Winter isn’t very wintry lately here in northern New Jersey. The dog and I spent a couple of hours at the Meadowlands on a warm, windy afternoon yesterday, and it could have been early spring.

With all the water open, Greater Yellowlegs weren’t that much of a surprise, and the Canvasback raft–now up to 235 birds–was pretty much expected, too.

The real surprise, though, was a ticking, tail-wagging Western Palm Warbler in the phragmites. That’s a rugged parulid if ever there was one, but even so, it should have been in Florida palms at this time of year, or at least hanging out in the relatively tropical climes of Cape May with all the other half-hardies.

Full list at eBird.

In his splendid new photographic guide to the North American tubenoses, Steve Howell laments the nomenclatural and taxonomic “clusters” that hound so many of these birds. He’s absolutely right: it’s a mess, as even the quickest glance (and who could stand more?) at Coues’s bibliographical notes on the history of tubenoses will prove.

Take, for example, the beautiful and rarish Black-capped Petrel. The AOU Check-list tells us merely that this bird was named Procellaria hasitata by Heinrich Kuhl in 1820. But a look at that original description suggests complication. Kuhl attributes the discovery of the species to the great Johann Reinhold Forster, who, says Kuhl, depicted it on two of his plates, once as Procellaria hasitata and once under the name leucocephala.

But Forster’s ornithological records were still unpublished in 1820 (they would not appear in print until 1844, nearly 50 years after Forster’s death), so Kuhl gets the credit for naming the species. It turns out, however, that Kuhl somehow got his petrels mixed up, and that Forster’s name hasitata actually referred to the Gray Petrel, nowadays known (rather prosaically) as Procellaria cinerea. Thanks to the rules of publication and priority, though, Kuhl’s name is the one that stuck.

But what about this name hasitata? There’s no such Latin word, and the emendation to haesitata–made by many, including Coues himself, without comment–isn’t much of an improvement. Instead, I suspect that Kuhl followed Forster in a different misspelling.

The perfectly good Latin word “hasta” means spear or blade; “hastatum,” which comes into botanical English as “hastate,” means “bladelike,” sharply pointed or angular. In ornithology, the adjective is used to describe the shape of the angular spots on the Indian Spotted Eagle and on the southwest Mexican subspecies of the Middle American Screech-Owl. I think that Forster used the word, with the insertion of a barbarous -i-, to indicate the sharp, bladelike wing shape of his bird, which he thus named “bladelike stormbird.” Evocative, isn’t it? And maybe even plausible.

How much easier it would all have been had Lafresnaye got there first! In 1844, working from a manuscript by L’Herminier (who–small world–provides the eponym for the Audubon’s Shearwater) and echoing the Creole name “diablotin,” the French naturalist renamed the species Procellaria diabolica, a fitting name for a bird whose taxonomic history is so devilish.

I’ve made three trips to Barnegat Light this past week, each of them a lot of fun: how can it fail when there are Purple Sandpipers and Common Eiders, and, yesterday, Razorbills to enjoy?

And Harlequin Ducks, of course.

This odd and beautiful little sea duck has been a reliable target for birders at Barnegat Light since at least the mid-1980s, when I first started visiting the   flock there; but something has changed in recent years.

In the 80s and even just a decade ago, fishermen and jetty walkers used to stop and ask me whether I was looking for whales or watching ships. My answer: no, just watching birds. Oh, they’d say, and that was that.

Nowadays, I can hardly get out of the parking lot without having someone ask me whether I’m going out to see the Harlequins. And once I’m out on that treacherous jetty, everyone I meet is eager to point them out, to talk about them, to ask whether they’re in yet.

It’s a great thing, this overwhelming popular consciousness of a rare and inconspicuous bird, but I wonder where it came from. Was there a series of newspaper articles, a special on public television, a poster competition in the public schools? Whatever did it, it’s heartwarming (and a little mysterious) to find non-birders, honest-to-goodness normal people, proud of these fine feathered visitors.

Help me think about this by answering two easy questions:

1. Who was your birding mentor?

2. Who was that person’s birding mentor?

You may need to talk to the answer to the first before you can answer the second. But it will be worth it.

Want to enjoy birding even more? Join me this spring at the Westfield Adult School for a new course. We’ll be meeting two Monday evenings for lecture and discussion, followed by a Saturday morning field trip to try out our new skills.

You can register here. See you in March!

Hurray for all shadowtails everywhere!

Scaled Quail in Willcox, Arizona. Note that the habitat in this photo is lacking what one thinks of as certain critical features: no cars up on blocks, no abandoned washing machines, no steaming meth labs.

Callipepla squamata, to use the mellifluous scientific name, is the type species of its genus; “calli” means beautiful, as in “beautiful writing” or “calligraphy,” and “pepla” is from a Greek word for cloak, as in “beautifully cloaked bird” or “Phainopepla.” “Squamata” is the same as the English adjective “squamate,” of course, “scaled.”

In 1832, Wagler, unaware that the species had already been named by Vigors two years earlier, (re)described it under the epithet strenua, meaning active or bold, as in Horace’s famous oxymoron “strenua inertia.” Coincidentally enough, Wagler’s German name for the genus, “Schuppenhuhn,” takes up Vigors’s original epithet, which together give us the English name of the bird.

More than you wanted to know? Then get up from the computer and go birding!

Long-billed Dowitchers are fairly common in winter in southeast Arizona, where their famous “sewing machine” feeding habits are a familiar sight in the shallows of sewage ponds and playa wetlands.

It’s the females that have those absurdly long bills, but all birds have the characteristic overstuffed shape, as if–in the perfectly apt words of the wondrous Shorebird Guide–they had swallowed grapefruits.

Maybe they have. But it would have to be one citrus stitch at a time.