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Lambruschini’s Republican Gull

Slender-billed Gull

It may not look like much, but blame the photographer, not the bird, which is, of course, a Slender-billed Gull, the pink-bellied, snout-faced favorite of almost everybody on my spring-time tours of Provence.

Nowadays this gull is famously a Camargue specialty, but it was first recorded there only in 1840, by Crespon in his great Ornithologie du Gard. It’s no wonder that Provençal ornithology had gone so long without recognizing this scarce bird: The species wasn’t even described to science until October 1839, when the Italian entomologist Ferdinando Arborio Gattinara di Breme presented specimen material from Sardinia to the “savans ornithologistes” assembled at that year’s Congress of Italian Scientists in Pisa. There he dedicated it to his colleague and

friend Carlo Giuseppe Géné … the learned Professor of Turin, [who] has devoted such ardor

to the study of the island’s fauna. Director of the Turin Museum of Zoology, the still-young Géné served, coincidentally or not, as the secretary of the Zoological Section at the Pisa conference.

Breme’s epithet genei stands today, thanks to a hair’s breadth of priority. Just a few months after the publication of Breme’s descriptio princeps, Coenraad Jacob Temminck included an account of the bird in the final volume of his Manuel. Temminck’s type specimen came from Sicily, and he suspected — rightly — that

this new species has always been confused with its congeners and is more common around the Mediterranean that one might assume.

Apparently unaware that Breme had described the same bird in Pisa, Temminck gave his “new” species the names tenuirostris and “mouette à bec grèle,” which still today provide the English name of the gull (the French now call it the “goéland railleur,” the “laughing gull,” a name dangerously close, it seems to me, to that of its abundant giggling congener, the “mouette rieuse“).

But that’s not the end of it. After slipping happily under the ornithological radar for all those centuries, the Slender-billed Gull was suddenly, it seems, hot property in the mid-nineteenth century. In the space of a scant year, the poor bird was described by Breme, by Temminck, by Keyserling and Blasius (“Larus gelastes,” another “laughing” name), and by Charles Lucian Bonaparte, who — no doubt with a bit of familial pride — was able to add Corsica to the species’ known range.

Bonaparte had chaired the Pisa meeting at which Breme announced his new species, but that didn’t stop him from re-naming the bird in 1840 in his Iconografia della fauna italica. Though both Géné and Temminck were subscribers to that work, Bonaparte took the opportunity to name the gull anew in honor of Raffaelo Lambruschini, in token of the

respect, friendship, gratitude, and esteem that we have long wished to express to him.

Like Bonaparte, Lambruschini — agronomist, educator, and clerical reformer — was a convinced democrat and nationalist, and given that he seems to have had no real interest in ornithology himself, I think we should understand Larus lambruschinii as one of Bonaparte’s “political” species, written up — to borrow Sclater’s words from another context — as a convenient opportunity for “promulgating his republican sympathies.”

It’s a small point, perhaps, but one that has gone unnoticed up to now. Patricia Stroud’s fine Emperor of Nature makes the argument that it is especially in the ornithological “portion of the Fauna italica that the relationship between science and politics is evident,” noting that “the real reason” for Bonaparte’s dedication of the work to the Grand Duke of Tuscany “was Leopold’s support of the” Congress of Italian Scientists (166-167). But Stroud makes no mention of Lambruschini and his gull, a story that would have made her point in the clearest possible way.

Lambruschini’s name doesn’t even appear in most of the standard ornithological onomastica. It does show up in Jobling, but he names the wrong Lambruschini: Luigi Lambruschini was actually our man’s uncle, a famous cardinal of the Catholic Church and a staunchly anti-republican royalist and papist. It’s hard to imagine a less sympathetic figure from the younger Lambruschini’s political point of view, or one less likely to be memorialized by Bonaparte.

Rare, beautiful, and sought-after, the Slender-billed Gull is more than just a tick on the eager birder’s list. As even this quick look at the history of its discovery and description shows, the bird stands at the very intersection of science and politics in mid-nineteenth-century Europe.

Interested in intersections? We are too. 

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The Immodest Wassher

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In the eighteenth century, if you wanted to claim universal application for a work of scholarship, there was no better way than to publish in French. Linnaeus knew that, and in the 1756 version of the Systema naturae, he abandoned the vernacular Swedish names of earlier editions in favor of their French equivalents.

The White Wagtail, for example, which had gone under the venerable label “sädesärla,” in reference to its appearance at the time of spring planting, was given a fancy new Gallic name, “la Cavandière.”

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Huh? Say what? Or as the Archiater’s French readers might have put it, Comment ça?

An unexpected source — the Oxford English Dictionary — helps resolve the ancient typo. The OED’s entry for “motacilla” includes a citation to John Withals’s Shorte Dictionary of 1553, where he defines the Latinizing term as a “wagtayle, wassher.”

Aha: Linnaeus’s careless printer simply misspelled “lavandière,” a perfectly normal French word for “washerwoman.” A little sniffing around finds that it was used even into the nineteenth century as a common name for the familiar and confiding, stiff-legged little birds of clear streams and countryside. Its English counterparts, “washtail,” “washerwoman,” “molly washer” and so on, are said by Swann to be widely attested “provincial names.” Lockwood tells us that

the constant up-and-down movement of the tail suggest[ed] the battledore once used to beat the washing.

I had to look up “battledore” myself. In any event, though, Lockwood’s explanation is too oblique: the bird isn’t called a “wash paddle,” it’s called a “washerwoman,” and as usual, a careful reading of earlier sources tells us why.

Aldrovandi's White Wagtail
Aldrovandi’s White Wagtail

Belon’s 1555 Histoire de la nature des oyseaux is much more straightforward, even earthier:

The Lavandière has its French name from the fact that it is very common along streams, where it constantly moves its tail by bobbing its rump, like a washerwoman who is beating the clothes.

Aldrovandi, quoting Belon, puts it even more pointedly:

Belon writes that in France these birds are called Lavandières, because they tarry at the water’s edge near the washerwomen, or because like them they assiduously shake their rear [podicem assidue agitent].

Two and a half centuries later, Buffon affirms that

the birds seem to imitate with the bobbing of their tail the bobbing that the washerwomen do in performing their work.

That immodest repetitive motion of the hips, so necessary to the laundress’s work, struck some observers as sexually provocative, and in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern, there was a tendency to associate washerwomen with a certain laxity of morals. Indeed, the Middle English word “lavender,” borrowed directly from the French “lavandière,” means both “laundress” and “whore,” and “wagtail” itself, as the OED tells us, was commonly used in the seventeenth century to denote “a profligate or inconstant woman… a harlot, courtesan.”

I’ve found nothing to suggest a direct, conscious transfer of such prurience onto our feathered wagtails, but there is one perhaps suggestive circumstance. Early modern ornithologists repeatedly cited the frequency with which wagtails served as foster parents: as Aldrovandi says,

Albertus Magnus writes that the Cuckoo sometimes lays its eggs in the nest of this little bird, and the author known as Ornithologus reports that birdcatchers in his area have seen cuckoo chicks raised by this same bird.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

 

 

 

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A Merely Nominal Woodpecker

It’s well known that the two sexes of the Williamson’s Sapsucker were originally described as separate species, a perfectly understandable confusion given the remarkable difference in their plumages.

What most of us don’t recall is that in the early nineteenth century another woodpecker was subjected to a similar, and similarly temporary, fate. Today we think of the Red-headed Woodpecker as absolutely distinctive, unmistakable in any plumage; but our forebears weren’t always so certain.

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John Latham was the first to describe this puzzling bird, in the 1780s; he called it, logically, the White-rumped Woodpecker, and based the account in his General Synopsis on a specimen from Long Island, New York. Neither the collector, a certain Captain Davies, nor Latham himself quite knew what to make of it: as the latter wrote, this bird

has, till now, never come under my inspection. I have some opinion of it being a female, but of what species cannot ascertain; am therefore constrained to place it as a distinct species, at least for the present.

Johann Friedrich Gmelin, updating the Systema naturae at the end of that same decade, was less cautious. He copied out Latham’s description in Latin, then assigned the “Whide-rumped Woodpecker” its very own Linnaean binomial, Picus obscurus — in allusion, I’m sure, to the animal’s overall color, not to its ontological status.

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Alexander Wilson, whose own connection to this species is the stuff of myth, was apparently unaware of Gmelin’s unwarranted multiplication of species; in the American Ornithology, he writes only — probably in reference to Latham, whose work we now know was available in Philadelphia — that the dusky plumage of the young birds “has occasioned some European writers to mistake them for females.”

It was up to Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot to point out the full error into which Gmelin had fallen:

As similar as the male and the female of this species are to each other in color, the immature birds differ from both sexes of the adult…. Latham and Gmelin created a redundancy when they presented the young bird as a separate species.

It was no doubt a specimen from Vieillot’s own collection that served as the model for Jean-Gabriel Prêtre’s illustration of the “Pic tricolor jeune”:

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The matter, one would think, was closed. But Charles Bonaparte, while acknowledging that Vieillot had already made the point clear, still felt moved, twenty years later, to include an account of the Young Red-headed Woodpecker in his American Ornithology of 1828. In addition to a very thorough description to debunk this “nominal species,” Bonaparte “thought proper … to give an exact figure of it,” in the shape of the colored plate at the top of this page, by Alexander Rider. Bonaparte, always given as he was to extravagant enthusiasms, felt that Rider’s woodpecker

will perhaps be allowed to be the best representation of a bird ever engraved.

I’m not so sure about that (or rather, I’m quite sure about that). But it is a nice illustration from, and of, a time when even the familiar birds of America could provide a mystery.

 

 

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Avant la lettre: What Is Audubon’s Snow Bird?

I’ve been unfair to Audubon.

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For years — for decades, in fact, ever since, as a fourth grader, I first learned about the man and the work — I’ve judged him, and harshly, solely on the evidence of the engraved plates that make up the The Birds of America.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to have been affiliated with a couple of institutions that own full sets, and I’ve always appreciated the big books as masterpieces of technology and entrepreneurial drive. But art? Not really.

My mind was changed, completely and abruptly, in late April when I finally made my way to the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition of some 220 of Audubon’s paintings — not the plates that were printed, colored, and sold to subscribers, but the actual paintings that served as the exemplars for the engraver.

Like most of us, the closest I’d ever come to seeing anything from Audubon’s paintbrush was the rather poor reproductions, on decidedly poor paper, of the watercolors published and republished in the 1970s and 80s. The originals themselves have been shown only very rarely in the 150 years since they were purchased from Lucy Audubon — but they are astonishing, startling, eye-opening.

They’re really good.

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Not only do the paintings reveal an artist in masterful command of his media, but they also, just as surprisingly, have a few things to teach us about the birds Audubon was painting. Take his Snow Bird, the bird we know today as the Dark-eyed Junco.

The engraving of this otherwise so engaging sparrow in Birds of America has always left me cold. It’s bland and dull, and the coloring of the specimens I’ve seen has always seemed vague, especially on the lower bird, the male, whose breast and hood just don’t seem to want to join up as they do in real life. Poor draftsmanship, poor engraving, poor coloring: it doesn’t really matter where the sloppiness was introduced.

In late April I saw Audubon’s original painting, the model for this junco plate, and suddenly it all came clear to me. (Click on the image symbol on the NYHS site to see that painting.)

Most of the engravings are more or less faithful renderings of Audubon’s originals: but not this time. The painting, prepared from specimens collected in Louisiana, differs strikingly from the engraved plate in depicting a male bird with a decidedly black, highly contrasting hood, sharply set off in a straight line from the softer gray of the breast sides and flank; the lower edge of that hood extends into the white lower breast, creating a “convex” border.

You know where this is headed, don’t you?

Audubon’s bird was not your everyday Slate-colored Junco. Instead, the bird that he shot and drew was a male Cassiar Junco, and his painting was the first depiction ever of a “flavor” of juncos that would not be formally described until 1918, nearly a hundred years later.

I don’t know whether we have any of Audubon’s instructions to the colorists responsible for finishing the plate, but I still think that we can figure out with some certainty what happened. I’m guessing that Audubon was slightly puzzled when he reviewed his Louisiana painting, and that he asked the engraver and the colorists to “correct” the pattern of the bird’s breast and sides to match that of the Slate-colored Junco, the taxon he would later describe in the Ornithological Biography. 

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Had I not seen the painting hanging in New York, I would have gone on in my benighted way, shaking my head over another botched Audubonian bird. Instead, I wind up admiring more than ever before the ornithologist who discovered the Cassiar Junco — and the artist who gave us such a fine depiction of a wonderful but long unrecognized bird.

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… the Bunting or the Egg?

This year’s World Series of Birding will be run under the mysterious shadow of the Townsend’s Bunting, a bird collected for the first time just across the river in Chester County, Pennsylvania, exactly 180 years ago today.

Just what this bird is, or was, has never been clear. Audubon described it from a specimen taken by John K. Townsend for the collection of the botanist, zoologist, and Quaker historian Ezra Michener.

Though the collector furnished some details of the bird’s song and flight attitudes,  Audubon himself said that “nothing is known of its habits,” a verdict that is unlikely ever to be reversed: for the shy bird with the loud, lively, and varied song that Townsend shot that May day in Philadelphia was the last of its kind ever encountered.

For a century and a half following its discovery, Townsend’s Bunting, named by Audubon as a “tribute of respect to [Townsend] in honor of his great attainments in ornithology,” was generally believed to represent a distinct taxon, almost surely extinct. While Elliott Coues had suggested as early as 1884 that the puzzling skin might be a hybrid, perhaps between a Dickcissel and a Blue Grosbeak, the first six editions of the AOU Check-list reject that possibility:

its peculiarities cannot be accounted for by hybridism [or] probably [the Fifth and Sixth editions here read “apparently“] by individual variation.

In 1985, Kenneth C. Parkes reached a different conclusion. Townsend himself had been “at first inclined to consider this species as identical with the Black-throated Bunting,” which we now know as the Dickcissel. Parkes’s examination of the specimen, which still resides in the collections of the United States National Museum, led him to propose

that it is a female Spiza americana that lacks the normal carotenoid pigment in its plumage,

a view reported approvingly in the latest edition of the Check-list.

All this is well known. What is invariably omitted from the modern accounts of Townsend’s Bunting, however, is a strange and wonderful statement offered by Coues, first in the second edition of his Check List and then repeated in the second, third, fourth, and fifth editions of the Key. This bird, he writes, is a “standing puzzle to ornithologists,” and “no second specimen of this alleged species is known.” And then:

it is not improbable that the type came from an egg laid by S. americana [the Dickcissel]. But even such immediate ancestry would not forbid recognition of “specific characters”; the solitary bird having been killed, it represents a species which died at its birth.

Natura non facit saltus, indeed; but this seems a leap to me. I think that Coues explains what he means in the General Ornithology prefacing the Key:

no such thing as species, in the old sense of the word, exist in nature…. their nominal recognition is a pure convention…. We treat as “specific” any form, however little different from the next, that we do not know or believe to intergrade with that next one…. the differentiation is accomplished, the links are lost, and the characters actually become “specific.”

What I find so wonderful here is the way in which Coues, convinced Darwinist that he was, is still, like every other natural historian before the Modern Synthesis, tangled up in a purely typological view of difference and relationship. Because the chick that emerged from that egg in 1832 or so was visually, morphologically different from its immediate ancestors — “morphology being the safest, indeed the only safe, clue to natural affinities” — it was distinct at the conventional level of species from the parent that laid that egg. Not a freak, not a variant, not a hybrid, but a new and distinct species deserving of its own name and its own category of thought.

However we understand Townsend’s Bunting, as a bit of spontaneous species creation, a hybrid, a “schizochroistic” variant, you would think that the mechanism behind its production 180 years ago would still be out there, waiting to bring forth another. Maybe today, as hundreds of birders scour the state, New Jersey will get its first record of this “standing puzzle.”

But what would we call it?

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