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Hoover’s Warbler

The Yellow-rumped Warbler deluge shows no sign of receding, and Jericho Park is pretty much crawling with chipping, singing, flycatching Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers again today.

It’s important–well, I think it’s important–to remember that both Audubon’s and Myrtle are polytypic; thus, it’s incorrect to speak of “the Audubon’s subspecies” or “the Myrtle subspecies” of Yellow-rumped Warbler, unless, of course, you’re using the word in the plural. The Myrtle Warblers we see here in Vancouver, the breeding race of northern British Columbia, are Dendroica coronata hooveri, differing in measurements and in some plumage characters from their eastern, nominate-race cousins.

This subspecies was described in 1899 by Richard C. McGregor, an adoptive Californian who would later become famous as the doyen of Philippine ornithology. He named his subsp. nov. after his college friend Theodore J. Hoover, collector of the type specimen and the older brother of Herbert.

In preparing his original description, McGregor also used specimens taken by Henry Ward Carriger, an early California oologist. I don’t know much about Carriger–fill me in if you do–but I was greatly impressed to read that as early as 1898, he had recognized the differences in the call notes of Audubon’s and Myrtle Warblers, a distinction that even today not all birders are aware of.

The Californians were out in front even then.

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Just Rumps

Vancouver’sJericho Park was covered with warblers this afternoon, but try as I might, I couldn’t find anything other than Yellow-rumps.

That’s an insidious “but,” of course, suggesting as it does that Yellow-rumped Warbler is somehow lesser than the other possible parulids. It is indeed much more abundant than any other, but that doesn’t make this species any less interesting. Or these species.

The birding world is abuzz with anticipation of a re-split of the yellow-rumped warblers, which were lumped almost 40 years ago in the great taxonomic massacre of the 1973 AOU Supplement. Now the Check-list Committee is evaluating a proposal to recognize at least two separate species in Dendroica coronata as now construed (and to correct the genus name to Setophaga–but that’s another story).

Both white-throated Myrtle Warblers and yellow-throated Audubon’s Warblers breed in British Columbia, and both are common migrants here in the Vancouver area, with the latter taxon generally the more abundant. Apparent hybrids and intergrades are easy to find if you look; one bird this afternoon had the yellow throat of an Audubon’s and the white malars and reduced white on the greater coverts of a Myrtle–I’m not sure I ever heard it chip, unfortunately.

The AOU Committee doesn’t much care what a birder wants, but still I hope for the split. And if it comes, I think we’ll all start paying attention again to what have for too long been “just yellow-rumps.”

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Golden Crowns and Black Tresses

Names are really just extreme words. And if the link between “ordinary” words and things is arbitrary, then that between names and the denoted can be downright capricious. Bird names are no exception, as generations of the literal-minded have moaned.

But a few birds enjoy names that are, wonder of wonders, straightforwardly descriptive.

Golden-crowned Sparrow? I’ll buy that. Hard to imagine what else you might call this bird with its, well, golden crown.

Unless, that it is, you happened to be Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who gave the species its scientific name in 1789. Gmelin was working from a not very good painting by John Latham, who labeled the bird “Black-crowned Bunting,” notwithstanding his description and depiction of the “fine yellow” of the crown.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Gmelin followed Latham’s slightly misleading lead in assigning the species the epithet atricapilla, meaning “black hair.”

That too makes sense from some views, I suppose, though I can’t help wondering why Latham and then Gmelin would have zeroed in on those midnight locks rather than the aureate crown. No accounting for taste!

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Eagles of the Mind

Another beautiful morning at Jericho Park, spring threatening to break out all over in spite of the gray skies.

I’d gone in hopes of passerine migrants, and there were plenty of Audubon’s (and a couple of Myrtle) Warblers and Golden-crowned and Ruby-crowned Kinglets around. But the best bird of the morning was a falcon, a tiny male American Kestrel that floated south through the bunny theater, sending the Golden-crowned and White-crowned Sparrows scampering off into the brush.

Bigger raptors were easy to find, of course: just listen to the Northwestern Crows.

I was standing underneath this adult Bald Eagle, trying unsuccessfully to read the band on its right tarsus, when a tiny woman on a bicycle paused to tell me that if I wanted to see an eagle, I should try Spanish Banks.

I might have stammered a little as I thanked her, but by now, after a year and a bit in Vancouver, I’m pretty much used to it. People here know that there are eagles around, they know it’s a big deal, but not one in a hundred has ever seen one–even when they’re looking straight at them.

I have no idea how many occupied nests are within easy walking distance of our apartment, but just offhand I can think of three; birds from those aeries and unattached non-breeders are in the sky pretty much constantly, visible and often audible from even the busiest Vancouver street.

It’s no great surprise that most Vancouverites don’t notice them, big and noisy as they (the eagles!) are. But the fact that they still talk about them, that they assume that anyone with binoculars must be out looking for eagles, speaks volumes about the cultural weight of these birds. Just knowing they’re out there really matters to the locals, whether they know what they look like or not.

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The Eagle Goose

Snow 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….

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