replied at once that the bird was an entirely distinct species, laying a very different egg [before shooting the adult, Bendire had collected at least six egg sets of the species in June 1872], and having somewhat dissimilar habits; and he finally settled the case by sending [Coues] a male skin, precisely like the original female specimen, together with several of both sexes of … Palmeri, all alike different from the new bird.
Coues doesn’t quite say “I told you so,” but poor Ridgway doesn’t come out looking any too good in this story. The Smithsonian ornithologist’s misidentification, Coues writes,
puzzled me … but presuming, of course, that he knew his own species better than I did, I felt obliged to rest on what he told me, though I was dissatisfied, and in … the Key, with the specimen before me, refrained from alluding to this (supposed) female of … Palmeri….
Ridgway having missed his chance, it was left to Coues to name the new species, a task he, no doubt gleefully, performed in the pages of The American Naturalist in June 1873, calling it Harporhynchus Bendirei, the Bendire’s Mocking-Thrush.
The skins Bendire sent Coues are now in the US National Museum’s collection, where they lie on their backs with red labels identifying them as the co-types of their species.
Coues treated the two specimens slightly, and tellingly, differently. His formal description is based entirely on the male skin, with just a note at the end that the female is “not distinguishable from the male.” And in incorporating the skins into his private collection, he catalogued the male first, before the female, which had been shot more than three months earlier. It’s an old story and often told, ornithology’s consistent treatment of the male bird as the unmarked category, but rarely do we come across such a glaring example as this one. Male? Female? Yes.
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:
[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?
Our insatiable hordes of gobbling Pine Siskins have pretty much moved on, greatly to the relief of our savings account, but we’re still enjoying the sweet little Red-breasted Nuthatches that seem to have settled in for the season. They’re no less ravenous than the streaky finches, and every bit as tame. I can hardly rehang the feeder before one of the little tooters lights on it, and it’s just a matter of time before they start landing on me, too.
Lots of backyard birders in the east have been taking advantage of the birds’ tameness this fall to train them to take food from the hand. I disapprove, in my puritanically strict hands-offitude, but the dozens upon dozens of accounts of hand-feeding I’ve read over the past couple of months got me to wondering: who first figured out that you could coax wild birds to take sunflower seed directly from a human?
There’s probably no answer to that, at least not until we’ve identified the original domesticator of the chicken. Meanwhile, though, let me introduce you to young Harriet Kinsley of McGregor, Iowa.
Wilson Bulletin 27.2 (1912): 314.
Exactly a hundred years ago this fall, Harriet and her mother discovered a new bird in their yard, one that
took it for granted that he was the sole owner of the feeding table, and it took a great deal of his time trying to keep the other birds away,
among them the numerous “chickadees, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, juncoes, a pair of cardinals, blue jays and the white-breasted nuthatches.” Neither Harriet nor her mother had seen the species before, but they took careful note of the bird’s plumage characters:
a bluish slate-colored back with black stripes running back above each eye and the breast tinged with rufous.
Harriet looked the stranger up in her bird book, and correctly identified it as a Red-breasted Nuthatch. It was her mother’s idea to teach the bird, which was soon burdened with the inevitable nickname “Hatchie,” to eat from her hand:
One day my mother thought she would put a nut meat on her hand and see how near he would come to it. He wanted the nut very much, but was a little shy about coming down to get it ; he scolded, cocking his head first on one side and then on the other. The temptation was too great; he would risk his life: he made a swoop, lighting on her hand, and away he went with the nut. The next day we all tried the same thing and found he would take them after a great deal of scolding. We fed him every day and he gradually grew less timid.
“Less timid” indeed: Harriet’s account, published in the Wilson Bulletin, makes it sound like the family was terrorized by the sharp-billed little beast. He started to demand to be fed — and only butternuts, if you please, no black walnuts — perching on doors and window sills to look into the house.
We had to keep little piles of nuts by several of the windows so we would not have to go so far.
The Kinsley family’s servitude lasted all through the winter, ending only on March 31, 1913, when their importunate guest finally flew north.
And what about Harriet? Even in those more relaxed days a century ago, when the Wilson Ornithological Club was still pronouncedly regional and midwestern in its “flavor,” it was remarkable to find a Campfire Girl publishing in the pages of the Wilson Bulletin. She is still listed as a member of the Club in 1917, but disappears from the rolls by 1920. No doubt the responsibilities of adulthood had set in by then, taking up the time that she had spent as a girl watching the bird tables.
Before life caught up with her (she married Roy Neff, the principal of McGregor High School in 1929), though, Harriet had almost certainly had contact with two of twentieth-century Iowa’s prominent ornithological observers — both of them fellow members of the Wilson Club.
Mary E. Hatch of McGregor was an assiduous collector of migration records and the author of (fairly vapid) articles in the Wilson Bulletin on the Northern Cardinal and the House Wren in northeastern Iowa. In that same cold winter of 1912 when Harriet Kinsley was feeding birds from her hand, Mary (no relation, I’m sure, to Hatchie) also noted several unusual birds — among them Red-bellied Woodpeckers, a Carolina Wren, a Winter Wren, and three “Kentucky Cardinals” — among “the large number of pensioners” visiting her family’s “well-filled table.”
I don’t know whether Mary Hatch was also a Campfire Girl, but both young women must have found inspiration in the bird studies of their famous neighbor in National (she received her mail in McGregor), Althea Sherman.
whose habitat is in deep, wooded ravines, [and is] very rarely … seen upon the prairie. To have one come in mid-winter, find food, even to visit the feeding-stick and linger around for three weeks, was as pleasant as it was unexpected.
Sherman’s mention of “many experiments … made to learn the winter bird boarders’ choice in foods” recalls — and may well have inspired — Harriet Kinsley’s offering her tame nuthatch a choice between butternuts and walnuts. I am still in search of the missing link (nowadays I think we’d call it the missing url) to establish the connection between Harriet, Mary, and Althea Sherman, but their experiences and their writings suggest that McGregor, Iowa, a little town on the Mississippi, was the place to be a hundred years ago, in the nuthatch winter of 1912.
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?
