The Experience of Birding
They’re gone, the hordes of gluttonous Passenger Pigeons that were so startling a part of the eastern North American landscape until the nineteenth century.
But what if we could bring them back?
My friend Nick and I disagree about that notion, a difference of opinion that led to one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. Join in the debate here, and let us know what you think.
René Primevère Lesson, it seems, was given to bestowing the names of barbarian chieftains on his birds. In 1831, for example, he renamed Gmelin’s Muscicapa spadiceus—first described by Latham as the Yellow-rumped Fly-catcher—Atilla, identified rather sensationally by Jobling as the “ruler of the Hunnish tribes that ravaged Europe in the fifth century, who reve[l]ed in the appelation ‘Scourge of God’.”
Attila monument in Hungary’s Bükk Hills
As usual, Lesson doesn’t fill us in on his inspiration for this odd name, but if we are to trust the all-knowers of the all-knowing internet, it was simply an allusion to this big tyrannid’s aggressive nature.
There’s more to the joke, I think. Long discredited scientifically, one of the great naturalist’s lesser-known works, the Histoire naturelle de l’homme, may still offer a clue to this puzzle. In his discussion of the historical Huns and their putative descendants, the Magyars, Lesson quotes the fifth-century diplomat Priscus, who had served in a Roman delegation to the Hunnish court and who knew Attila personally:
Attila was short, with a broad chest, small eyes, a sparse beard, a flat nose, and a dark complexion.
In his authoritative description of the new avian genus, Lesson remarks on the bird’s bill, “broadened at the base,” its “bristly mouth,” and its “dusky olive-green” plumage. Is it just possible that he imagined a physical resemblance between the Hunnish king and his feathered namesake?
There is another hint in the name Charles Lucien Bonaparte assigned in 1857 to a genus of west African bulbuls. First described by Swainson thirty years before, the type specimen had been acquired from Sierra Leone by William Bullock, whose entire collection Swainson purchased and slowly worked through.
Swainson was excited by Bullock’s bulbul:
The very remarkable bird we are about to describe is, to the ornithologist, one of the most interesting contained in this volume…. To Dasycephala it is related by its lengthened, straight, and abruptly hooked bill; by a few incurved setaceous feathers and hairs over the nostrils, by the length of the tarsus and of the middle toe; and, by the great inequality between the lateral toes.
Of those characters, Swainson was most impressed by the “feathers and hairs” at the nares, and he gave his skin the English name African Bristle-bill, known today as the Red-tailed Bristlebill.
When Bonaparte came along, he rejected Swainson’s assignment of the species to Dasycephalus, deciding that it was sufficiently distinct to merit its own genus. He named it Bleda,
ainsi nommé du frère d’Attila,
“so called after the brother [and co-regent] of Attila.”
Maybe Lesson wasn’t joking, but Bonaparte most surely was.
Ted set a quiz the other day:
What widespread and common bird has the number EIGHTEEN in its name? And for a bonus: Without googling it, WHY is that bird thus named?
The first question isn’t that hard. Though it’s not widespread or common in New Jersey yet, the Eurasian Collared-Dove bears the remarkable species epithet decaocto, “eighteen,” assigned to it in 1838 by the Hungarian botanist and entomologist Imre Frivaldszky.
As James Fisher reminds us, Frivaldszky’s odd choice of name was inspired by a story about the bird and its voice, said to be current in the 1830s in what is now Bulgaria:
A poor girl was in service to a very hard-hearted lady, who gave her only eighteen para a year as salary. The girl implored the gods to make plain to the world how miserably her mistress rewarded her. Zeus thereupon created this dove, which still today cries its recognizable deca-octo to the entire world.
That’s the story I “knew.” I can’t hear those syllables myself, and the chain of transmission — from the collector Carl Hinke, to Frivaldszky, to Johann Friedrich Naumann, to Fisher, to posterity — is uncomfortably attenuated, but I’ll buy it.
There’s more, though. Though this is the story made canonical by its endless (and irresponsibly embellished and unattributed) repetition on the internet, Hinke, in Naumann’s summary of Frivaldszky’s letter to him (see what I mean?), goes on to report another circumstance:
They are shot in the autumn, but by only a few of the Turkish inhabitants; most of the Turks spare them, as do to an even greater extent the Christian inhabitants, who even think them holy birds and never do anything to harm them. Thus I attracted considerable annoyance when I shot these birds at Filibe, not so much from the Turks as from the Christians.
The significance of the dove in Christian iconography is obvious, but is there something else going on here? Maybe.
There is a different story making the e-rounds about how this bird got its scientific name:
The Greeks say that when Jesus Christ was in agony on the cross, a Roman soldier took pity on him and tried to buy a cup of milk to ease his thirst. The old woman selling the milk asked for eighteen coins, but the soldier had only seventeen. There was no way to bargain: she kept repeating eighteen, eighteen, eighteen. Jesus cursed her, changing her into the dove that can say nothing but eighteen, eighteen, eighteen in Greek. When she consents to take seventeen coins, she will be changed back into a human being. But if she ever raises the price to nineteen, that will mean that the end of the world is near.
I haven’t been able to find an authentic source for this “Greek” story, which seems to be out there only in Spanish. If it is not entirely contrived, and Hinke/Naumann/Frivaldszky’s allusion to the bird’s odor of sanctity makes me think it is not, this tale suggests that there is more than one strand of Balkan folk narrative behind the very strange scientific name of what will soon be, if it isn’t already, one of the most familiar birds in your neighborhood.
Uncommon now and uncommon then, the Red-shouldered Hawk was encountered only “occasionally” by Alexander Wilson on his trips to the Jersey shore; this fierce-looking male seems to have been shot near Egg Harbor and mounted for display in Peale’s Philadelphia museum.
By the time Wilson painted and published this bird, the species had been known to European ornithology for a generation. Gmelin had named it Falco lineatus on the basis of descriptions published in the 1780s by Latham and Pennant; it was Pennant, working with a Long Island specimen from Anna Blackburne‘s collection, who gave it the English name we still use today.
So far as I know, Anna Blackburne never set foot in the New World, but her brother, Ashton Blackburne, was, in Pennant’s words, a skilled and zealous “sportsman” in New York, Connecticut, and here in New Jersey.
Ashton Blackburne, who was also first cousin to the great museum man Ashton Lever, dispatched annual shipments of American curiosities to “his worthy and philosophical sister.” According to McAtee, Blackburne, by way of his sister, provided Pennant with specimen material for no fewer than 101 of the species accounts in the Arctic Zoology; seventeen of those birds, from the Vesper Sparrow to the Labrador Duck, were new to science.
It is one of the mild ironies of ornithological history that the only one of those 101 species to bear the English name “Blackburnian” — a name assigned by both Pennant and Latham, codified by Gmelin as blackburniae, and retained in its latinized form by systematic ornithology for more than a century — well, that species wasn’t really new, and it already had a correctly formed and properly published Linnaean label.
In 1776, the incomparably well named Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller took Buffon’s “figuier orangé,” named for the “belle couleur orangée” of its throat, and restyled it in Latin Motacilla fusca, a dull name that highlights instead the bird’s brownish upperparts. Regardless, we’re stuck with it, and we know the bird today as Setophaga fusca (and yes, my fingers very nearly typed a different genus name, starting with a D).
My modest proposal: Let’s make up for it. I doubt that we’ll readily abandon such nicely established names as Red-shouldered Hawk and Dickcissel, but there is one of Pennant’s nova that may soon be in search of a better English name.
The Willet was described by Pennant from a New York specimen in Mrs. Blackburn’s collection. Now that the birds of the coast and the birds of the prairies are widely considered specifically distinct, why not call our eastern bird the Blackburnian Willet? I like it.
A lot.
In Louisiana, writes John James Audubon, in the early spring, the White-eyed Vireo
forms a nest of dry slender twigs, broken pieces of grasses, and portions of old hornets’ nests, which have so great a resemblance to paper, that the nest appears as if studded with bits of that substance.
It’s a pretty description, but it needs to be read as Audubon’s gentle correction of a passage in Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology — a passage Wilson intended as humorous. The vireo “builds a very neat little nest,”
constructed of various light materials, bits of rotten wood, fibres of dry stalks of weeds, pieces of paper, commonly newspapers, an article almost always found about its nest, so that some of my friends have given it the name of the Politician.
Audubon, as so often, just didn’t get the joke.