Winter isn’t very wintry lately here in northern New Jersey. The dog and I spent a couple of hours at the Meadowlands on a warm, windy afternoon yesterday, and it could have been early spring.

With all the water open, Greater Yellowlegs weren’t that much of a surprise, and the Canvasback raft–now up to 235 birds–was pretty much expected, too.

The real surprise, though, was a ticking, tail-wagging Western Palm Warbler in the phragmites. That’s a rugged parulid if ever there was one, but even so, it should have been in Florida palms at this time of year, or at least hanging out in the relatively tropical climes of Cape May with all the other half-hardies.

Full list at eBird.

I’ve made three trips to Barnegat Light this past week, each of them a lot of fun: how can it fail when there are Purple Sandpipers and Common Eiders, and, yesterday, Razorbills to enjoy?

And Harlequin Ducks, of course.

This odd and beautiful little sea duck has been a reliable target for birders at Barnegat Light since at least the mid-1980s, when I first started visiting the   flock there; but something has changed in recent years.

In the 80s and even just a decade ago, fishermen and jetty walkers used to stop and ask me whether I was looking for whales or watching ships. My answer: no, just watching birds. Oh, they’d say, and that was that.

Nowadays, I can hardly get out of the parking lot without having someone ask me whether I’m going out to see the Harlequins. And once I’m out on that treacherous jetty, everyone I meet is eager to point them out, to talk about them, to ask whether they’re in yet.

It’s a great thing, this overwhelming popular consciousness of a rare and inconspicuous bird, but I wonder where it came from. Was there a series of newspaper articles, a special on public television, a poster competition in the public schools? Whatever did it, it’s heartwarming (and a little mysterious) to find non-birders, honest-to-goodness normal people, proud of these fine feathered visitors.

Help me think about this by answering two easy questions:

1. Who was your birding mentor?

2. Who was that person’s birding mentor?

You may need to talk to the answer to the first before you can answer the second. But it will be worth it.

Want to enjoy birding even more? Join me this spring at the Westfield Adult School for a new course. We’ll be meeting two Monday evenings for lecture and discussion, followed by a Saturday morning field trip to try out our new skills.

You can register here. See you in March!

Winter at Barnegat Light is the time to look for such specialties as Common Eider, Harlequin Duck, Long-tailed Duck, Great Cormorant, Northern Gannet, Purple Sandpiper, Snow Bunting, and Ipswich Sparrow; there’s also a chance at a rare gull or a Snowy Owl.

Meet at the lighthouse at 9:00 am on Monday, January 23; we’ll be finished by 2:00 pm. Carpoolers can meet at 6:30 am in the Pet Smart parking lot at the intersection of Highway 23 and Willowbrook Boulevard. New birders, casual birders, out-of-towners are especially welcome!

Dress for the cold, and bring notebook, pencil, and lunch.

Our morning wasn’t exactly a dud, but I can’t say that we were subjected to all that many interruptions of a feathered kind, either, as Alison and I birded Verona and Hilltop Parks.

We did come up with 21 species, none of them rare or otherwise notable to anyone who can’t appreciate a Great Blue Heron standing motionless in the shade, a Red-tailed Hawk being blown overhead like a huge rusty leaf, or a curious White-throated Sparrow emerging, silent for once, from the brush to check us out.

We’ve had lots of good CBCs together now over the years. Wonder where next December will find us birding!

Nice way to end the year. Merry Christmas!

This Western Kingbird has been installed near Sandy Hook for several days now. It made me wait this noon, not flying in until I’d nearly given up, but then joined a small flock of Eastern Bluebirds plucking fruit from some berry-laden vines.

A pretty bird, and likely my last of the year for New Jersey.

For the last two weeks, we’ve had one appear almost every day in our backyard ash, where it steadfastly ignores the feeders that are at the center of all the other birds’ attention, creeping brownly up the bare branches in search of its own delicacies.

I’ve seen creepers feeding at suet blocks, but this one seems to show up just for the company. A friendly little beast, and we’re happy to have it.

Hooded Merganser and Red-breasted Merganser

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.