One hundred seventy-five years ago today, John James Audubon boarded a train in New York City and began an eight-month journey that would take him up the Missouri River as far as what is now the Montana state line. The party also included the painter Isaac Sprague, the taxidermist John G. Bell, and Audubon’s friend and frequent funder Edward Harris — each of whom lent his name to one of the bird species discovered (or, in Harris’s case, rediscovered) in the course of the trip.

Bell would return to New York after the journey, where he would operate the city’s most successful taxidermy shop and go down in history a second time as mentor to a young naturalist named Theodore Roosevelt.

After his return to Massachusetts, Sprague became one of the nineteenth century’s best and best-known botanical illustrators.

Harris, most famous as the great American champion of the Percheron, went back to his New Jersey farm. The only member of the expedition to keep up contact with the Audubons, Harris would no doubt have been of lasting help to the widowed Lucy, as he had long been to her husband, had he not died himself at the early age of sixty-three.

Early on, Audubon also invited his young protégé Spencer Baird to take part in the journey. Baird, who turned twenty in the winter of 1843, eventually declined, but Audubon remembered his young friend in naming another new sparrow, collected that summer in the grasslands around Fort Union. this would be the last new species Audubon would discover — though, of course, it was Harris and Bell who actually found and shot the first specimens.

William O. Ayres was another of Audubon’s young friends; like Baird, he would make significant contributions to American ichthyology. Six years older than Baird, Ayres was employed as a teacher in 1843; a dozen years later, he took his medical degree at Yale, and later served as curator of ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences. It hardly matters that “his” woodpecker turned out to be a hybrid or backcross of the kind so abundant on the Great Plains.

The Harris sparrow, which Audubon’s party collected again and again as they moved up the eastern edge of Nebraska in May, had actually been named and described three years earlier, by Audubon’s colleague and correspondent Thomas Nuttall. There is an especially good story behind this mix-up, but this was not the only time that Audubon mistook a bird he found on the Missouri for new.

Looking back, it is not much of a surprise that Audubon should have been unaware that the blackbird he would name for Thomas Mayo Brewer was already known to science: the formal description had appeared in the Isis for 1829, and the more readily accessible reprint was still almost fifty years in the future. It would be even less reasonable to expect him to have recognized his “new” icterid in Fernandez’s cacalotototl.

Audubon’s failure to recognize the clay-colored sparrow, abundant all the way up the river that spring and at Fort Union all summer, had more complex reasons. Unaware that the “clay-colored” he had painted almost a decade earlier was in fact a Brewer sparrow, Audubon named what he thought was a new species for George Shattuck, his erstwhile companion on the trip to Labrador a dozen years earlier and subsequently a doctor in Boston. The confusion was cleared up not long thereafter, but the name “Shattuck” could still be encountered for this species into the early twentieth century.

Audubon really does not deserve to be accounted the discoverer of the sweet little LeConte sparrow, but two unfortunate circumstances — the early naming of the saltmarsh sparrow, and the explosion of the steamboat Assiniboine — would mean that neither John Latham (who published the first description in 1790) nor Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (who collected the bird in Nebraska in 1833) would have a valid claim to name the bird. Audubon kindly specifies that he has named the bird for the younger LeConte; if rightly I remember, the thrasher was named for his father.

And speaking of unfortunate circumstances.

If most birders know anything about Audubon’s Missouri River expedition, it is the story of the western meadowlark. In its most frequently encountered version, it goes something like this: Audubon was the first to notice that the song of the meadowlarks in the west was different from that of his hometown birds, and he named the new species neglecta to tweak Lewis and Clark for having overlooked it.

That’s how I learned it, but it’s not true. Meriwether Lewis knew full well that the meadowlarks of the Missouri Valley were different, and had he been able to publish his natural historical discoveries before descending into mental illness, Lewis would certainly be the author of the species’ name. What’s more, Audubon knew full well that Lewis had known full well, and even quotes him to that effect. The disapproval he expresses in the tendentious name neglecta is directed not at the Corps of Discovery but at those who had followed Lewis and Clark up the river in the decades since, none of whom, Audubon says, had “taken the least notice of” the bird; it’s no real stretch to read the name as in fact a gentle tribute to Lewis, who had committed suicide in 1809.

There is much more to say about the Missouri River expedition undertaken by Audubon and his friends and companions. I’ll be saying some of it in a series of lectures this jubilee year; but that is no reason that you too can’t rummage around in the documents that survive from those long-ago months on the river. You may well notice something no one else has.

 

I’ll tell you why not.

Apparently there is a move afoot to recommend that the English name of Perisoreus canadensis be changed from the venerable “Gray Jay” to “Canada Jay.” It doesn’t really matter — names are just names, and English names have no taxonomic force in any event — but if the proposal is to be based on the information published in Ontario Birds a year ago, there are a couple of important corrections to be made before the AOS committee comes to a decision.

The essay in OB, “How the Canada Jay lost its name and why it matters,” is delightful and impressive, including an enormously helpful discussion of the debate leading up to the AOU’s adoption of English species names in the fifth edition of the Check-list. Unfortunately, this same essay begins with an assertion that is simply not true, namely, that “Canada Jay” was “the name [the AOU] had used for Perisoreus canadensis until 1910″ and the species’ “original official English name.”

A look at the pre-1910 editions of the Check-list, the first (1886) and the second (1895), reveals immediately that both used the English name “Canada Jay” to refer only to the nominate subspecies, not to the species as a whole. The typography and numbering in the first and the second editions serve poorly to distinguish species from subspecies, but the convention there in the case of polytypic species is to list the nominate subspecies first, without its redundant third element, and then to list the other subspecies as full trinomials. In no instance is any polytypic species assigned its own English name.

The rather illogical typographic system misled the author of the OB piece to claim, bizarrely, that the Check-list included “no nominate subspecies” of Perisoreus canadensis. In fact, the first entry, headed “Canada Jay,” refers only to the nominate subspecies, as the description of range makes plain:

The graphic privilege given the nominate subspecies of polytypic species was, happily, abandoned beginning with the third edition of the Check-list, when all subspecies were assigned letters under a species-level header comprising only the scientific name. As in the previous editions, there are no English species names for polytypic species.

The same system was used for the fourth edition of 1931. Only in 1957 was a Check-list published with English names for species rather than just for subspecies.

None of these circumstances would be especially interesting — but for the fact that the author of the note in OB continually describes “Canada Jay” as “the original official English name” of Perisoreus canadensis “abandoned in 1957” “through error” and deserving of “restoration.” A weak argument to begin with (there is no such thing as lex prioritatis in English names), it falls apart entirely with recognition that the AOU never used “Canada Jay” to refer to anything but a subspecies of Perisoreus canadensis.

To its great credit, the AOU (now AOS) committee has been notably reluctant to change the English names of North American birds; in fact, as many have observed over the years, it is precisely the English names that have remained relatively stable as taxonomic discoveries have forced changes, and sometimes outright replacements, in scientific names.

There is no cogent and positive reason for the AOU to replace “Gray Jay,” the “official” English species name of Perisoreus canadensis. The name is not misleading — it denotes, after all, a jay that is gray — and it threatens confusion with no extralimital species. It avoids the geographic confusion created by so many English bird names. And it has been universally in use for more than sixty years.

All this, of course, is a tempest in a maple-flavored teacup: nothing is going to change. But it raises a very important matter, and in this at least, I agree fully with the author of the OB essay.

There is no reason that birders should feel obligated to abide by the decisions of the AOS in the matter of English names. There is no reason, for that matter, that the AOS should waste its time making decisions about English names.

Scientific names have a scientific purpose: they are meant to indicate identity and relationship. English names, in contrast, are just for the convenience of those who can’t remember or pronounce such impossibly challenging labels as Junco or Vireo, and there is every reason to simply let them evolve as the community using them does. The notion that, as Dan Strickland writes, “the unelected foreign-dominated body” that is the AOS should direct its efforts to the legislation of English names is risible if you think about it.

So by all means, let’s call it the Canada jay, if that’s what pleases you and your birding friends. But let’s not do it because we believe, falsely, that that’s what the AOU always called it.