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Another Other People’s Bird Book

Quick: which edition of the AOU Check-list belongs on every North American birder’s shelf?

Reference works are not all created equal. If you’re going to buy a Britannica, make it the eleventh, please; given a choice of Peterson guides, take the 1947. And if you should be in the market for an AOU Check-list (yes, that’s still how it’s spelled, a century and a quarter after it first appeared), be sure to buy the fifth edition, fifty-five years old this year.

How come? Don’t we want our status and distribution books to be as up to date as possible?

Well, yes. But the fifth — six years older than I am — offers two important somethings that no edition since has seen fit to provide. First, all of the official scientific names (not, however, the synonyms) are outfitted with accent marks, a terrific convenience if you’re trying to figure out whether to say ArchiLOchus (no) or ArchILochus (yes).

And more importantly, this is the last edition of the Check-list to treat all of the subspecies then recognized from North American north of Mexico. What that means, of course, is that this book, no matter how out of date in some particulars, remains the most precise source for information on the status and distribution of the birds it covers.

Nowadays, this and the other six editions of the Check-list are readily available on line, but it wasn’t always so, and I was delighted several years ago to find an honest-to-goodness paper copy, bright and clean, that I could afford. (I rarely pay more than a dollar or two for a book, no matter how much I want it.)

Yes, there are the usual check marks, 524 of them according to the discreet penciled tally that ends at McKay’s Bunting.

McKay’s Bunting?

Obviously, this was the book of a well-traveled birder, a suspicion neatly confirmed by ticks next to, for example, Emperor Goose, Common Teal, Steller’s Eider, Slaty-backed Gull, Red-legged Kittiwake, Bluethroat, Arctic Warbler, and so on. A few Old World species are scrupulously noted as having been seen in Egypt, making it apparent that the rarities without such annotation must have been seen in North America–in Alaska, obviously.

Happily, there is a stamp on the foredge of the book block:

followed by a neatly inked monogram on the front pastedown:

Henry Carroll Kyllingstad was born on March 19, 1914, in North Dakota and died December 3, 2002, in New London, Minnesota. He went to Alaska as a young schoolteacher: in 1941, he conducted the first Christmas Bird Count in Mountain Village, Alaska (tallying five species); it was about the same time that he started a banding operation there.

By 1946, he was married; his wife, Gertrude Lois, apparently shared his interests, if her observations that year of a playful Northern Shrike are any indication. Within two years, the couple had moved to Fort Yates, North Dakota, where they apparently taught school.

The ornithological high point of Kyllingstad’s Alaska time came in June 1948. Beginning in 1944, Kyllingstad paid repeated visits to the Kusilvak Mountains, in the Yukon Delta, in search of the Bristle-thighed Curlew, a bird that, so said his wife, “had become an obsession.” On the advice of George Sutton, in 1948 Kyllingstad put together an expedition for the Arctic Institute to find the nest of this mysterious sandpiper; he was accompanied by a teaching colleague from Kalskag, Warren M. Petersen, and by none other than Arthur A. Allen, one of the great names in the history of American academic ornithology.

The two men’s accounts of Allen’s involvement in the curlew expedition reveal a certain lack of agreement. Allen, writing in The Auk, says that he had had “the privilege to organize an expedition under the auspices of the National Geographic Society [, which] joining forces with one led by Henry Kyllingstad … penetrated the interior to the east side of the coast range.” Kyllingstad offers a somewhat different version of events:

I was extremely happy … to receive a grant [from the Arctic Institute] … Warren Petersen agreed to come along, and later Dr. Arthur A. Allen of Cornell University asked if he might join our party. He brought assurance of funds from the National Geographic Society which we felt would be desirable if the Mountain Village area should be unproductive….

Two expeditions or one? A merger or a polite intrusion?

In any event, the little party proceeded, taking every opportunity along the way to observe the other nesting birds of the tundra. “Except for the occasional rain,” wrote Kyllingstad, “there was only one thing wrong — there were too many birds to photograph in the short time we planned to stay.”

On June 11, the party decided to split up. Allen and Peterson stayed at Igiak Bay to take more pictures, while Kyllingstad and Allen’s son, David, set up a new camp twenty miles out of Mountain Village.

The next day, Kyllingstad and Allen fils set out in the drizzle. Soon enough they flushed a curlew:

We watched a while, whispered agreement on the likely location of the nest which we thought surely must be there, and then at a signal from David we rushed the spot. David had wisely removed his raincoat and high wading boots, and being considerably more of a runner than I, was soon ahead of me…. he reached the nest a few seconds before me.

(The elder Allen would write: “The nest was discovered by David G. Allen, and Henry Kyllingstad was with him at the time.”)

This was the first Bristle-thighed Curlew nest known to science, and had Kyllingstad thought to shed a layer and run a little faster, the original owner of my Check-list would have been the first white man in history to see one.

Exciting stuff. Knowing all of this, I open the book to page 184, to the entry for Numenius tahitiénsis. And I find — a neat red check mark and the penciled number 160. Modest to the end.

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Other People’s Bird Books

Years ago, I left home one morning without the book I’d asked my students to prepare for that day’s class discussion. Happily, my research assistant was in that day, so I gave her a dollar and sent her down Green Street to get me a copy — the cheapest used copy she could find, please, as I planned to use it once and then throw it onto a high shelf. She came back with a badly abused volume, its cover scuffed and torn, its pages dogeared and underlined.

The underlining fascinated me. Literary historians learn to look closely at things like that, and I had made a small career out of using just that sort of evidence to understand the way people read five or six centuries ago. But here was a nut I couldn’t crack. The cheap pages of my latest acquisition offered what looked like plenty of clues, but I just couldn’t figure out what principles had guided my underliner. So I turned it over to my RA. Who, naturally, came up with the answer in a jiffy. It wasn’t the moving passages, or the problematic passages, or the passages that s/he would use in a term paper that our reader had signaled. No, not at all.

It was the hard words.

I should have learned not to overthink these things, but it’s irresistible when the fatum of a pre-owned libellus drops it into my hands. A couple of months ago I spent another of my dollars to pick up a pretty copy of Ralph Hoffmann‘s New England and Eastern New York, one of the most important publications in the history of North American birding. The cover’s a bit dinged, but I was delighted to find the book block tight and bright, every inspired word clean and readable.

And I was a little disappointed, too. You’d think that in the 110 years between the book’s being printed and my snatching it up from the junk table, someone, someone would have come up with something to write in the margins. There are a few penciled check marks, of the sort a desultory lister might enter once in a while. And there is a single solitary verbal annotation:

Too much to hope that anyone would recognize the handwriting, of course, which strikes me — way outside my paleographic comfort zone, admittedly — as the stereotypical school hand of a woman born in the first third of the twentieth century (note the failure to distinguish u and n and the classic d, above the line and with a big loop in terminal position).

But still, doesn’t that single, neatly anonymous entry — nothing more than a place and a date — preserve all the excitement of a bright spring morning 85 years ago, when among the migrant sparrows gathered in the yard there was a buzzy-voiced outlander singing from beneath a badger-skin cap? Even the vagueness of the location, so maddening at first, is suddenly touching when you consider the geographic scale in which this birder must have been working: Country Club Road (how vastly many must there be in New England, New York, and New Jersey?) was quite enough in an era when leaving town by train or auto still constituted a journey.

I know just how she felt. I have always loved White-crowned Sparrows, and among the many sightings of this species I can still recall with clarity and precision was one at the Beemer Road silo of an early May morning. Dave and I were scouting for a big day, and as we pulled up to listen for Vesper Sparrows (they used to breed on the hillside there, lo these many ago), we heard instead the slow whistles and buzzes of White-crowns, the

pure sweet notes that suggest the Meadowlark’s whistle or a Vesper Sparrow singing louder than usual, and continu[ing] with notes that recall the Black-throated Green Warbler.

Never will I forget the sight of the puffy-crowned sparrows moving along the fence while a Solitary Sandpiper fed on the pond beneath them; that is what I think of when I think of Sussex County, and I hope that something similar is what the earlier owner of my copy of Hoffmann thought of whenever she heard that buzzy whistle.

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It’s Striking, But …

Seventeen hundred years ago, Felix of Aptunga took part in the consecration ceremonies for the new bishop of Carthage. Then as now, high office came with low intrigue, and a cabal of bishops declared the consecration void, asserting that Felix had collaborated with the Romans by surrendering Bibles to officers of the persecution: no sacrament, they said, received from the hands of a sinful priest is valid.

They were overruled, ultimately by Emperor Constantine himself, but the Donatist heresy, as it came to be known, persisted for a hundred years and beyond in north Africa.

And it survives today, though now it rears its ugly head less in matters of religion than in questions of aesthetics.

I believe a number of things about Todd R. Forsgren’s photographs of birds in mist nets.

I believe that they are beautiful. I believe that they are startling. I believe that they are art.

What I do not believe is that no birds were harmed for the sake of these images. The artist says that he “basically give[s] [himself] ten minutes or so to set up and take the photographs,” a very long time indeed for a bird to hang in a net while huge bipedal predators fuss with machines. Tongues are wrenched, eyes scratched, hands and feet broken, heart rates raised: to be sure, such violent events are infrequent (probably not as infrequent as some studies suggest), but anyone with open eyes who has spent time around bird banders has seen these things and more.

No way is the oropendola in the photograph above lying quiet and passive in the pocket; that bird is struggling, and it has used its ten minutes to full advantage, working its head and its left wing entirely through the net. It also seems to have hooked a loop around its tongue. With a little patience, an experienced net-runner will have had no trouble extricating this bird from its tangle–but still, it would have been a lot easier ten minutes earlier.

But here’s the real question, the important question: does it matter? Does the fact that these photographs memorialize a situation that I think we can all stipulate is a bad one diminish their value as art? Are they, as a very thoughtful colleague of mine wrote, “ethically tainted”? Are we aesthetic Donatists, or are we willing to accept that good art can be about bad things?

In September 2001, Karlheinz Stockhausen held a press conference in Hamburg. A leading light of the German avant garde in the ’60s and 70s, Stockhausen had slipped into obscurity –but he burst forth again, and how, in Hambug with a dozen words that will live on long after his music is barely a footnote in Grove: the fall of the World Trade Center earlier that month was “das größte Kunstwerk, das es überhaupt gibt für den ganzen Kosmos,” the greatest work of art there can ever be in the entire cosmos.

The revulsion and the horror at Stockhausen’s words, just days after the attacks on New York and Washington, were universal and proper. (The universal attention paid those words was not, however, proper, given that the composer’s progress into mental illness was already well known.) As Anthony Tommasini put it in the Times, “real suffering is not [art]” and never can be.

The murder of thousands of people is not art. War is not art. And–just to ratchet things back down to our original, much more comfortable problem–trapping wild animals, for whatever purpose, is not art. To be sure, bird banding in the hands of far too many of its practitioners has become a performance and an entertainment and a money-maker, but it’s not art.

Suffering, especially suffering inflicted on unwilling and unknowing victims, is not art. But suffering is supremely and indisputably an appropriate subject for art. From venatorial scenes on the walls of Lascaux to the Grand Guignol, from medieval Passion cycles to Picasso, representations of real suffering problematize nature and human nature (and, often enough, the intersection between the two), upsetting our views of what is inevitable and what is right; and many such works do that in ways that are pretty, or striking, or clever, or even very beautiful.

Only a new Stockhausen, and one in a particularly impious frame of mind, could call the Bourbon Restoration and the occupation of Spain a work of art. But in the hands of a genius, torture, murder, and dismemberment become the stuff of masterpieces. The Disasters of War is beautiful–even if the disasters of war are not. Goya’s prints transform horror into works of formal perfection and intellectual challenge.

Todd Forsgren’s photographs are of birds captured, he tells us, by ornithologists for scientific purposes. They are suffering, but the photographer did not engineer their suffering (and I’m not sure it would make a difference to me if he had). The images he makes are not (as all those facebook photos of birds in the hand most decidedly are) souvenirs of curiosity, but rather the questioning record of a particular species of human intervention in nature. These photographs ask questions about the relationship between knowledge and freedom, science and reality, creation and “data.”

And they’re beautiful, in the way that carefully imagined depictions of shocking violence can be.

One of my friends, thoughtful and sophisticated, wrote:

I don’t like the imagery – takes away from the beauty of the birds…. seeing them all tied up like that is depressing and sad, it agitates me.

But that’s what art does. It agitates you, it “kicks complacency in the” rear, as another friend said, and makes you ask why an image or a text or a piece of music troubles or delights, or better, troubles and delights. Good art–and this is good art–takes you out of your settled ways and changes you. Good art is sacramental, and the value of a sacrament does not depend on how it is administered. We’ve known that since Carthage.

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Why I Say “Northern Rough-winged Swallow”

A “facebook friend” of mine reports being e-chastised for her “failure” to use four- or six-letter codes in her reports:

The most negative one was how inexperienced as a birder I appeared. Then there was the one offering to ‘teach’ me the abbreviations since I obviously didn’t know them….

Charming.

I’ve been guilty over the years of letting an “AMGO” or a “MODO” or a “PISI” slip past my lips, but like most birders I know (and want to know), I make a very careful effort in the field to use the full, official, unambiguous names of the birds I see. It avoids confusion–who doesn’t remember Bill Oddie’s riff on “the red-throated“?–but more than that, and more importantly than that, abbreviations and cutesy nicknames create yet another barrier for the new birder, the beginning birder, and the casual birder.

It can be hard enough when you’re starting out to figure out what that fluffy-tailed little duck is without having people around you shouting “peebie-jeebie.” Save the endearments for the bedroom, and give the good people birding with you or near you the information they need to understand what you’re seeing and to learn more about it later when they sit down with a field guide.

Even if it’s a Middendorf’s Grasshopper Warbler, or a Southern Beardless Tyrannulet, or even a Northern Rough-winged Swallow. Please.

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The Louisiana Egret: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know, and a Lament

This pretty little Tricolored Heron juvenile has been one of the stars of the show at Dekorte Park recently. Still common enough twenty years ago in New Jersey’s southern marshes, the species is declining rapidly in the state; Bill Boyle’s fine new S&D book reports barely three dozen birds in five colonies in 2009, while just ten years earlier Walsh et al. could still call it “fairly common” and “increasing” after its arrival as a breeding bird in 1948. In spite of this elegant bird’s propensity to show up, and even to nest, far north and inland of its usual breeding range, it’s never been anything but rare away from the coast in New Jersey, and this one has no doubt enriched many a Bergen County list since it arrived ten days ago.

The taxonomy of the herons, tiger-herons, bitterns, boat-bills, and night-herons seems to have settled down in the past couple of decades; it’s a good thing, too, given that, as Frederick Sheldon has noted,

over the last 100 years, the number of recognized species in  the Ardeidae has varied  from  60 to 93 and the number of  genera from  15 to 35.
That’s a lot of varying, even for an ornithological classification, and those of us who have been birding for more than even a couple of years have had to adjust more than once. “Green-backed Heron,” anyone? No North American heron has undergone as much taxonomic change as the Tricolored Heron, though, which has had two English names and two scientific names just in my lifetime–and more before that. (By the way, go ahead and click on that link; it will take you to a pretty cool resource.) Just about the only combination we haven’t suffered through is the one in the title of this post. But we’ll get there someday, I’m sure.
The onomastic history of this bird starts with a posthumous publication. On January 5, 1776, the professor of (among a wide range of other subjects) natural history at Erlangen, the imposingly named Philipp Ludwig Statius (Statius!) Müller, died, suddenly and “in the best of his years.” Fortunately, Müller had just delivered to his publisher the manuscript of the index and supplement to his German translation and commentary of the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema, and that volume appeared in Nuremberg not long after the author’s untimely death.
Drawing on recent updates published by Linnaeus and on discoveries reported by the other famous naturalists of the day, Müller’s Supplement offered the first published descriptions of a number of animals, including a heron he calls “der dreyfärbige Reiher. Ardea tricolor.” He describes it briefly:
The bird is blackish-blue, white underneath, and has blue tail coverts. Its range is in America. – Buffon.
Terse as it is, Müller’s description answers one question I’ve heard over and over at Dekorte: what are the heron’s three colors? For years I’d assumed that they were red, white, and blue, the signature palette of the attractive juveniles, but not so: this description is of an adult.
Today, Müller is credited as the “author” of the current scientific name of the heron, Egretta tricolor (Müller). What that means in practice is that he was the first to publish for the species a Latinized binomial formally acceptable under the criteria of the ICZN–but what about that citation at the end of Müller’s description?
Wikimedia Commons

Müller’s description is an abbreviation of this account of “La Demi-Aigrette” in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle des oiseaux:

We have given this name, Demi-Aigrette, to a bluish, white-bellied heron from Cayenne, shown in our Plates; the name designates a characteristic that seems to be intermediate between egrets and herons: unlike the egrets, this species does not have long, airy plumes on the back, but rather only a cluster of sparse strands that extend beyond the tail and represent a smaller version of the tufts of an egret. These strands, which other herons do not have, are reddish in color. This bird is less than two feet in length. The front of the body, the neck, and the head are dusky bluish, and the underparts are white.
Buffon, a sworn enemy of the great Swedish taxonomist, does not assign his heron a Linnaean name. But he does publish a painting of it, and it is this image that provided the type “specimen” for Müller:
The caption in these Planches enluminées gives our bird yet another name: the “bluish heron with a white belly from Cayenne.” The painting itself leaves a lot to be desired as either an aesthetic or a scientific document, but it matches neatly with Buffon’s description, right down to the rusty bustle. Müller’s copy of the plate must have been poorly colored for him to concentrate on the blue tail coverts instead.
Alexander Wilson, the Scots father of American ornithology, was aware of Buffon’s description and of John Latham’s somewhat more thorough account of the Demi Egret when he collected and painted a specimen that would later end up in Peale’s Philadelphia Museum.
Like all of Wilson’s birds, the heron and its platemates are awkwardly drawn to the point of ridiculousness; but this is the oldest painting showing a bird readily identifiable as a Tricolored Heron. Wilson can be forgiven, I think, for not recognizing that his bird and the Cayenne bird of the older descriptions were in fact conspecific: he says that the “Demi Egret … seems to approach near to the present” “rare and delicate” species, which he named, in honor of the place he first found it below New Orleans, the Louisiana Heron, Ardea ludoviciana.
Twenty-five years after Wilson’s publication, his colleague and champion Charles Bonaparte moved the Louisiana Heron into Forster’s genus Egretta. In 1858, Spencer Baird shifted this species, the Reddish Egret, and Peale’s Egret (now known to be the white morph of the Reddish Egret) to Demiegretta, a genus said by Baird to have been coined by Blyth, in obvious reliance on Buffon and Latham, to include the Western Reef-Heron. But Baird is skeptical: he has
a strong suspicion that the American birds, with Ardea ludoviciana as type, are entitled to a new generic appellation, for which Hydranassa would be exceedingly appropriate.
Baird leaves it at that, without bothering to explain why his suggested name would be so fitting. It would remain for Elliott Coues–who else–to unravel the “ornithophilologicality” of Baird’s proposal. Coues points out that the name is not to be analyzed as the bland “hydra” + “nassa” = “water duck,” but rather as the much more poetic “hydra” + “anassa” = “water queen.” And then, in one of those casual displays of memory and erudition to which the great man was given, he identifies Baird’s source in Audubon’s Ornithological Biography:
Delicate in form, beautiful in plumage, and graceful in its movements, I never see this interesting Heron, without calling it the Lady of the Waters.
Audubon’s painting (much of it done by his gifted assistant George Lehman) does the nickname justice, depicting a bird that seems almost to wear the elegant feathers it is so carefully arranging.
Coues’s own 1873 list of North American birds, the immediate forebear of the AOU Check-list, provides one of the clearest examples of the muddiness of this species’ taxonomic history. The Buffonian-Müllerian name is nowhere to be found, but neither is Wilson’s or Baird’s. Instead, Coues calls the lady of the waters “Ardea leucogastra Gm., var. leucoprymna (Licht.) Cs.”
Hypercorrecting for gender (as if “leucogaster” were an adjective rather than a noun in apposition), Coues adopts the name given the species in the Systema naturae of Gmelin’s 1788 edition, Ardea leucogaster. Lichtenstein, professor of zoology in Berlin, had assigned the epithet leucoprymna (with no further published description) to a specimen in his care, a nomen nudum that Coues (the “Cs.” of the full name citation above) re-purposed to designate the subspecies (“variety,” as we called them back before the trinomial controversy was settled the first time) that occurs in the southern United States.
Coues was the head of the committee constituted by the AOU in 1883 to prepare an official checklist of North American birds. When the first edition appeared in 1886, it eschewed Coues’s name for the heron and demoted Baird’s Hydranassa (which Ridgway had flirted with nearly ten years earlier) to a subgenus; for the first time, the Check-list joined Wilson’s English name Louisiana Heron with Müller’s scientific moniker Ardea tricolor. In keeping with the committee’s determination to “amplif[y], increas[e] the effective force of, and len[d] a new precision” to ornithological naming, the Louisiana Herons of the northern part of the species’s range are further defined by the addition of a subspecific epithet, ruficollis, originally the specific name given by Gosse in 1847 when he described a juvenile Tricolored Heron as a new species, the Red-necked Gaulin, Egretta ruficollis.
The name Ardea tricolor stood until 1905, when the Twelfth Supplement to the AOU Check-list elevated almost all of the heron subgenera to genus status. Baird’s suspicion was validated, and Hydranassa lasted for three quarters of a century, until the next revision of the herons was adopted in the thirty-fourth supplement, published in 1982. The Little Blue Heron, the Reddish Egret, and the species under discussion here were all moved (back) into Egretta, a reconstituted genus they shared (and share today) with another ten or so small, slender herons.
That same supplement changed the English name of the old Louisiana Heron to Tricolored Heron, a nod to the range of the bird, which extends far beyond the lower Mississippi, and to its new and old specific epithet. If I’d been asked (I don’t remember getting a call), I would probably have gone all the way and called it the Tricolored Egret (along with Little Blue Egret and so on). But Tricolored Heron it is, and likely long will be.
An egret by any other name–

I for one am sorry to have lost another “Louisiana” bird. I know the arguments against honorific patronyms and geographic designations, and they sometimes seem fairly persuasive, but when I see the bird and call it, as I am still likely to do when I’m feeling tired or perverse, a Louisiana Heron, I think of Wilson and Audubon and Lehman, of the swamps of Charleston and the big woods of the Mississippi Valley. The “new” name, even though it is also an old name, conjures up no visions, no affections or remembrances; it’s logical and sensible, but hardly evocative. And names should evoke, shouldn’t they?

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