Archive for Nebraska
An Unfortunate Name
Posted by: | CommentsMy friends over at NEBirds have been carrying on an amusing conversation about bird names–just the sort of thing to get us through these dog-day afternoons of August. A very sharp young birder brought up the Paltry Tyrannulet, a cute little tropical flycatcher whose English name seems determined to add insult to diminutive injury.
In a fascinating bit of serendipity, this onomastically maligned bird, resident from Mexico south through Central America to Colombia, in fact has a Nebraska connection. Described 150 years ago in the genus Elainia, the tyrannulet was quickly renamed Tyranniscus vilissimus, where it remained until in 1977 the late Melvin Traylor–himself memorialized in the scientific name of the Orange-eyed Flatbill Tolmomyias traylori–erected a new genus for this and another ten or species.
Traylor named his new genus Zimmerius, in honor of the great and little-remembered American ornithologist John Todd Zimmer. Born in Ohio in 1889, Zimmer and his family moved to Nebraska in the early years of the twentieth century, and he graduated from the University of Nebraska one hundred years ago this year; he took the M.A. there in 1911, and was granted the D.Sc. honoris causa in 1943. Like others I could name, Zimmer spent much of his college time outside looking for birds and inside looking at birds, and he eventually left a large and very fine collection of Nebraska skins to the state museum, where they still reside.
Zimmer left Nebraska to hold positions in the Philippines and New Guinea, then moved to the Field Museum and finally to the American Museum, where he spent nearly thirty years working on the birds of the Neotropics, particularly Peru. The naming of Zimmerius recognizes his contribution to the taxonomy of South American birds, cited by the Brewster Medal Committee in 1952 as “truly the foundation for the work of all other current students of the South American avifauna.”
Unfortunately, when Sclater and Salvin named the Paltry Tyrannulet in 1859, they gave it the specific epithet vilissimus, the superlative of the Latin adjective vilis, meaning (as its English descendant “vile” would suggest) “contemptible, worthless, ordinary, vulgar,” a reflection of both the bird’s abundance and its relatively undistinguished appearance. With Traylor’s revision, though, the species’ current scientific name, Zimmerius vilissimus, joins the epithet to a person’s name–giving us a translation something like “the very contemptible Zimmer.” The fact that the species is polytypic makes it even worse: the nominate subspecies, Z. v. vilissimus, is “the very, very contemptible Zimmer.”
Surely not what Traylor wanted to say, but such things happen in the world of birds and words.
Half a Mammal
Posted by: | CommentsAs I think back on it, it’s possible that well more than half of my “life mammals” first crossed my path in Fontenelle Forest. The tally this past Easter weekend, though, was less than impressive: White-tailed Deer, Muskrat, Fox Squirrel, all of them common, all of them so familiar as to be almost unavoidable.
One species I was especially eager to see–my friends from the east may snort in disbelief–was Eastern Gray Squirrel. Hugely abundant in the heart of its native range (and disturbingly common here in Vancouver, where it is an introduced pest species), this mammal is uncommon to scarce as far north as Peru, in southeast Nebraska, and very rare indeed as far up the Missouri River as Bellevue. Over three and a half decades of hiking and looking, I can still count on both hands my encounters with the creature in Sarpy County.
Friday last I was wandering the Missouri’s flood plain on a dim, dull morning, when suddenly I spied with my own little eye a grizzled tail hanging down from a tree.
A second look confirmed that the guard hairs edging the appendage were white, not black as in Fox Squirrel: it was indeed the tail of an Eastern Gray Squirrel. But not much more than that, alas.
I don’t know who stashed this bit of squirrel in the tree. I’d seen a couple of Red-tailed Hawks and a Cooper’s Hawk that morning. My money’s on the Barred Owls, though, still singing loud in the dim, dull light, as they’re wont to do in early spring. And what’s better than a sciurid snack at breakfast?
I couldn’t fault the raptors’ taste; rarity must have its culinary benefits, too. But still I wished I’d arrived while the squirrel was still scampering and the owls were still hungry.
Nebraska: Scaly Signs of Spring
Posted by: | CommentsThe first stimulus to assault my senses when I got out of the car in Bellevue Thursday night was the almost deafening trilling of chorus frogs, a sound that more than any other says spring in the midwest.
And so I wasn’t surprised to hear leopard frogs the next day in Fontenelle Forest, their tongue-clucking quacks another sure sign that winter was over. Painted Turtles, too, emerged as the day warmed, and I glimpsed a snake’s tail disappearing into the grass at one point, too big to be Dekay’s snake and so probably a garter snake of one species or another.
Far and away the day’s most impressive herps, though, were the snapping turtles. Though they probably can’t snap a broomstick or take off a hand–cherished mythologies to the contrary–these animal do attain an impressive bulk in southeast Nebraska, and to see their weird angular forms slogging through the mud is a reminder of a prehistoric past when a foreign megafauna still crept around.
(Click here for a video of one in Fontenelle Forest last Friday.)
It’s rare, however, in my experience to see a snapper haul out to sun. But that’s just what this mossy-backed fellow was doing.
That’s a very large cottonwood trunk it’s lying on, and the animal’s carapace was well into its second foot in length.
Just what a monster like this eats, I couldn’t say, but I assume that small fish, frogs, even muskrats mind their surroundings when one of these shows up.
Fontenelle Forest Flowers
Posted by: | CommentsEastern Nebraska’s snow had disappeared by the time we arrived for Easter weekend, but the wildflower season was still anything but advanced.
A few early bloomers were poking up from the forest floor, though, among them Virginia waterleaf and Dutchman’s breeches–here surrounding a fine scarlet cup fungus.
We never did find a Hydrophyllum in bloom, but the Dicentra had started on some of the slopes in the Fontenelle Forest upland.
Claytonia leaves were everywhere in evidence, and there were a few widely scattered colonies in bloom.
It won’t be long until this spring beauty is joined by dozens of others in the Missouri River bluffs, from showy orchis to dogtooth violet. It’s been years–decades–since I’ve witnessed an entire flower season in the midwest, and the sight of the early blossoms this Easter weekend made me miss it, and envy a little those who have only to step outside.
Northern Flicker
Posted by: | CommentsAlison took this great picture of a Yellow-shafted Flicker in eastern Nebraska this weekend.
You don’t have to go too much west of the Missouri River before the flickers get all orangey, but in the extreme east, most of them in breeding season are at least visually pure, with golden flight-feather shafts and nice red nuchal crescents. This male had solid black malars on both sides, too. Nebraska birders don’t pay these beauties much mind, but we stood open-mouthed at more than one this past weekend.
