This Streptopelia pigeon was the source of a few moments’ excitement this morning in Somerset County. Eurasian Collared-Dove is still a rarity in New Jersey, and I don’t think it has been recorded yet so far north and inland.
Unfortunately, this bird’s small size, pinkish tinge, and plain wing, without the contrasting dark primaries of Eurasian, identified it quickly and handily as an African Collared-Dove, the beloved prop of stage magicians and the often ill-caged pet of careless door shutters.
Ah well. It won’t be long before the “right” collared-dove gets here too.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read about some birder fussing at a state legislature to change that state’s official bird. Floridians want the Osprey or the endemic Florida Scrub-Jay, Nebraskans have proposed the Sandhill Crane, Oregonians suggest the Spotted Owl, Washingtonians have nominated the Great Blue Heron, Georgians would prefer (get this) the Chicken.
The second most common response: “Sacrilege!” (The most common, of course, is “Don’t bother us, we’re busy.”) How can we just throw off the weight of all that history? How can we second-guess the venerable traditions of the Founders?
It turns out that there’s nothing divinely ordained about The State Bird. And like all human institutions, this one has a history that’s a lot more recent, and a lot more interesting, than we might suspect.
Under her leadership, the Society exercised its influence to have wildlife preserves established, bird protection laws passed, and a state game commission created. And in 1925, Tippetts and her colleagues conducted the election in which Florida’s schoolchildren elected the Northern Mockingbird as the state bird.
Seven years later, Tippetts published an important article in Nature Magazine. The title, I think, is self-explanatory.
Note (if you can read the very small type) that Tippetts here gives her affiliation as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization that in the 1920s and 30s took the lead in encouraging states to select an emblematic bird. As Chairman of the Federation’s conservation division, Tippetts was able to get state Women’s Clubs to distribute ballots to the schools. Sometimes the results were surprising. In the Florida election, for example, she noted that
one boys’ school went solid for the vulture, because they had been building airplanes and studying this bird in the process.
Alabama’s state bird, the Northern Flicker, was selected for more insidious reasons.
It turns out that that choice was made not out of any particular fondness for the bird itself, but because Alabama’s Civil War soldiers were known as “yellowhammers.” The poor brown woodpecker is an underhanded political statement, a sort of feathered bars and stars–which makes sense if you look at its plumage. Similarly (but much less sinisterly), Delaware’s Blue Hen was chosen not because of its prowess as a layer or even its tenderness in the skillet, but rather for the association of the rooster of the breed with the state’s soldiers during the American Revolution.
Pushed hard by the women’s clubs, most of the states appear to have selected their state birds in the late 1920s and 1930s. The process in Nebraska, described by Jon Farrar in his Birding Nebraska, was probably typical:
At the October 1928 Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs convention in Kearney, a resolution passed that ‘a bird typical of the prairies and abundant in all parts of the state be chosen by this convention assembled and the result combined with the vote of the school children of the state and interested societies to be presented to the State Legislature for acceptance’.
The Federation prepared a slate of five species for the schoolchildren to vote on; the winner (just as it would be in Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wyoming) was the tuneful Western Meadowlark. The Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union, after some very interesting debate about just what purpose might be served by having a state bird–education, conservation, sentiment–endorsed the choice, and the Unicameral passed a bill that was promptly signed by the governor.
Two states joined the Union a couple of decades after the Women’s Clubs put so much effort into this matter. Hawaii, with its wealth of endemics (fewer and fewer each year, alas), settled on (or maybe for) the Nene, that handsome ground-dwelling goose found nowhere else in the world; Alaska, probably eager to remind “sportsmen” of its many allures, chose the Willow Ptarmigan. What impresses me most is not the selections but their timing: according to that invariably accurate source of infallible wisdom the internet, both jurisdictions selected their avian emblems in 1955, four years before either attained statehood.
A curiosity. But a measure, too, of how successful Katherine Tippetts and her sisters in arms were, and of how important the role of women was in all aspects of birding and nature study in pre-1934 America. By the mid-1950s, if you wanted to be a state, you had to act like one–and that meant having a state bird.
Todd Forsgren‘s photographs of birds in nets are as breathtaking as they are violent. As the artist puts it,
the birds inhabit a fascinating space between our framework of the bush and the hand. It is a fragile and embarrassing moment before they disappear back into the woods, and into data.
Nobody I know could fail to be dazzled by the discovery of a new barbet in Peru–or by the painting of the bird, the Sira BarbetCapito fitzpatricki, on the cover of this month’s number of The Auk. At the same time, though, I bet nearly everybody e-leafs right past Seeholzer et al.’s description to get to the birderly meat of the new issue: the 2012 Supplement to the AOU Check-list.
My own thoughts of late are aswarm even more than usual with sparrows, so naturally I went to the emberizids first.
The linear sequence of the Spizella sparrows, subject of an oddly half-hearted proposal this time around, also remains unchanged (that proposal summarizes research that purports to show, interestingly, that the closest relative of Worthen’s Sparrow is not the look-alike Field Sparrow but rather Brewer’s Sparrow).
But there are still some sparrow changes. The tropical “cardinals” of the genus Paroaria are kicked out of Emberizidae and moved to the tanager family Thraupidae, a taxon well on its way to becoming the next catch-all.
US birders will sit up and take note at the new and slightly ungainly genus name coined for the Sage Sparrow(s); it–or they—are henceforth members of the (provisionally) monotypic genus Artemisiospiza, while the Black-throated Sparrow now shares Amphispiza with only the Five-striped Sparrow. The only “splits” among the emberizids are the recognition of two new Arremon brush-finches, both formerly considered conspecific with South America’s Stripe-headed Brush-Finch; the North American committee agrees with the decision of its South American counterpart in recognizing as distinct the “new” Costa Rican and Black-headed Brush-Finches (and in retaining the hyphen).
The other species-level splits affect two seabirds and a raptor. Galapagos Shearwater, formally described 125 years ago by Robert Ridgway, is once again recognized as a species separate from Audubon’s Shearwater. A much-bruited change is the split of the old Xantus’s Murrelet into a northern and a southern species, Guadalupe Murrelet and Scripps’s Murrelet; these two have been well illustrated in the field guides for decades now, and birders fortunate enough to be out in places where they’re possible already routinely distinguish the two.
Equally anticipated is the recognition that the former Gray Hawk in fact represents two species, a reasonable view that has been taken at regular intervals over the past two centuries. Unfortunately, and in sad contrast to the sensible naming practice adopted for the “new” murrelets, the Committee muffed it in assigning English names to these two tropical raptors. Priority requires that the scientific name nitidus go with the southern species, the Gray-lined Hawk, but the AOU retained the English name Gray Hawk for the northern birds (now Buteo plagiatus). The historical record for Mexico and the southwest United States is full of mentions of Gray HawkButeo nitidus, a name combination that with the publication of this supplement no longer makes sense and is likely to be a source of perennial confusion. Notably, regrettably, the Committee rejected a proposal to assign the northern species the English name “Ashy Hawk,” which would have been a good step towards avoiding at least future confusion.
The Supplement makes another nine changes to English names. Most are simple and straightforward–easy enough to learn to say Indian Peafowl or Island Canary. Trudeau’s mysterious tern is now officially Snowy-crowned Tern, and Solander has lost his petrel, now named Providence Petrel. Like most history-minded birders, I was happy to see that this apparent hostility to the English patronym was not extended to the newly described Puffinus bryani, Bryan’s Shearwater.
Taking a broader view, name changes and splits are perhaps the least interesting of the Supplement’s determinations. If we really want to understand more about the relationships between avian taxa, we need to look at the higher levels of classification; there are some real eye-openers this time around. Birders from the Great Plains west will be especially interested this time of year in the move of the Calliope Hummingbird out of its prettily named genus Stellula and and into Selasphorus; as the proposal noted, this is no surprise to “anyone who knows Calliope Hummingbird.”
A change in the opposite direction takes place among the wrens: Carolina Wren is now all alone in Thryothorus, its former fellows there now spread among three resurrected genera that the linear sequence places closer to the cactus wrens than to Carolina.
Two other venerable and familiar genera have also been revised in ways that will take some getting used to. The nightjar genus Caprimulgus, a name reaching all the way back to the authoritative 1758 edition of Linnaeus, has been divvied up such that it is now entirely unrepresented in North America. “Our” old Caprimulgus species are now members of the genus Antrostomus, erected by Bonaparte in 1838 with reference to the Chuck-will’s widow and the Eastern Whip-poor-will. I’ll miss being able to initiate new birders into the meanings and the (partly contrived) mythology of the old name, but Bonaparte’s coinage isn’t half bad, either: if you’ve ever handled one, you know how like a gaping cavern the mouths of our goatsuckers are.
It’s a red-letter day for most of us when we actually see an Antrostomus nightjar, but the revision of the genus Carpodacus will affect most North American birders every time they look out the window. Cassin’s, Purple, and House Finches are apparently not closely enough related to the classic rosefinches to be considered congeneric with them any longer; Swainson’s 1837 Haemorhous has been revived to accommodate the North American breeders. I have to admit that I don’t know what the Swainsonian name means etymologically; the closest I can come is “blood-red like the sumac,” but corrections and conjectures welcome.
Perhaps the most revealing–and for birders perhaps the most jarring–of all the changes put forth in this Supplement is the move of the falconids and the parrots to a new position between the woodpeckers and the passeriform birds, a change made last year by the South American committee. No longer will the woodpeckers occupy the center of the field guides, and no longer will the falcons and caracaras follow immediately on the similar, but only rather distantly related, hawks and kites. The research cited in justification of this move suggests that the branch now believed to include the falcons, the parrots, and the songbirds may aso be shared by the seriemas, of all things. I’ll certainly be looking at all these birds differently now.
And that’s the fun of the annual Supplement, isn’t it? New names shift our thinking, new classifications jar our settled impressions. A very good thing.
To have a seagull take flight from your hands or watch a squirrel scamper up a tree or see a seal making its way through the surf to return back to its natural habitat after spending days, weeks or months caring for it is indescribable. If you were to ask me I would have to argue that yes it is all worthwhile. And more importantly, it is the right thing to do, no matter what the cost. – Michael P. Belanger
I’m all in favor of sentiment, and I believe firmly that live animals are better than dead ones.
And I believe that “wildlife rehabilitation” is profoundly wrong.
There’s a lot amiss in our world. Birds die all the time. More and more of them die as the direct result of some human action.
But what makes more sense: putting in days and nights to nurse a baby Blue Jay back to health, or taking the same time to talk to your city council about eradicating feral cats? Paying a vet to set the broken wing of a cardinal, or donating that money to saving habitat? Weeping over a crippled raccoon, or dedicating that good will and great effort to actual conservation?
For some years now, I’ve carefully confirmed that any organization I donate to has no involvement with this sort of thing. I’m glad that it gives people like our Mr. Belanger an “indescribable” feeling, but it’s not the right thing to do.
