The Experience of Birding
This Slate-colored Junco is easy to pick out as it feeds on the ground outside my work room window.
Not so easy to pick off, though: it looks like one of our neighborhood Cooper’s Hawks — or, heaven forfend, a house cat — wound up with a mouthful of rectrices.
Audubon’s famous Fork-tailed Flycatcher, collected in New Jersey in June 1832, gets all the press.
But that wasn’t the first fork-tail recorded in the US — or even, amazingly enough, the first for New Jersey.
Sometime before 1825 — the usual date in the secondary literature seems to be “around 1820,” while Boyle gives “around 1812” —
a beautiful male, in full plumage … was shot near Bridgetown, New-Jersey, at the extraordinary season of the first week in December, and was presented by Mr. J. Woodcraft, of that town, to Mr. Titian Peale, who favoured me with the opportunity of examining it.
“Me,” of course, is Charles Lucian Bonaparte, writing in his American Ornithology, for which Peale also provided the rather stiffly elegant plate reproduced above.
When James Bond set out, almost 75 years ago now, to determine the subspecific identity of US Fork-tailed Flycatchers, he was unable to locate any of the specimens taken before 1834, “if any exist.” But even absent a skin, Bonaparte’s detailed description of the Bridgeton bird allows us to pin it down almost 200 years later:
… the three outer [primaries] have a very extraordinary and profound sinus or notch on their inner webs, near the tip, so as to terminate in a slender process.
That is enough, according to Zimmer, to identify the Woodcraft specimen as a member of the subspecies savana (then known as tyrannus).
That austral migrant, abundant in its range, is responsible for almost all northerly records of this species, though Zimmer identified one New Jersey specimen, of unknown date and locality, as sanctaemartae (a determination adjudged only “possible” by Pyle).
To Bonaparte, it was “evident” that his specimen “must have strayed from its native country under the influence of extraordinary circumstances.”
That’s for sure.
Now here’s a true mega: A Cape May Warbler, the second for Britain, is being seen on Unst, that delightfully named island in the Shetlands.
Inevitably, the oldtimers have already started reminiscing about that much brighter, male Cape May that set up shop in Paisley, Scotland, in June 1977. And, inevitably, journalists and others have been trotting out the old canard:
Interestingly, the ornithologist who first discovered the species, Alexander Wilson, was born and spent his youth in Paisley….
But our warbler had been known to science for half a century by the time Wilson learned of its existence. In 1789, more than two decades before Wilson put pen to paper about what he mistakenly considered a “new and beautiful little species,” Gmelin knew the bird — and gave it the nicely descriptive name Motacilla tigrina in his edition of Linnaeus’s Systema.
The real eye-opener here is — or should be — all the earlier citations Gmelin is able to adduce. Edwards, Brisson, Buffon, Pennant, and Latham had all described this warbler in the mid- and late eighteenth century, a couple of their accounts even accompanied by paintings.
So much for the notion that Wilson — who died 200 years ago this year — was the “discoverer” of the species.
Indeed, not even Wilson himself, though laboring under the notion that the warbler was unknown when he first saw it, claimed the bird as his own discovery. In his American Ornithology, he puts it as clearly as anyone possibly could:
This new and beautiful little species was discovered in a maple swamp, in Cape May county, not far from the coast, by Mr. George Ord….
The latest book-length study of Wilson, Burtt and Davis’s Alexander Wilson, points this out — and identifies what has meanwhile become the authoritative source of the subsequent error, namely, Audubon’s account of the species in the Ornithological Biography:
Of this beautiful species, which was first described by Wilson, very little is known…. I am indebted for the fine specimens … to my generous friend Edward Harris….
Now there’s an irony. Audubon devoted so much energy to denying Wilson‘s priority in other cases, but here, thanks to his profound disdain for George Ord (or to sloppy reading and even sloppier bibliographic work), he created a myth that is still being retold nearly two hundred years later.
But we all know better. Three cheers for Edwards and the rest!
After yesterday afternoon’s cold front, we thought we had it made this morning. The woods along the Delaware River would, we thought, be swarming with warblers and vireos and flycatchers and tanagers. All we needed to do, we thought, was get there.
“There” in this case is a very special place in the history of American ornithology.
Point Breeze was the country estate of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of the first Napoleon and erstwhile king of Naples and of Spain. At the mouth of Crosswicks Creek in Bordentown, New Jersey, Point Breeze was also the home for some five years of Charles Lucian Bonaparte and his cousin-wife, Zénaïde, and it was here on the banks of the Delaware that the Prince of Musignano and Canino conducted much of the work that would lead Coues to call the 1820s “the Bonapartian Period” in American ornithology.
Bonaparte had better luck with the birds than we did. But still we enjoyed treading the same paths trod almost two hundred years ago by the man Coues styled “the princely person.”
Back in Bonaparte days, the marsh at the bottom of the hill was a lake, formed by damming Thornton Creek. The view down Crosswicks Creek to the Delaware is still impressive, and this would be a great place to simply set up and wait on a day when migrants really did decide to show up.
The house Joseph built above the lake for his daughter and son-in-law is long gone, replaced by tall beeches and tulip trees.
The tangled banks held chipping Northern Cardinals and mewling Gray Catbirds; on a warbler day, the edges could be lively.
The most evocative spot we discovered was this crumbling stretch of carriage road.
The only intact structure from Bonaparte’s day is the old Garden House, a modest building now overlooking lawns and a sparse orchard but once guarding the entrance to Joseph Bonaparte’s formal gardens.
This little house, too, has its place in ornithological history. You can read about that, and more about Charles Bonaparte and American ornithology, tomorrow at the newly remodeled ABA Blog. See you over there!
Thanks to Alison and to Hidden New Jersey‘s Sue and Ivan for the excellent birding company, and to the Divine Word Mission in Bordentown for allowing us access to their grounds.
Tens of thousands of cars, back and forth, every day, all night long, without cease: the Garden State Parkway bridge over Great Egg Harbor is as busy as it is dramatic. Whoosh. Whoosh. On to Cape May. On to Atlantic City. On to Philadelphia and New York.
Of the human hordes crossing the bridge, only a vanishingly few look out at the vastness of the salt marsh to ask where this place got its name; I even know birders who have never thought about it, too absorbed in the Great Black-backed Gulls and the occasional Peregrine Falcon perched atop the light poles whizzing past at 65 mph.
A moment’s consideration, or a quick glance at google, answers the question: this is one of the many sites worldwide whose wild birds — ducks, gulls, terns, shorebirds — once supplied eggs to nearby urban markets, often in astonishing numbers.
The locus classicus for such activities is Audubon’s description of the eggers of Labrador:
At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause…. But nothing of this sort occurs to the Egger, who gathers and gathers, until he has swept the rock bare. The dollars alone chink in his sordid mind…. With a bark nearly half filled with fresh eggs they proceed….
The year before, Audubon’s party had encountered a similar scene two thousand miles to the south, beneath the glare of a Dry Tortugas sky:
At Bird Key we found a party of Spanish Eggers from Havannah. They had already laid in a cargo of about eight tons of the eggs of [the Sooty] Tern and the Noddy. On asking them how many they supposed they had, they answered that they never counted them, even while selling them, but disposed of them at seventy-five cents per gallon; and that one turn to market sometimes produced upwards of two hundred dollars….
A hundred twenty years later, James Fisher did the math for us, determining that eight tons was about 250,000 tern eggs.
I’d always assumed that all those eggs were for eating. But then I read this, in the prose notes to James Jennings’s Ornithologia:
The Torda, Razor-bill, Auk, Common-Auk, or Murre …. lays one very large egg, size of a turkey’s of a dirty white colour, blotched with brown and dusky, on the projecting shelves of the highest rocks…. The eggs of this bird, and of the foolish guillemot, are an article of trade in several of the Scottish isles; they are used for refining sugar.
Though I wouldn’t call Jennings the most reliable source on the shelf, he turns out to be right. David A. Wells, in his Principles and Applications of Chemistry, informed a no doubt eager public that crude sugar is refined
by dissolving the brown sugars in water, adding albumen (whites of eggs, or bullocks’ blood), and sometimes a little lime-water, and heating the whole to the boiling point. The albumen, under the influence of heat, coagulates, and forms a kind of network of fibers, which inclose and separate from the liquid all the mechanically suspended impurities.
I assume that the process today does without auks’ eggs and cow blood, presumably substituting manufactured chemicals for those earthy ingredients.
