.

Before we do that, though, there is a lot of exciting news in the Committee’s Fifty-fourth Supplement, which has just appeared in the latest issue of the Auk. It’s not the easiest reading, but take a little time and work your way through it; if you’re a lister, your numbers may jump, and if, like the rest of us, you’re just interested in the way that our understanding of birds and their relationships evolves, you’ll find lots of fascinating details to ponder.

The most eye-catching changes, of course, are the additions to the United States and Canada list — no less than seven of ’em this time around.

Two parrots have been added to the AOU list by introduction, the lovely little Rosy-faced Lovebird and the Nanday Parakeet. Largely following the ABA Checklist, the Committee considers the lovebirds of Phoenix established, as anyone who has ever visited Gilbert Water Ranch will agree; the parakeet is listed thanks to established populations in Florida, but the Committee finds the birds in California — which I think is the only place I’ve seen the species — not yet established. The lines are lighting up over at the ABA facebook page, I’m sure.

A startling Double-toothed Kite photographed in Texas in spring 2011 extends that lovely little raptor’s range into the US.

The Providence Petrel, once known as Solander’s Petrel, has been added on the strength of birds photographed off the Aleutians two falls ago; the new species account also notes possible individuals recorded from Washington and British Columbia in Septembers past.

Fea’s Petrel, a difficult gadfly from the Cape Verdes, has long been a hoped-for, even nearly expected, sight on North Carolina pelagic trips; it now takes its place on the list as a visitant from Nova Scotia to Florida, with a hurricane-borne bird having made it to the Virginia mainland. The smart money is on a further split from this species to come, the Desertas Petrel.

Two of this year’s newcomers come newly from Alaska: a Common Moorhen from Shemya in fall of 2010 (not, please, to be confused with the bird we once again are calling the Common Gallinule), and an equally amazing Asian Rosy-Finch from Adak. As the Committee did not lump the others as proposed, North America now has four species of Leucosticte on its list.

One of the most anxiously anticipated splits was that of the old Sage Sparrows. With the publication of the Supplement, we now, once again, have two species, the Sagebrush Sparrow Artemisiospiza nevadensis and the Bell’s Sparrow A. belli. The Committee notes that canescens, the subspecies of Bell’s Sparrow visually most similar to the Sagebrush Sparrow, may represent a third species; this is the population that moves in winter into western Arizona, where sage sparrow identification just got a lot more interesting.

Not a species-level split, but probably more significant in what it tells us about the higher-level relationships of North American birds, results in the elevation to generic status of Coues’s Psiloscops (named for the bird’s naked toes) for the Flammulated Owl; that tiny baritone ghost of the pines had most recently shared the genus Otus with the scops owls.

The other splits announced here will be a bit more abstract to most of us North American birders. “Our” Little Shearwater, accidental off New England and the Maritimes, is now recognized as a separate species, the Barolo Shearwater. The House Wren of much of continental America no longer includes Troglodytes cobbi, which means that those lucky enough to have birded the Falkland Islands get a new bird.

In the American tropics, the Zeledon’s Antbird is split from the Immaculate Antbird, and the genus Schiffornis gets more species-rich with the splits of the Northern Schiffornis and the Russet-winged Schiffornis from South America’s Brown-winged Schiffornis. The Rufous-rumped Antwren, until now in the genus Terenura, is given a new genus Euchrepomis.

And as if the manakins weren’t hard enough to keep track of already, the venerable genus Pipra is determined to consist of “multiple independent lineages,” resulting in a split into Dixiphia (White-crowned Manakin) and Ceratopipra (Golden-headed and Red-capped Manakins). The linear sequence of the Check-list’s eleven manakin species is also updated.

Naturally, there are also lumps. Here in the north, the Surfbird, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, the Broad-billed Sandpiper, the Buff-breasted Sandpiper, and the Ruff all lose the distinction of their monotypic genera and join the other brown sandpipers in the genus Calidris; the sequence of species in that newly enlarged genus is also changed, as are the relative positions of the families in the entire order Charadriiformes. I’ll miss some of those old sandpiper names, but not as much, I suspect, as will the editorial staff of a certain German periodical.

Farther south, the Green-crowned Woodnymph fannyi, etc., is now treated as a subspecies group of the Crowned Woodnymph. The Green Manakin, formerly known as Chloropipo, is now merged into the genus Xenopipo.

The largest of the wholesale lumps is the dissolution of the subfamily Drepanidinae; the Hawaiian honeycreepers now occupy a position in the subfamily Carduelinae immediately after the Eurasian Bullfinch and before the “purple” finches — and those last, by the way, are now placed in the sequence House, Purple, and Cassin’s Finch. It can be confusing when you’re a bird towards the end of the Check-list.

Most of the remaining changes effected in this Supplement are housekeeping matters of nomenclatural propriety and orthography. Priority forces the alteration of the species name of the Common Bush-Tanager to flavopectus. The former genus of the Bare-legged Owl is replaced for similar reasons by the clunky Margarobyas; the subgenus of the American Woodcock is changed back to Nuttall’s Microptera.

Fans of the silky-flycatchers will have to relearn the spelling of that family’s scientific name; “corrected” once to Ptilogonatidae, it has now been corrected back to Ptiliogonatidae, adding yet another small challenge for those us who can’t spell “Phainopepla” anyway.

The bibliographic side of the Check-list may seem tedious to some readers, but it’s nice to see some historical justice done to scientists whose contributions have been underappreciated over the years. Emmanuel Le Maout gets full credit now for the Black Vulture‘s genus name Coragyps, and the name of Stephen Harriman Long, military commander of the Rocky Mountain Expedition of 1819-1820, is replaced in the citations for nine species by that of Edwin James, who actually edited the Account of the Expedition in which Thomas Say described those birds, ranging from the Dusky Grouse to the Orange-crowned Warbler.

It’s a lot for the non-scientific reader like me to take in, as it is every year at this time, and each succeeding Supplement increases my admiration for the members of the Committee, whose learning and labor give the rest of us so much to think about and so much to learn. I hope that if you’ve never delved into the Supplement before, my quick précis encourages you to read this Fifty-fourth, and that even if you’re an old hand and eye at such things, you’ll find it useful in identifying those sections you want to examine first.

July 28, 2013May 23, 2020

Ladies First? Nope.

On this date in 1872, Charles Bendire took the first skin of the long-tailed desert bird that has been known ever since as the Bendire thrasher.

Bendire sent the bird — a female, preserved by “mummification with carbolic acid” — to Elliott Coues, who, “not having then specially studied these birds,” submitted it to Robert Ridgway, who pronounced the specimen a Palmer curve-billed thrasher. Bendire

replied at once that the bird was an entirely distinct species, laying a very different egg [before shooting the adult, Bendire had collected at least six egg sets of the species in June 1872], and having somewhat dissimilar habits; and he finally settled the case by sending [Coues] a male skin, precisely like the original female specimen, together with several of both sexes of … Palmeri, all alike different from the new bird.

Coues doesn’t quite say “I told you so,” but poor Ridgway doesn’t come out looking any too good in this story. The Smithsonian ornithologist’s misidentification, Coues writes,

puzzled me … but presuming, of course, that he knew his own species better than I did, I felt obliged to rest on what he told me, though I was dissatisfied, and in … the Key, with the specimen before me, refrained from alluding to this (supposed) female of … Palmeri….

Ridgway having missed his chance, it was left to Coues to name the new species, a task he, no doubt gleefully, performed in the pages of The American Naturalist in June 1873, calling it Harporhynchus Bendirei, the Bendire’s Mocking-Thrush.

The skins Bendire sent Coues are now in the US National Museum’s collection, where they lie on their backs with red labels identifying them as the co-types of their species.

Coues treated the two specimens slightly, and tellingly, differently. His formal description is based entirely on the male skin, with just a note at the end that the female is “not distinguishable from the male.” And in incorporating the skins into his private collection, he catalogued the male first, before the female, which had been shot more than three months earlier. It’s an old story and often told, ornithology’s consistent treatment of the male bird as the unmarked category, but rarely do we come across such a glaring example as this one.

Male? Female? Yes.