Posted on

Other People’s Bird Books: Samuel Rhoads

Of all the great names from the generation of the DVOC‘s founders, that of Samuel N. Rhoads may be heard the least.

Even in this year of the sesquicentennial of his birth, Rhoads remains for most of us a dimly remembered name, encountered once or twice, perhaps, in Witmer Stone’s Old Cape May and then forgotten. A leading light a century ago in North and Central American ornithology, Rhoads now seems to be little more than a subject for local historians and eccentric “bloggers” who really should be working on something else.

Ironically, Rhoads may be better known today in the west than here in his native mid-Atlantic. His collecting tours of Texas and Arizona in the 1890s resulted in a number of records still cited today, and his pioneering trip to Washington and British Columbia was, until recently, commemorated each year by the late-summer “Rhoads Count” conducted by the Kootenay Naturalists.

In addition to his attainments as a naturalist, Rhoads was a devoted historian of his field. Writes William Evans Bacon in the Cassinia obituary illustrated by the photograph above

Except for his labors, numerous records of great interest, particularly those pertaining to pioneer days, would have been irretrievably lost …. Rhoads amassed his information by extensive search through the literature, by the examination of museum specimens, … and by personal interviews with naturalists, trappers, trappers, old pioneers, and frontiersmen.

That historical interest was accompanied, inevitably, by the usual bibliophily, and in the first two decades of the last century, Rhoads owned a small Philadelphia bookshop and publishing house, its most notable productions facsimiles and reprints of such regionally important titles as the botanist William Young’s Catalogue and Ord’s American Zoology. In 1903, Rhoads printed his own most important work, The Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Given these predilections and pre-occupations, it’s no surprise to find that Rhoads’s own library was carefully assembled and, more remarkably, apparently curated with an eye to posterity. I don’t know where the collection ended up after his death, but one of the most interesting volumes, his copy of Witmer Stone’s Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is now in Firestone Library.

Rhoads was a member of the DVOC committee charged with overseeing the production of this work, and, as he wrote on the second flyleaf in September 1924, he saw his copy as a repository of documents bearing on the history of the Club and its most ambitious publication to date:

Samuel N. Rhoads: / His private copy, / with insertions appropriate / to the history and make-up / of the book. / Bound up Sept. 1924.

Among the documents inserted into Rhoads’s scrapbook are appeals for phenological information about the birds of the region, directed to the general public

and, no doubt more profitably, to “gunners and sportsmen” who might be able to furnish unusual records.

There are also more personal bits of history, including Rhoads’s collecting permit — “license to kill or take said song or wild birds and game mammals” —

and a delightful letter in pale purple ink from his step-cousin George Morris, full of news of egg collecting and boating mishaps:

The general history of the DVOC is represented by a fine photo of this January 1898 meeting — taken exactly 85 years before the first women were admitted to membership:

Rhoads is number 23, his cousin Morris number 24; Stone, number 28, is seated at the table with the open book. In his handwritten key, Rhoads tells us that this self-same photo was used as “proof” for his 1902 Bird-Lore article and afterwards returned to him by Frank Chapman.

There are postcards and field lists, too, but the most wondrous of the ephemera preserved here is an invitation to a party for Witmer Stone on the occasion of his having “committed Matrimony”:

Two years after Rhoads had his little archive bound, there was an explosion and fire in his Haddonfield house. The books, obviously, survived, but Rhoads’s spirit did not: “conflicting currents of emotion” overwhelmed him, in Evans’s discreet phrase, and he spent the last quarter century of his life in seclusion, sometimes in confinement, until he died, sixty years ago today, leaving us this unique record of the early days of a venerable institution.

Share
Posted on

The Red-breasted Nuthatch Winter of ’12

Our insatiable hordes of gobbling Pine Siskins have pretty much moved on, greatly to the relief of our savings account, but we’re still enjoying the sweet little Red-breasted Nuthatches that seem to have settled in for the season. They’re no less ravenous than the streaky finches, and every bit as tame. I can hardly rehang the feeder before one of the little tooters lights on it, and it’s just a matter of time before they start landing on me, too.

Lots of backyard birders in the east have been taking advantage of the birds’ tameness this fall to train them to take food from the hand. I disapprove, in my puritanically strict hands-offitude, but the dozens upon dozens of accounts of hand-feeding I’ve read over the past couple of months got me to wondering: who first figured out that you could coax wild birds to take sunflower seed directly from a human?

There’s probably no answer to that, at least not until we’ve identified the original domesticator of the chicken. Meanwhile, though, let me introduce you to young Harriet Kinsley of McGregor, Iowa.

Wilson Bulletin 27.2 (1912): 314.

Exactly a hundred years ago this fall, Harriet and her mother discovered a new bird in their yard, one that

took it for granted that he was the sole owner of the feeding table, and it took a great deal of his time trying to keep the other birds away,

among them the numerous “chickadees, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers,  juncoes, a pair of cardinals, blue jays and the white-breasted nuthatches.” Neither Harriet nor her mother had seen the species before, but they took careful note of the bird’s plumage characters:

a bluish slate-colored back with black stripes running back above each eye and the breast tinged with rufous.

Harriet looked the stranger up in her bird book, and correctly identified it as a Red-breasted Nuthatch. It was her mother’s idea to teach the bird, which was soon burdened with the inevitable nickname “Hatchie,” to eat from her hand:

One day my mother thought she would put a nut meat on her hand and see how near he would come to it. He wanted the nut very much, but was a little shy about coming down to get it ; he scolded, cocking his head first on one side and then on the other. The temptation was too great; he would risk his life: he made a swoop, lighting on her hand, and away he went with the nut. The next day we all tried the same thing and found he would take them after a great deal of scolding. We fed him every day and he gradually grew less timid.
“Less timid” indeed: Harriet’s account, published in the Wilson Bulletin, makes it sound like the family was terrorized by the sharp-billed little beast. He started to demand to be fed — and only butternuts, if you please, no black walnuts — perching on doors and window sills to look into the house.
We had to keep little piles of nuts by several of the windows so we would not have to go so far.
The Kinsley family’s servitude lasted all through the winter, ending only on March 31, 1913, when their importunate guest finally flew north.
And what about Harriet? Even in those more relaxed days a century ago, when the Wilson Ornithological Club was still pronouncedly regional and midwestern in its “flavor,” it was remarkable to find a Campfire Girl publishing in the pages of the Wilson Bulletin. She is still listed as a member of the Club in 1917, but disappears from the rolls by 1920. No doubt the responsibilities of adulthood had set in by then, taking up the time that she had spent as a girl watching the bird tables.
Before life caught up with her (she married Roy Neff, the principal of McGregor High School in 1929), though, Harriet had almost certainly had contact with two of twentieth-century Iowa’s prominent ornithological observers — both of them fellow members of the Wilson Club.
Mary E. Hatch of McGregor was an assiduous collector of migration records and the author of (fairly vapid) articles in the Wilson Bulletin on the Northern Cardinal and the House Wren in northeastern Iowa. In that same cold winter of 1912 when Harriet Kinsley was feeding birds from her hand, Mary (no relation, I’m sure, to Hatchie) also noted several unusual birds — among them Red-bellied Woodpeckers, a Carolina Wren, a Winter Wren, and three “Kentucky Cardinals” — among “the  large  number of pensioners” visiting her family’s “well-filled table.”

I don’t know whether Mary Hatch was also a Campfire Girl, but both young women must have found inspiration in the bird studies of their famous neighbor in National (she received her mail in McGregor), Althea Sherman.

Well known today — better known than in her lifetime, I’d guess — as a champion of the Chimney Swift and an equally fervent enemy of House Wrens and screech-owls, Sherman was also an enthusiastic feeder of the winter birds, particularly fond of the woodpeckers that visited her dooryard to partake of her special mixture of suet, cornmeal, and walnuts. Like Harriet Kinsley and Mary Hatch, she took special note of the Red-bellied Woodpecker,

whose habitat is in deep, wooded ravines, [and is] very rarely … seen upon the prairie. To have one come in mid-winter, find food, even to visit the feeding-stick and linger around for three weeks, was as pleasant as it was unexpected.
Sherman’s mention of “many experiments … made to learn the winter bird boarders’ choice in foods” recalls — and may well have inspired — Harriet Kinsley’s offering her tame nuthatch a choice between butternuts and walnuts. I am still in search of the missing link (nowadays I think we’d call it the missing url) to establish the connection between Harriet, Mary, and Althea Sherman, but their experiences and their writings suggest that McGregor, Iowa, a little town on the Mississippi, was the place to be a hundred years ago, in the nuthatch winter of 1912.
Share
Posted on

Spare Parts, Strange Bedfellows

The Aztec headdress now in Vienna cost hundreds of tropical birds their lives when it was created in the early sixteenth century. Three hundred fifty years later, more birds would die for its restoration — this time, though, not tracked down in the jungles of Meso-America, but purchased on the same market that supplied feathers to the fashionable ladies of Mitteleuropa.

According to Hochstetter in his report of the 1884 restoration, the headdress (which was then thought to be a battle standard or fan) still included 459 quetzal plumes when it was handed over for repair.

But the remains of quills on the back side of the spread let us understand that very many such feathers had broken and fallen out, so it is not too much to assume that the original number can be estimated to have been at least 500. Since the male quetzal generally has only two, or at the most four, of these plumes, several hundred quetzals must have surrendered their feathers for this one object.

Not only were some of the original long feathers missing, but the band of shorter green quetzal feathers (visible against the reddish background in the 1908 photograph above) had been “completely destroyed” by moth and rust. But fortunately, Hochstetter tells us,

the pre-contact peoples of the Americas were not the only ones to use quetzal feathers for ornament and decoration; nowadays fine European ladies also adorn themselves with them, so it wasn’t difficult to obtain genuine quetzal feathers for the restoration. Such feathers were used only to restore the destroyed green band at the base of the fan, however.

Hochstetter goes on to note that long quetzal plumes would have been available from the same sources, but it was decided not to replace the originals:

Those long plumes today cost as much as ostrich plumes or the feathers of New Guinea’s birds of paradise. At today’s prices, 500 such long quetzal plumes would cost about 5,000 Austrian gulden.

The conversion is not straightforward, but it seems that that would be the equivalent of about US $50,000 — and even Imperial Museums had to stay within their budget.

The sky-blue feathers of the inner bands were another problem. These patches were originally made up of feathers from the underparts of the Lovely Cotinga, but, says Hochstetter, they too had deteriorated very badly, and required not just restoration but replacement.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to turn up enough cotinga skins to carry out a truly authentic restoration. As a substitute, we chose the magnificent White-throated Kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis) of India, the turquoise back feathers of which most closely approach the turquoise of the cotinga. Restoration required 24 skins of this species.

Hochstetter doesn’t say where those two dozen kingfisher backs came from, but it seems improbable that his colleagues over at K.K. Naturhistorisches Museum would have handed him theirs. More likely, just as in the case of the quetzal feathers, the conservators simply addressed themselves to the great millinery supply houses of Paris or of London.

Availability was no problem: two single-day sales in London twenty years later accounted for a total of more than 35,000 kingfisher skins. And unlike the prohibitively pricey quetzal plumes, whole White-throated Kingfishers could be had in the early twentieth century for somewhere between six and nine cents each. It probably cost the museum more to have them delivered.

Happily for nervous squirrel cuckoos and spoonbills, the rest of the feathers in the headdress were sufficiently well preserved as to require nothing more than routine care.

I’m sure that more details lurk in the files of the Museum für Völkerkunde. For now, though, what we know about this first restoration of this spectacular artifact hints at a fascinating and probably unique collaboration between scientists and plumassiers in nineteenth-century Vienna. I’m looking forward to learning more.

Photos:

1908 photo of the Aztec headdress.

White-throated Kingfisher.

Poached White-throated Kingfishers from Africa.

Share
Posted on

Aztec Featherwork

This sixteenth-century liturgical headdress is probably the most famous piece of featherwork in the world. Brought to Austria before 1575 by an unknown traveler, who had acquired it from an unknown source in Mexico, it is once again on exhibit — after long years of conservation work — at Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde.

The green plumes, of course, are those of 500-year-old Resplendent Quetzals. The blues are the loveliest of Lovely Cotinga feathers, and the headdress is also said to incorporate feathers of Squirrel Cuckoos, kingfishers, and Roseate Spoonbills. Whoever created this object, you can’t fault their taste.

This restoration is at least the second to have been carried out since the headdress came to Vienna.

Brought from Schloss Ambras to the Belvedere in the early nineteenth century, it was “discovered,” apparently in storage, by Ferdinand von Hochstetter in the late 1870s. There was great puzzlement as to just what it was, and the 1878 restoration ordered by Hochstetter proceeded on the belief that these were the remains of a kind of battle standard, an assumption that “resulted in the object’s loss of the three-dimensional shape.”

A century and a half later, that may seem to have been a terrible mistake, but I think it’s more than understandable, given the exotic singularity of the object. In fact, though flattening the headdress did violence to its original form and concealed its original function, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to it from the standpoint of preservation.

The exhibit includes another nine Mexican featherwork objects from the sixteenth century, including a “painting” done in hummingbird feathers, similar to this one in the Imperial Treasury:

Vienna is already my favorite city in the world. And it just got better.

Share
Posted on

Birds That Glow in the Dark

Did you know — I did not — that the American Bittern glows in the dark?

At least that’s what we’re told by “several gentlemen of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum”:

I was much interested with an account I heard the other day of a bird, a species of heron. I believe it is called by Wilson, in his Ornithology, the Great American Bittern; but, what is very extraordinary, he omits to mention a most interesting and remarkable circumstance attending it, which is, that it has the power of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a common torch, which illuminates the water, so as to enable it to discover its prey. As this circumstance is not mentioned by any of the naturalists that I have ever read, I had a difficulty in believing the fact, and took some trouble to ascertain the truth, which has been confirmed to me by several gentlemen….

This account, received by Mrs. C. Hackney from a Philadelphia correspondent in 1828, was deemed sufficiently noteworthy to be published in the Magazine of Natural History, and drew comment the following March from R.A. Bridgewater, who suggested that the light was generated “possibly by some electrical operation.” Lesson, on the other hand, wondered whether it might be produced “de son estomac.”

Not sure why, if that’s true, my photo of the bird above, from Reifel Refuge a couple of years ago, should be so dark and blurry.

Share