Louis Agassiz Fuertes – Birding New Jersey

A real Bonaparte’s gull

One hundred years ago today, Ludlow Griscom was out shooting birds for his graduate alma mater, Cornell University. As Roger Tory Peterson told the story,

Firing into a flock of Bonaparte’s Gulls, he shot a bird which he skinned and labeled as an immature Bonaparte’s. Then taking aim at one of the passing Common Terns, he dropped it into the water, retrieved it, and subsequently labeled it an adult Common Tern.

You can guess what followed when

both specimens were re-examined. The supposed Bonaparte’s was actually a Little Gull, the first record for upstate New York; the tern was an Arctic Tern…. May 20, 1916, had been a red-letter day, but Ludlow did not appreciate it at the time.

“Never assume the obvious,” the resolutely unchastened Griscom told his disciples. But Peterson, telling this tale long after Griscom’s death, did just that. It would seem to be obvious that Griscom made up his own skins. Not this time, though.

Look what I found:

I guess we know what America’s greatest bird painter was doing, too, one hundred years ago today.

In 1903, the American Ornithologists’ Union held a special spring meeting in California. It was a largely informal affair, essentially a “pick-up trip” of the sort that groups of birding friends and colleagues still take today, and lodging seems to have been arranged in the most happily haphazard way.

Those couch-surfing at Joseph Mailliard‘s San Geronimo ranch house included Elizabeth and C. Hart Merriam, Fanny and Frank Chapman, Jonathan Dwight, Louis Bishop, and Louis Fuertes, a distinguished guest list indeed.

Chapman and Fuertes spent the mornings afield, returning to skin the fruits of their labors at the house. Twenty years later, Mailliard recalled something odd about those sessions:

There seemed to be some subtle means of communication between the two men, for it was a rather startling thing, again and again, to hear them suddenly commence to whistle or hum the same air at the same instant. I finally remarked upon this and one of them told me they had often noticed that they did whistle or sing together in this way, but that they could never quite account for it.

That may seem remarkable, but I think this intense mental sympathy — for lack of any better description — between Fuertes and Chapman really represents only an extreme example of a phenomenon we’ve all experienced with our close birding friends.

We may not sing out loud (for which I’m sure my companions over the years have been endlessly grateful), but if we’re well matched, we fall into step, into tune, with each other in all sorts of ways.

What’s your experience?

Tag: Louis Agassiz Fuertes

“Never Assume the Obvious”

Birding In Tune