World War I – Birding New Jersey

June 20, 2015June 20, 2015

Hostile Birds

Otto Kleinschmidt seems to have been decidedly a my-country-right-or-wrong kind of guy, an attitude that inevitably and continually put him on the wrong side of history over a long lifetime that included both world wars and the foundation of the German Democratic Republic.

Kleinschmidt, founder of the notion of the Formenkreis, no doubt harbored some genuinely intellectual objections to the Darwinism of his day — but by 1915, he had largely abandoned argument in favor of nationalistic name-calling.

Now just why is Darwin’s work scientifically inferior?… Considered critically, the book’s treatment of evidence recalls the war bulletins of the British and the French, in which small advantages are puffed up while large failures are understated or even entirely suppressed…. The sturdy stability of German scientific effort, which keeps its feet on solid ground, is entirely foreign to this book.

And he never let up. Even in naming newly recognized forms, Kleinschmidt’s animus comes through loud and clear.

Six barn owls from England … show a tarsus length varying between low extreme values. I shall name the English form hostilis.

America wouldn’t enter the war for another two years, but we came in for some subtle needling, too:

The cautious Americans have called their house sparrow Passer domesticus…. In any event, the English house sparrow is separable [from that of Germany] and probably identical with the American bird…. I shall name both hostilis…. the small size of American specimens is not evidence of rapid adaptability, but rather proof of the persistence of racial characteristics, as determined by von Virchow, as the American house sparrow probably originated principally from England.

Just in case the reader misses his point, Kleinschmidt adds that

the hostile barn owl and the hostile sparrow will certainly have a hostile reception, that is to say, rejection, in their home range. We don’t care, because we have not described and named them for the benefit of British ornithologists, but for the benefit of the thoroughness of German science.

May 7, 2015May 8, 2015

Thomas Evans

Thomas William Evans of Cheshire was a sailor by trade, but his happiest hours were spent in search of waterfowl on the estuary of the River Dee. A great hunter and “puntsman,” he also — like so many British “working-man naturalists” — made himself invaluable to the ornithologists of the day, in his case providing specimens and dates for Coward and Oldham’s Vertebrate Fauna of Cheshire and Liverpool Bay.

Evans died 100 years ago today, having signed on three weeks earlier as helmsman and quartermaster of the Lusitania.

March 13, 2015March 29, 2015

Birds and War: A Hundred Years Ago Today

There is a vast, entirely unmanageable literature by and about ornithologists in the First World War. Even that heap of letters and books and articles and memoirs, though, cannot possibly make mention of all the millions who died while the larks trilled above the trenches and nightingales chanted from forests stripped bare.

Instead, we’re left to remember only the famous, among them Wyndham Knatchbull-Hugessen, killed in action at the age of 29, early in the course of the British offensive at Neuve-Chapelle.

Knatchbull-Hugessen had rejoined the Grenadier Guards on returning from a collecting trip to the Neotropics, part of his work with Charles Chubb on what was to have been a monumental, 16-volume survey of the birds of South America.

The first volume appeared in 1912, but on Knatchbull-Hugessen’s death three years later,

so little text had … been completed, and the work as projected was so extensive and costly, that nothing could be done in the way of completing even a second volume….

As often happens, however, the preparation of the text and the painting of the illustrations had proceeded at different rates. The artist, Henrik Grönvold, had made somewhat better progress, and in 1915, the publishers determined that the finished images should be issued even in the absence of the intended text. H. Kirke Swann provided brief descriptions for each of the 38 plates, which included ratites, tinamous, cracids, and a selection of water birds and waders.

Those plates would not be the only ornithological monument to Knatchbull-Hugessen. In 1916, Chubb proposed a new genus name for the spot-throated hummingbird, Brabournea. The name — later shown to be invalid — honored his late co-author, Knatchbull-Hugessen, the baron of Brabourne, killed in France a hundred years ago today.