{"id":10032,"date":"2015-05-31T13:14:22","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10032"},"modified":"2015-06-01T18:22:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T01:22:19","slug":"a-towhee-type","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/31\/a-towhee-type\/","title":{"rendered":"A Towhee Type"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been a bit far north these past couple of weeks to have a real chance at green-tailed towhee<\/a>s, but we’ve been keeping eyes and ears open just in case one of those lovely sparrows — some say the loveliest — should happen to “overshoot” on its way to the breeding grounds.<\/p>\n

As yesterday’s entry here pointed out, the generic affinities of the species were matter for discussion and debate for a long time. Beyond that question, though, there was another, more material: For twenty years after the species’ first description, we just didn’t know exactly what a\u00a0green-tailed towhee\u00a0was<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The species was first published by Audubon<\/a>, as the green-tailed sparrow, in the last volume of the\u00a0Ornithological Biography<\/em>. Audubon never saw the bird himself, and never painted it; he bases his description of this “true\u00a0Fringilla<\/em>” instead on what seem to be two separate letters from John K. Townsend, who shot a “new and singularly marked Sparrow” on July 12, 1834. Townsend informed Audubon that<\/p>\n

the specimen is, however, unfortunately young, and the plumage is not fully developed. I feel in great hopes of finding the adult….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In what appears to have been a subsequent letter, Townsend\u00a0is forced to report that<\/p>\n

In this I was, however, disappointed: I never saw it afterwards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, it was not until September 1842\u00a0that the towhee\u00a0seems to have been encountered again — encountered, but not recognized. Somewhere in the Rockies, “about half way between New Mexico and the Colorado of the west,” William Gambel collected\u00a0a single male<\/a>\u00a0of a bird that he named\u00a0Fringilla Blandingiana<\/em>, in honor of the discoverer of the turtle<\/a>. Gambel was almost certainly aware of Audubon’s publication of the green-tailed towhee, but his bird, unlike Audubon’s, was an adult, and neither Gambel nor his colleagues at the Philadelphia Academy put the two together.<\/p>\n

Six years later, in 1848, Baron de Lafresnaye received an adult bird in a shipment of Mexican and South American\u00a0specimens sent by a M. Sal\u00e9 to his mother. Obviously unaware of Gambel’s description, and apparently likewise failing to compare it to Audubon’s, Lafresnaye described this “touit \u00e0 coiffe rousse” as a new species,\u00a0Pipilo rufo-pileus<\/em><\/a> — thus assigning the species for the first time to the genus\u00a0Pipilo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It did not help that the original Townsend\/Audubon specimen had somehow slipped into obscurity. John Cassin in 1855<\/a> asserted\u00a0expressis verbis<\/em> that there had never been such a skin<\/a> — in spite of Townsend’s clear claim to have taken the specimen.<\/p>\n

What gives?<\/p>\n

It would take a few years to figure it all out, but clarity shone forth with the publication in 1859 of the ornithological volume of the Pacific railroad surveys<\/a>. While Spencer Baird was still using the name blandingiana\u00a0<\/em>in 1852<\/a>,\u00a0seven years later he, with Cassin and George Lawrence, was\u00a0able to determine that\u00a0blandingiana\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0rufopileus<\/em> were mere synonyms of the Audubonian\u00a0chlorurus<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

And they were able to do so because the Townsend specimen had turned up — in Baird’s own cabinet, whence it passed into the collections of the Smithsonian<\/a> as number 1896. Comparison of that skin with a slightly older male specimen and a series of adults led\u00a0them to conclude that the Townsend skin<\/p>\n

is unmistakeably the Pipilo<\/span> here described, and settles the question in favor of the priority of the name\u00a0chlorurus<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The odd outlier aside (Ridgway cites blandingiana\u00a0<\/em>as late as 1868),\u00a0that has been the bird’s specific epithet ever since. And if anyone doubts that it should be so, Townsend’s bird from July\u00a01834 still lies peaceful on its back in Washington<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

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We’ve been a bit far north these past couple of weeks to have a real chance at green-tailed towhees, but we’ve been keeping eyes and ears open just in case one of those lovely sparrows — some say the loveliest — should happen to “overshoot” on its way to the breeding grounds. As yesterday’s entry … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A Towhee Type”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,66],"tags":[284,490,492,489,487,491,493,494,495,485,486,488],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10032"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10032"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10037,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10032\/revisions\/10037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}