It’s a familiar enough phenomenon to most birders in temperate North America. Every spring, birds more typical of southern climes appear north, sometimes far north, of their usual breeding range. As if the frenzied impulse of northward movement has simply become too much to control, warblers and rails and flycatchers just keep going, joining little flocks of residents or more expected migrants to startle and delight the human observer.
We call these birds “spring overshoots.”
It’s been happening forever, of course. But what I want to know is who first noticed it and who coined the term “spring overshoot.”
the annual over-stepping of faunal limits by many species belonging to a more southerly district, and their subsequent disappearance toward the end of the spring migration,
but he doesn’t use our modern term, and neither does he explicitly claim to be the first to notice it.
Some student of migration out there knows the answer. Fill us in.
I’ve been throwing together some new pages here with links to digital versions of useful books and papers, from some of the earliest lists of American birds to the once-standard, now shamefully ignored handbooks.
Eventually, given world enough and time, I suppose all of my e-bookmarks will show up on a page. Meanwhile, let me know if there is a corpus you’d like to see appear: if I have the links, I can post them.
Many, many thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library for making so much of our ornithological heritage available to us.
Mark Twain saw a lot of the outdoors over a long life that took him from the Mississippi to California to Connecticut. As I think back on what I’ve read of Twain, though, nature — Nature — doesn’t play much of a role at all. Landscape, even so dominant a feature as Huckleberry Finn’s river, never seems to be more than narrative convenience or metaphoric convention.
She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts, and everything — even snakes — an inheritance from me. She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore.
And she learned her bird lore the way most people did in the first years of the twentieth century: from the works of Frank Michler Chapman. Clemens owned both his Warblers, in a 1907 edition, and a 1903 printing of his Handbook.
Clemens also owned another standard of the day, now forgotten, Oliver Davie’s popular oology:
More cutting edge: Dugmore’s Nature and the Camera, an early introduction to photographing birds, other animals, and natural features.
Clemens received this book as a gift from her father in 1903, six years before her death. Does anyone know whether she ever put its precepts into practice?
Herbert K. Job was another early “camera-hunter,” still far better known today than Dugmore ever was. Samuel Clemens gave a copy of Job’s Wild Wings to his daughter in November 1904.
All I know about Jean Clemens’s books is what was written in the NYT some time ago. But that is quite enough to suggest that her interests in bird study ran deep, and it seems likely that a careful examination of the physical books themselves would turn up notes and other signs of use to offer some insight into the birding life of a young woman at the turn of the last century.
One of a loose flock of ten (!) Scott’s orioles working the reeds at Todos Santos.
And another bizarre icterid:
a hypomelanistic yellow-headed blackbird on the beach at the Estero San José; I couldn’t remember ever having seen an “abnormal” plumage in this species.
Everybody wants to see the Big Three species-level endemics in Baja, but the small, rather darkish Gila woodpeckers were just as striking to my eye.
Non-avian vertebrates were surprisingly scarce. I got to see a single jackrabbit, and the highlight of our whale “watch” were the close views of California sea-lions.
Common birds all, but great to see them at the Estero San José:
I’m very glad iguanas are vegetarian.
This was my first opportunity to see California scrub jays after the resplit this past summer.
With an astronomical telescope and some luck, I could have been watching Baird’s juncos and royal terns all at once.
This photo — below even my usual low standard — at least shows the brown nape patch said to be shown by almost all Baird’s juncos.
Tourists come to Baja for the sun. So do white-faced ibis, apparently.
It was a lovely warm morning, and there were birds to be seen along the way, to boot. Single black-throated gray and Townsend’s warblers reminded us that we were in the southwest, and the San Lucas robin made sure we knew that we weren’t just anywhere in the southwest.
We also got to see the bizarrely dim-eyed angustifrons acorn woodpecker, and a heavily spotted spotted towhee that was presumably the aptly named umbraticola. A feral hog was a source of momentary puzzlement, and then it was higher, ever higher.
I was embarrassed at having to take three (three!) quick sitting breaks for out-of-breathness, but everyone was kind about it. I’m not used to being The Problem Client, and I’m not used to being Oldest In The Group, but I guess I’d better start resigning myself to it. At least each of my long pauses was another chance at leisurely enjoyment of the stunning desert scenery.
Then, at about 1200 meters, Gerardo mentioned that we were at the lowest spot he’d ever seen the bird. “And there’s one now!”
In early February 1883, when he was exactly my gasping, panting age, Lyman Belding set off alone for the Sierra. Belding found “the trail leading to Laguna … the longest, highest, and possibly the worst” in these mountains, “which were probably never previously explored by any collector.”
The effort paid off handsomely, however, when, on reaching the lower edge of the pines, Belding encountered “a beautiful new Snowbird,” which he dispatched and sent to Robert Ridgway at the Smithsonian for description, specifying that the new bird was to be named for Spencer Baird, “in consideration of [his] valuable ornithological services… in field and office, not the least of such services being his original, full, and accurate descriptions of so many North American birds.” Ridgway, finding the bird “pretty and very distinct,” obliged, concluding his formal description with the observation that the Baird’s Junco “is so markedly distinct… from all its congeners as to really need no comparison with any of them.”
We didn’t have to go anywhere near the pines.
Instead, all we had to do was plop down on the roadside and wait for this most beautiful of the juncos to re-emerge from the shadows to feed in the open.
The birds were nervous at first, perching in the bushes and chacking like tiny thrashers.
Soon enough, though, we had three Baird’s juncos on the ground in front of us, busily stripping the seeds from a grama-like grass and daintily plucking petals from low flowers.
For the most part, all three were quite stolid, barely shifting their big feet when it came time to reach up to take another bite.
video
There was a little bit of occasional and unenthusiastic double-scratching, but never in the hour we watched them did I see the creepy shuffling so typical of Mexican yellow-eyed juncos, just short hops.
video
The birds grew more trusting as time went on, and I was able to repeatedly change my position, getting closer each time, without causing any obvious alarm. They were obviously alert to whatever passed overhead, though, reacting nervously to everything from turkey vultures to a canyon wren, and I suspect it was a flighted threat that finally chased the birds back into the dense, dark vegetation whence they had come.
Our walk back down the mountainside was nothing short of joyous, a dream of decades having finally come true. Minds and memories full of the junco, we paused to look at fruiting burseras
purple flowers
and weirdly exfoliating slopes.
Thanks to Bryan, Gerardo, and Leo for making this day such an astounding success. I can’t image what the rest of 2017 could possibly bring to match it.
![Estero San Jose cinnamon teal, blue-winged teal, northern shoveler, white-faced ibis]](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/561/32097369011_e9a5a330f0.jpg)
