One hundred fifty years ago today in Hannover, Paul Georg Heinrich Martin Reinhold Leverkühn first saw the light of day. Leverkühn studied in Kiel, Strasbourg, and Munich, and practiced medicine in that last city before accepting an appointment as privy secretary to Ferdinand I of Bulgaria in 1892. Ferdinand was an enthusiastic botanist and entomologist, and just a month after Leverkühn’s arrival in Sofia, his job description was altered to make him director of the prince’s extensive natural historical collections.

Leverkühn’s own interests were ornithological. Ferdinand funded collecting expeditions across western and central Europe and to Russia and Turkey, the fruits of which filled the drawers and cases of the new museum built under Leverkühn’s direction.

Like most birders then and now, Leverkühn found as much satisfaction in the library as in the field. By 1905,

in the blossom of his best manly years, at the center of a rich circle of influence, and amid the pleasures of scholarly creativity,

he was about to embark on what would have been one of the greatest bibliographic works in the ornithological tradition. It was not to be, though. In December of that year, at the age of 38, Leverkühn died in Sofia, the victim of typhoid fever.

Even a century ago, it was a red-letter day when a bird was added to the California list. Just such a day was New Year’s Eve 1916, when Laurence M. Huey went out to set some mammal traps in his yard, a few miles north of Bard.

I noticed a thrasher scratching on the shady side of a neighbor’s wood pile. On collecting the bird, I was surprised to find it to be a Palmer Thrasher.

The bird Huey shot was the first record of the species ever in California, where it is still a rarity.

A fine way to end the year — less so, perhaps, for that adult female thrasher, now reposing in the San Diego Natural History Museum.

It’s an honest question. Jean Cabanis’s forebears were French Huguenots, but I have assumed, lo these many, that by the time he was born, two hundred years ago this year, the family name had been teutonicized at least to the extent that the final consonant was pronounced.

I’m beginning to think I was wrong. Look what I found this afternoon:

These clunky Hildebrand long-lines were the work of Carl August Bolle, the Berlin naturalist and collector, on the occasion of Cabanis’s elevation to the rank of professor. In the second strophe, the name stands in end rhyme — with the word “sie.” For poetic purposes, at least, we are to pronounce the name as if it were still French, with the emphasis on the last syllable and the final consonant silent.

Was Bolle just being cute, pushing poetic license for the sake of an easy rhyme? Or is this genuine evidence of genuine usage?

Anybody know?

 

Seventy years ago today, on December 1, 1946, Ben and Lula Coffey with Mr. and Mrs. B.F. McCarney discovered the largest flock of European starlings ever seen to that date in Mexico.

This was not the first record for the country, but the band of 500 individuals encountered just south of Nuevo Laredo was some 20 times the cumulative total reported since the species’ arrival in Mexico a dozen years earlier.

The rest is history, as they say.