I’m a big animal lover myself, perhaps even more than that. I understand your interest in the waxwing and that you want to document these numbers with all your gigantic telephoto lenses. But you aren’t entirely seeing the other side. Meanwhile an average of about twenty people are standing here in front of my door from sunrise to sunset. You’re going up and down past all our new cars, with scratches as a result, you’re taking up parking spaces, parking bikes right up against the cars, and so on. All in all you’re creating a big nuisance for the neighbors…. You’ve had a whole week to document the birds and I sincerely hope that both the waxwings and the neighborhood will get some peace now. [my translation]
And you can imagine how the discussion continues: it’s photographers, not birders; it’s just a few bad apples; it’s a public right of way; your car isn’t all that new, and it isn’t scratched, and it was already scratched when I got there. And on and on in tones familiar from every e-brouhaha to have ever erupted in any birding community.
The situation is even more resonant, though, given the Dutch name of these beautiful birds. “Pestvogel” means “plague bird,” and the association of these winter nomads with the equally unpredictable visitations of pestilence seems to have been historically widespread in western Europe. Suolahti writes of the species’ former German name:
Furthermore, the unexpected occurrence of certain birds in the vicinity of houses or their sudden appearance in a given region inspires uncanny notions. In particular, the occurrence of northern species that travel in great flocks, such as waxwings, bramblings, and redwings, is considered a bad omen, and so they are called “death birds,” “plague birds,” or “war birds.” [my translation]
Suolahti finds the German name “Pestvogel” — plague bird — attested from Austria, Swabia, Switzerland, and Westfalia; he quotes Aitinger‘s 1631 tract on bird catching to the effect that these birds are seen in some areas no oftener than every fourteen years, and that many people are of the “remarkable opinion” that when they do appear, they bring with them “war, pestilence, hunger, and inflation” (watch out, Euro Zone).
it was not until the very end of the sixteenth century that Ulisse Aldrovandi first drew the connection between the waxwing’s appearance in unexpected localities and a biological cause for such displacement, even though the concept of certain species’ migrations during the harsher season was already beginning to be perceived, thanks largely to wintertime trips to the southern Mediterranean, on which observers recognized some of the birds present in Europe during the summer. But the mental horizon in which that discovery is rooted means that several different interpretations can still co-exist for one single fact. And for a long time the occurrences of waxwings were related to other exceptional phenomena, among them meteorological or cosmic phenomena, still interpreted as signs or warnings of divine origin. [my translation]
Myself, I would observe that for many of us l’horizon intellectuel hasn’t lifted that much: Who doesn’t shiver when suddenly the feeders are aswarm with a tightly packed, ferociously gobbling flock of Dark-eyed Juncos — or should I say snowbirds?
Autographs don’t thrill me the way I think they’re supposed to.
This copy of Stiles and Skutch was a gift from our friend Ruth, who on a visit to Costa Rica in February 1994 had the title page signed by the 90-year-old author and — a neat touch — his wife. I cherish the book for that simple association, of course, but even more for the photos Ruth pasted in.
Here Ruth and Skutch examine plate 46. Her handwritten annotations on the facing key indicate that on that day, she and the ornithologist had seen the Shining Honeycreeper, the Green Honeycreeper, and the Speckled Tanager, among many other species.
And here:
Alexander Skutch autographs the very book into which Ruth, just visible, I think, in the background, inserted this photo.
I saw these pictures when Ruth gave me the book, and asked whether she didn’t want to keep them. No, she said, they belong to the book. She was right, and I’m glad.
It’s a bad habit left over from my days as an academic, I confess, but I still find myself turning eagerly to the acknowledgments when I first open a bird book. Who gets thanked, who doesn’t? Can we distinguish between genuine gratitude, flattery, and bread-and-butter thank you’s? And if we can rise above the level of mere gossip, what do the lists of names tell us about long-vanished communities of birders and ornithologists?
Every birder in this part of the world, and most, I suspect, in other parts, too, know Ludlow Griscom’s Birds of the New York City Region, published by the American Museum in 1923. Replacing Frank Chapman’s 1906 pamphlet, originally published in the AMNH Journal, Griscom’s book quickly became the status and distribution “bible” for an entire important generation of American birders; Roger Peterson and the rest of the Bronx County Bird Club famously “could recite chapter and verse” from their great mentor’s work. But the book is a monument of far more than local importance: it marks the first time in the history of birding that the author of a regional avifauna systematically confronted sight records on a massive, modern scale: “the grand total” of such reports Griscom evaluated for the book “easily passes the enormous sum of one hundred thousand.”
eBirders may be unimpressed by that figure, but remember that those records trickled and poured and washed in on slips of paper — paper! Fortunately, Griscom had time:
…Dr. F.A. Lucas, director of the American Museum … instructed me to prepare a handbook as soon as possible, it having become evident that publication by the Linnaean Society would be unduly protracted …. I should devote my whole time to the preparation of the Handbook….
Ralph W. Tower and Frank Chapman, great names in the history of the Museum, offered their support, as did “all but one of the active members of the Linnaean Society” — I wish I could figure out who was the target of that typically snide Griscomianism. The Linnaean made Griscom Chairman of its Local Avifauna Committee, to which were also named J.T. Nichols (“who,” wrote Griscom, “knows more about Long Island birds than anyone living”), Edmund Janvrin (a young physician who had treated Booker T. Washington in New York), and L.N. Nichols. Roy Latham and Eugene Bicknell (of Catharus renown, and an early champion of the field glass method of birding) contributed important records, as did from New Jersey Waldron Miller, Griscom’s colleague on the Nicaragua journey of 1917. Another of his frequent field companions, Maunsell Crosby, proofread the manuscript; Crosby had been the personal assistant to the great Jonathan Dwight, the owner of a collection of New York area birds that Griscom described as “the best in existence” and which furnished a number of important records for the book.
Put all the names together and you have a fantastic tapestry of relationships, a lively picture of who was who in New York and New Jersey birding in the first quarter of the last century. But here’s a surprising name, one not many of us have heard of:
… my brother, the Rev. Acton Griscom, rendered invaluable service in critically reading the entire book in both galley and page proof.
Ludlow’s brother? Ludlow’s brother the Reverend?
Passport photo, Clement Acton Griscom III. From “puzzlemaster” at flickr.com
The Griscoms and the Ludlows were wealthy and well-connected, famous members of America’s nineteenth-century gilded upper class. The children’s generation — Ludlow was born in 1890, Acton in 1891, and their sister Joyce, who died in a horrific accident at the age of three, in 1898 — continued to enjoy the wealth, but as if they were characters in a Thomas Mann novel, the industrial vigor and financial assertiveness of their ancestors seemed to drain right out of them. Ludlow became an ornithologist, and Acton — well, it’s not easy to figure out just what Acton did with his life.
The best (and virtually the only) comprehensive source to the life of Ludlow Griscom is William E. Davis, Jr.’s Dean of the Birdwatchers, an excellent history of Griscom the birder and (probably no fault of the author’s) a slender biography of Griscom the human being. Acton, the younger brother, appears a grand total of two times in the book. Davis calls him “something of a black sheep in the family,” noting that he “could never achieve stability,” and quotes at length a 1952 letter from the older brother to Frederick R. Goff :
My brother’s life has been a tragic and unfortunate one, and in recent years has been mostly spent in New Mexico and Venezuela. I know that he has had serious financial reverses and I would be surprised if he had not been forced to sell his library and his manuscripts for whatever sum of money he could obtain.
I haven’t seen the letter, which resides in the collections of Cornell University, but the excerpt here, taken together with the addressee, points us in a very interesting direction. Frederick Goff was one of the greatest of American historians of the book, the Goff of Incunabula in American Libraries and Head of the Rare Book Collection at the Library of Congress. And it turns out that Acton Griscom was an important collector and amateur scholar of the early book.
Acton studied at Columbia, and around 1920, he made a significant gift — not a sale “for whatever sum of money he could obtain” — to his alma mater of nearly two thousand volumes treating of Joan of Arc, among them several fine manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Fancy stuff, and there was evidently much more. The catalogue of Acton’s private library, published in 1931 (thus after his donation of the Joan of Arc materials to Columbia), runs to 51 printed pages, covering titles in
early printing, chivalry, mysticism and occult, Jeanne d’Arc, English and Romance literatures, etc.; part II general literature including a garner of old, rare and unusual books, early American juveniles, criminology, etcetera.
Catholic tastes indeed. But we know that “chivalry” and “mysticism” combined to form Acton’s principal area of inquiry. His 1917 Columbia M.A. thesis was titled “An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism,” and his scholarly publications dealt with the textual history of the matière de Bretagne — the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table — in high medieval Wales and England.
His serious work reached its high point in 1929 with the publication of an edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, one of the foundational texts in the Arthurian tradition, to which Griscom appears to have contributed the Latin text and a historical essay. The reviews were not unanimously kind, several critics noting a naivete both philological and historiographic, but all the same, it was decades before this edition was superseded.
Davis, in his biography of the elder Griscom brother, connects the “immense library on Joan of Arc” to the Griscom parents’ “rather bizarre” “strong belief in reincarnation,” hinting that they considered themselves latter-day versions of the fifteenth-century French heroine and of Napoleon. Acton certainly shared his parents’ commitment to theosophy, an interest that seems to have annoyed Ludlow no end. In 1919, Acton presided over his father’s funeral at New York’s Chapel of the Comforter, an institution dedicated to the reconciliation of Christianity and theosophy. Following his father’s death, Acton continued as a frequent contributor to The Theosophical Quarterly, writing articles and reviews and taking an active part in conventions and committee meetings. (Unsurprisingly, the name of Ludlow Griscom appears in the Quarterly precisely never.)
Unlike his older brother, Acton was also interested in politics. In keeping with long family tradition, he was a vocal supporter of women’s rights. In the months after the conclusion of World War I, he spoke and wrote vigorously about the evils of Bolshevism, the intrinsic Frenchness of the Rhineland, and the deceptive wickedness of the German people.
German dishonor is a byword …. the outwardly clean streets of German cities but whited the rottenness within …. “Kultur” was a myth, and … the German people and the German civilization were notably inferior…. Immorality in Germany is literally appalling…. Does the American citizen wish to be friends with such people?
Here speaks, obviously, the Francophilia of America’s upper classes at the turn of the last century, the same small still voice that was heard in 1935 when Acton Griscom married Blanche B. Miller, who had four years earlier taken a graduate degree at Clermont-Ferrand. Ludlow was not in attendance. The wedding announcement describes Acton as “a noted collector of medieval manuscripts … an investment specialist in government bonds with Farrell, Brown, & Co.”
The couple was divorced in Florida in 1943, after which Acton becomes much harder to trace. Just before the divorce, he registered for the draft at the outbreak of World War II, and by the late 1940s, he is in Venezuela, flying once a year to New York for an autumn visit. Thanks to Davis, we know that he was still living in 1959, “when Ludlow’s wayward brother, Acton, knelt before the coffin” at his elder brother’s burial in Mount Auburn.
The negative characterization of Acton Griscom is understandable, I suppose, in a biography necessarily related from the dour older brother’s point of view. But the facts seem to be richer and more complex than the story Davis tells. Even these first, sketchy bits of evidence that good old google reveals are enough to suggest that the story could be told very differently: the story of an older brother who dismissed his parent’s religious explorations, an older brother who married without his mother’s approval, an older brother who spent his talents and his advantages on birds. And Acton? A man of the cloth, the avatar of filial piety, a scholar and a businessman. Who’s the black sheep, the wayward brother now?
Drop me a note in the Comments below if you know more about Acton Griscom.
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:
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.
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.
