I’m guessing that ninety-nine out of a hundred readers of this ‘blog’ identified this Least Sandpiper at the merest of a glance. And I’m equally sure that not one out of that hundred (yes, someday we just might have fully one hundred people reading this blog) could give this familiar and abundant species’ scientific name without hesitating.
Me, I don’t just hesitate. I have to look it up. Every single time. For thirty-five years now.
It’s not that the name is difficult or vague or nonsensical. Calidris minutilla makes as much sense to us today as it did to Vieillot when he named the species (including it in the catch-all genus Tringa) in 1819.
The name of this bird was given it on account of its small size … it shows some affinity to the Tringa minuta of Leisler, which is found in Europe; I believe, however, that it is a separate species.
Minuta is the Little Stint, and in naming his new species, Vieillot simply gave it an even more diminutive diminutive.
So far so good. But the problem is that there are so many of these small sandpipers — and so few good names to go around.
Brisson started it all in 1763, when he described the Semipalmated Sandpiper from a specimen sent from Hispaniola by André Chervain. When Linnaeus gave the French ornithologist’s “petite alouette-de-mer” its Latin binomial, he, sensibly enough, called it Tringa pusilla, simply adopting and translating Brisson’s adjective “petite.”
By the time Middendorf came along in 1851 with the newly discovered Long-toed Stint, all the good names for the “little” sandpipers were used up.
This little bird of our is so similar to Tringa minuta that I have noticed the differences only now, after a closer examination. In its structure, size, and coloration, it cannot be distinguished at all from Tringa minuta in its summer plumage (cf. Naumann), except for its strikingly long toes and the dark-colored shafts of the flight feathers…. I would have classified this bird as a distinctive variant of Tringa minuta if the typical form of that species did not also occur in the Stanowoj Mountains without the least hint of intergradation with [the new bird].
But what to call it? Middendorf settled on subminuta, a name indicating both the bird’s apparent similarity to the sympatric Little Stint and its tiny size, “less than small.”
The long middle toe of Middendorf’s new stint.
What we have today is a bunch of rather similar little sandpipers with a bunch of incredibly similar names:
Of the making of many books there is no end — and in my case at least, of the reading of many of them there is no beginning. My mind is full of the dimly remembered names of all those “minor” writers I’ve wanted to read, or should have read, or — when it comes to so many of my high school English assignments — claim to have read.
Every once in a while I try to make it up.
Donald Culross Peattie was a famous name well before I was born, one encountered again and again in all that sturdy, workman-like prose we read mid-century. For some reason, though, in spite of the praise heaped on him by my favorite naturalist authors, I never actually bothered to take up anything he’d written.
In this Wilson year, though, and in preparation for my August tour, I’ve been trying to read everything I can about the Father of American Ornithology; and I vaguely recalled that Peattie had somewhere published a brief biography.
It doesn’t take long in these days of internet wonders to put flesh on the bones of memory, and soon enough I had downloaded Green Laurels onto my trusty little kindle.
It will surprise some of you (wasn’t I called “an old fogey luddite” in a letter to the editor of Birding a couple of years ago?), but I don’t always mind reading books on line. In this case, though, I decided that I’d want to make some notes, an activity that I still find physically more comfortable with a pad and pencil and a “hard copy” of the book on the desk. So off trundled Alison to the library for me.
I was surprised that the book was available, and more surprised when I opened the clunky green-bound volume, its dust jacket long gone. The accession date penciled onto the flyleaf was nearly forty years later than the publication date: this book had been bought used. And whoever bought it had also purchased the original owner’s bookmarks.
Here, from July 1942, the receipt for something called “295 American Birds,” sold for $2.15 cash in Honolulu, Hawaii; and here, dated some 27 years later, a newspaper clipping observing the erection of a monument on Mauna Kea to the great botanist and explorer David Douglas.
The Hawaii-Montclair connection, puzzling at first, came clear with a look at the bookplate on the front pastedown.
The volume was bought in January 1973 ex libris J. d’Arcy Northwood, a much-traveled figure in the history of twentieth-century birding, in New Jersey and across North America and its most far-flung islands, right up to his death in March 1972. Choate’s Cassiniaobituary has Northwood — a British pilot during World War I, then a California-based sailor — landing in Hawaii, where he supervised plantations, served as a police chief, and in 1939 founded the Hawaii Audubon Society. A year later, he published hisFamiliar Hawaiian Birds.
Then came Florida, where Northwood worked as an Audubon warden, and then Ithaca, where he studied ornithology. Montclair must have come into the picture during his tenure (“short,” says Choate, and not abundantly documented — thereby must hang a tale) as Executive Director of the New Jersey Audubon Society; we know he was living there in 1951, when he published a pretty trivial note in The Auk about swimming yellowlegses.
Northwood’s bookplate is adorned with a sketch of John James Audubon’s Mill Grove, where he was curator of the “Audubon Shrine” until his retirement. According to Clay and Pat Sutton, Northwood, “a character in his own right,” moved with his new wife, the writer and artist Anne Ardrey, to Cape May; their “ramshackle cottage” there is now the Northwood Center of the Cape May Bird Observatory on Lily Lake.
It will be an easy matter to find out which others of the books from Northwood’s Montclair library stayed in town after his death; meanwhile, this volume serves as a direct line from a twenty-first-century reader to a twentieth-century personality I might otherwise never have bothered to look up.
[J.P.] Giraud here [in New York] has thought that there is a permanent distinction between the large & small Black heads and has commenced a description of the smaller kind as Fuligula Minor…. the small one has the black on the lower abdomen, about the anus finely undulate, while the large one has it in spots, & … the large ones have a white spot at the base of the under mandible on the chin which the other has not. These … two characters I want you to examine those in the Washington markets and let me know.
Before the late 1830s, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone that the New World might in fact have two species of scaup.
The opinion, derived from Wilson’s account of the Scaup Duck, that it is met with only along our sea coasts, in bays, or in the mouths of rivers, as far as the tide extends, is incorrect. Had Wilson resided in the Western Country, or seen our large lakes and broad rivers during late autumn, winter, or early spring, he would have had ample opportunities of observing thousands of this species, on the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, from Pittsburg to New Orleans. I have shot a good number of Scaup Ducks on all these rivers….
Wilson gave the length of his “blue bill” as 19 inches.
Audubon, thanks to his greater experience, was able to note “that specimens may be procured measuring from sixteen and a half to eighteen, nineteen, or twenty inches in length,” a significant range of variation in a duck — but he assures his reader nonetheless that scaup “seen in various parts presented no such differences as to indicate permanent varieties.”
Just a few years later, Giraud disagreed. In addition to the subtle marks William Baird was to confirm in the market stalls of Washington, D.C., Giraud had discovered that the size difference between the two apparently different species was consistent; he also showed Baird that
in the smaller ones the white band on the wing is distinctly of that color only on the secondaries & not extending to the primaries as on the large one…. the inside of the bill is dark in the small one & whitish in the large…. the small one is most tufted and has a purplish reflection on the head instead of a greenish one.
By 1844, Giraud had convinced himself that these differences rose to the level of a specific distinction, and his famous Birds of Long Island offers a full description of what he names the Lesser Scaup Duck, Fuligula minor.
What Giraud in those pre-internet days did not know was that another ornithologist had got there first. T.C. Eyton admitted in his 1838 Monograph on the Anatidaethat he “entertained considerable doubts as to the propriety of making [it] into a species”; but the differences he discovered between this new bird and the familiar Greater Scaup were “constant”:
total length less; bill shorter and not so broad; nail much narrower, and not so much rounded at its sides; tarsi shorter.
similar to the preceding species [the Greater Scaup] but with a shorter bill furnished with a narrower nail.
As late as 1922, Ludlow Griscom included the two scaup among the “birds which it is practically impossible to distinguish in life,” a remark — published in the Auk — that seems very curious indeed when we realize that almost a hundred years earlier both Giraud and Eyton had published precisely those characters birders routinely use today: head shape, bill shape, nail size, wing pattern.
But the real historic irony lurks in Audubon’s painting. There is only one species of scaup, he tells us — and then paints birds that are obviously Lesser Scaup avant la lettre.
The photograph at the top of this entry is of a flock of Aythya ducks at the Jersey shore yesterday. Can you identify them?
Of all the great names from the generation of the DVOC‘s founders, that of Samuel N. Rhoads may be heard the least.
Even in this year of the sesquicentennial of his birth, Rhoads remains for most of us a dimly remembered name, encountered once or twice, perhaps, in Witmer Stone’s Old Cape May and then forgotten. A leading light a century ago in North and Central American ornithology, Rhoads now seems to be little more than a subject for local historians and eccentric “bloggers” who really should be working on something else.
Ironically, Rhoads may be better known today in the west than here in his native mid-Atlantic. His collecting tours of Texas and Arizona in the 1890s resulted in a number of records still cited today, and his pioneering trip to Washington and British Columbia was, until recently, commemorated each year by the late-summer “Rhoads Count” conducted by the Kootenay Naturalists.
In addition to his attainments as a naturalist, Rhoads was a devoted historian of his field. Writes William Evans Bacon in the Cassinia obituary illustrated by the photograph above
Except for his labors, numerous records of great interest, particularly those pertaining to pioneer days, would have been irretrievably lost …. Rhoads amassed his information by extensive search through the literature, by the examination of museum specimens, … and by personal interviews with naturalists, trappers, trappers, old pioneers, and frontiersmen.
That historical interest was accompanied, inevitably, by the usual bibliophily, and in the first two decades of the last century, Rhoads owned a small Philadelphia bookshop and publishing house, its most notable productions facsimiles and reprints of such regionally important titles as the botanist William Young’s Catalogueand Ord’sAmerican Zoology. In 1903, Rhoads printed his own most important work, The Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Given these predilections and pre-occupations, it’s no surprise to find that Rhoads’s own library was carefully assembled and, more remarkably, apparently curated with an eye to posterity. I don’t know where the collection ended up after his death, but one of the most interesting volumes, his copy of Witmer Stone’s Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is now in Firestone Library.
Rhoads was a member of the DVOC committee charged with overseeing the production of this work, and, as he wrote on the second flyleaf in September 1924, he saw his copy as a repository of documents bearing on the history of the Club and its most ambitious publication to date:
Samuel N. Rhoads: / His private copy, / with insertions appropriate / to the history and make-up / of the book. / Bound up Sept. 1924.
Among the documents inserted into Rhoads’s scrapbook are appeals for phenological information about the birds of the region, directed to the general public
and, no doubt more profitably, to “gunners and sportsmen” who might be able to furnish unusual records.
There are also more personal bits of history, including Rhoads’s collecting permit — “license to kill or take said song or wild birds and game mammals” —
and a delightful letter in pale purple ink from his step-cousin George Morris, full of news of egg collecting and boating mishaps:
The general history of the DVOC is represented by a fine photo of this January 1898 meeting — taken exactly 85 years before the first women were admitted to membership:
Rhoads is number 23, his cousin Morris number 24; Stone, number 28, is seated at the table with the open book. In his handwritten key, Rhoads tells us that this self-same photo was used as “proof” for his 1902 Bird-Lore article and afterwards returned to him by Frank Chapman.
There are postcards and field lists, too, but the most wondrous of the ephemera preserved here is an invitation to a party for Witmer Stone on the occasion of his having “committed Matrimony”:
Two years after Rhoads had his little archive bound, there was an explosion and fire in his Haddonfield house. The books, obviously, survived, but Rhoads’s spirit did not: “conflicting currents of emotion” overwhelmed him, in Evans’s discreet phrase, and he spent the last quarter century of his life in seclusion, sometimes in confinement, until he died, sixty years ago today, leaving us this unique record of the early days of a venerable institution.
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?
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.
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.
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?
