Archive for Nebraska
Crane Noise
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s nothing like the sound of Sandhill Cranes coming off the roost on a March morning. Click on the photo to hear a tiny portion of the flock at the Alda Bridge yesterday morning.
The Eagle Goose
Posted by: | CommentsSnow Geese are taken pretty much for granted across most of the continent nowadays, but the dark morph of Lesser Snow Goose remains a Midwestern specialty.
It’s only relatively recently that these handsome white-headed birds were recognized as conspecific with their snowy brethren; my first field guide still listed them as a separate species (which betrays not my age so much as the vintage of my first bird book).
The “lump” came in 1973, and with it one of those delightful onomastic mixups that bird taxonomy is so prone too. Priority required that the scientific name of the newly enlarged species be Chen caerulescens. Thus, all Snow Geese, including those populations that do not have a dark morph, now bear the name originally assigned the dusky birds, a name that means, well, “blue goose.”
It would be no more nonsensical, and even more amusing, had we adopted another of the old common names of the dark morph, “Eagle Goose,” which describes the adult’s bright white head. Maybe I’ll propose it to the AOU….
Spring Sounds
Posted by: | CommentsClick here and turn up the volume if you want to hear the sounds of spring in Buffalo County, Nebraska.
Can you identify that sweet thin warbled song? It’s one most of us don’t get to hear very often.
The Platte River at Fort Kearny.
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.
