The Experience of Birding
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.
You owe it to yourself to take a look.
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 Barbet Capito 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 proposal to split the beautiful pastel Baird’s Junco from the other Yellow-eyed Juncos, was not accepted; neither was the split, first formally proposed three or four years ago, of the Savannah Sparrow into two or three or four species.
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 Hawk Buteo 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?
The question is rhetorical, the answer obvious. Obvious, that is, to sensible people concerned about their environment. I wish it were as obvious to the “rehabilitators” who spend their time and their money healing European Starlings, House Sparrows, and feral pigeons for release into the American wild.
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.
The scientific names of the saw-billed ducks lead in all sorts of interesting directions. Take the Hooded Merganser, possibly the loveliest of a very lovely group of birds; its current genus name, Lophodytes, is as pleasant to say as it is meaningful.
“Lophos” is from the Greek word for crest, and “dytes” means “digger, diver.” So our cute little hoodie is a crested diver, a point only reinforced by the specific epithet cucullatus, meaning, well, hooded, or cowled.
There are somewhere between many and gazillions of birds with loph- in their name somewhere, and cucullatus/a/um is nearly as frequent. The “dytes” part is more interesting. Two penguin species–the consummate divers–share the genus Aptenodytes, meaning “wingless diver,” and the name “troglodytes,” familiar even to many non-birders as the genus name of the mouse-like wrens, has also been applied to species and subspecies of nightjars, swifts, waxbills, and cisticolas, each of which typically (and sometimes maddeningly) disappears from the birder’s view by diving into the darkness.
The other bird in the photo above is a drake Red-breasted Merganser, Mergus serrator. “Serrator” is easy enough to figure out: like the English word “serrated,” it has to do with “serra” or “secra,” a toothed saw, in reference to the pointed projections on mergansers’ bills, which help them hold on their slippery prey. Oddly enough, “serrator” is rumored to also be an obsolete English name for the Ivory Gull–I don’t believe it, or even understand it, but such are the things one can run across on the internet.
Mergus, the genus to which all other mergansers but the Smew are assigned (and that’s simply Mergellus, a little teeny tiny Mergus) is a bit more mysterious. The word is obviously related to the Latin “mergo,” “I dive,” on the same impulse as “dytes” (and the old genus name for the loons, Urinator).
But it is only recently that the noun “mergus” has been restricted in meaning to the mergansers. In Antiquity, the word referred to a number of ill-defined, perhaps unidentifiable waterbirds; Arnott notes that Pliny used “mergus” to translate Aristotle’s Aithyia, which is used nowadays (in a slightly different spelling) as the genus name for the pochards. To heap confusion onto mix-up, Arnott concludes (quite cogently) that Pliny and a few later Latin writers used “mergus” to denote the Great Cormorant, while in many other cases the name means simply “diving piscivore,” perhaps including Great Black-backed and Yellow-legged Gulls.
The name “merganser” (which doubles as the specific epithet of the Common Merganser or Goosander) is easily analyzed as a combination of Latin “mergus” and “anser,” meaning goose; it apparently first appeared in the neo-Latin of Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium.
Gesner’s cut is plainly of a Common Merganser, but in its earliest English usage, the word “merganser” was explicitly restricted to the Red-breasted Merganser. Sir Thomas Browne wrote in 1668 that the “gossander… is a large well colored and marked diving fowle most answering [closely corresponding to] the Merganser.” It seems to have taken nearly two centuries for the name to be applied more generally to all the saw-bills–first, apparently, by MacGillivray in his History of British Birds. Charmingly and sensibly and perhaps slyly, MacGillivray suggested that the larger species be called “merganser” and the smaller “merganas,” “diving duck.”
The species names of most of the remaining Mergus mergansers are fairly straightforward. The extinct Auckland Merganser went by the name australis, “southern,” a reference to its range. Miocene miscellus, described from a Virginia specimen, shows a mixture–a miscellany, as it were–of primitive and derived characters, while the European Mergus connectens, a Pleistocene species, “links” other species. The Chinese, or Scaly-sided Merganser is named simply squamatus, “scaly.”
The critically endangered Brazilian Merganser has the most descriptive name of all its relatives. Mergus octosetaceus was named by Vieillot in 1817; the French name he gives it, harle à huit brins, reveals the meaning of the scientific epithet: this species, writes Vieillot, has a crest comprising eight narrow vaneless feathers.
Great name, that one; but eight years later, Vieillot, having discovered that the crest in other specimens was made of more than eight feathers, changed both the vernacular and the scientific name, this time giving it the equally logical but inestimably more colorless name brasilianus.
The change created a confusion that persisted for nearly a century, with various authorities going back and forth over the years between some form (often enough mangled) of octosetaceus and brasilianus/brasiliensis. In 1850, Pucheran proposed a new, or rather an old, epithet, lophotes, which he had discovered on the label prepared by Cuvier and attached to Vieillot’s type specimen in Paris; Pucheran also took the opportunity to propose for the first time the synonymization of Latham’s Mergus fuscus. But Pucheran’s new name was pushing the idea of priority too far, and Vieillot’s (inaccurate!) octosetaceus has prevailed.
Pucheran’s–or Cuvier’s–specific name for this rare bird takes us back to the beginning: “lophotes” means simply “crested,” from the same word that gave us Lophodytes. Next time you’re standing around balancing a drink and a horse doover, try some of this stuff out on the other guests: you may never have to worry about being asked out again.
By the way, who doesn’t love the Biodiversity Heritage Library? It’s impossible not to while away an entire day following even the most whimsical thread.
I can remember to the day learning to identify this bird–a White-rumped Sandpiper, photographed yesterday at Sandy Hook. It was at a shorebird workshop in Nebraska in the 1970s, conducted by Mary Tremaine, and it was a real eye-opener: Dr. Tremaine gave us all mimeographed pages introducing a strange and new way to identify shorebirds, using not plumage characters but shape and structure. She even produced a dichotomous key, with such odd choices as “More bird behind legs” and “More bird ahead of legs.”
All very conventional nowadays, though we have more precise, less impressionistic ways of talking about wing projection and such. But remember: this was thirty years before The Shorebird Guide, twenty years before The New Approach, nearly a decade before the National Geographic Guide. Mary Tremaine was way, way ahead of her time, and I’ve often regretted not getting to spend more time at her figurative feet when I was a young birder.
As near as I can tell, she is quite forgotten today, a common enough fate for not-quite-famous birders who lived and died in a pre-internet age. Google turns up the odd citation here and there, but nowhere, so far as I know, did she publish any sustained work on identification techniques. If she had, we’d be talking about her today as a pioneer in modern birding.