{"id":10357,"date":"2016-02-16T00:33:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T07:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10357"},"modified":"2016-02-16T09:04:02","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T16:04:02","slug":"the-first-lawrences-goldfinch-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/16\/the-first-lawrences-goldfinch-in-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Lawrence&#8217;s Goldfinch in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Lawrence's Goldfinch CSP February 27 2007 068\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rickwright\/21301343726\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/598\/21301343726_865d20016a_z.jpg\" alt=\"Lawrence's Goldfinch CSP February 27 2007 068\" width=\"640\" height=\"337\" \/><\/a><script src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re happily, gratefully\u00a0spoiled. Need a\u00a0note from an obscure regional journal published half a century ago? One e-mail, and the text is on my computer desktop within minutes. Wonder what the type specimen of a bird looked like? I can see it in three dimensions on the museum&#8217;s website. Want the original account of a species&#8217; discovery? It&#8217;s right there in my e-bookmarks. All pretty miraculous.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, though, I&#8217;m surprised at how quickly information and objects could move even a century and a half ago.\u00a0The beautiful and relatively uncommon\u00a0<strong>Lawrence&#8217;s goldfinch\u00a0<\/strong>offers an example.<\/p>\n<p>John Graham Bell, Audubon&#8217;s companion on the Missouri and Theodore Roosevelt&#8217;s mentor in the taxidermy shop, first encountered\u00a0this pretty little finch\u00a0in Sonoma, California. He deposited his specimens in Philadelphia, where John Cassin published a formal description of\u00a0the species in 1852.<\/p>\n<p>Cassin named the bird<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>in honor of Mr. George N. Lawrence, of the city of New York, a gentleman whose acquirements, especially in American Ornithology, entitle him to a high rank amongst naturalists, and for whom I have a particular respect, because, like myself, in the limited leisure allowed by the vexations and discouragements of commercial life, he is devoted to the more grateful pursuits of natural history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Lest there be any worry that Cassin had slighted Bell, in the same paper the Philadelphia ornithologist named the pretty California sage sparrow\u00a0still &#8212; again &#8212; known as Bell&#8217;s.)<\/p>\n<p>Not much more than a year later, in mid-December of 1853, Charles Bonaparte was able to introduce\u00a0the bird to his colleagues in Paris, in a letter describing the specimens brought back from the New World by Pierre Adolphe\u00a0Delattre:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Our collection dazzles especially in the finches&#8230;. One&#8230; now appears for the first time in Europe, the pretty Lawrence&#8217;s goldfinch, discovered by Mr. Cassin in Texas and collected by Mr. Delattre in California.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As usual, Bonaparte could not resist going on to re-describe the species, but this time at least he preserved Cassin&#8217;s scientific name.<\/p>\n<p>Bonaparte&#8217;s misidentification of the discoverer &#8212; it was Bell, not Cassin &#8212; and of the type locality &#8212; it was California, not Texas &#8212; suggests to me that he had not yet actually read the description published the year before. Then as now, though, news traveled quickly along the ornithological grapevine.<\/p>\n<p>Just not yet at the speed of light.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re happily, gratefully\u00a0spoiled. Need a\u00a0note from an obscure regional journal published half a century ago? One e-mail, and the text is on my computer desktop within minutes. Wonder what the type specimen of a bird looked like? I can see it in three dimensions on the museum&#8217;s website. Want the original account of a species&#8217; &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/16\/the-first-lawrences-goldfinch-in-europe\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The First Lawrence&#8217;s Goldfinch in Europe&#8221;<\/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":[38,1],"tags":[612,613,611,395,614],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10357"}],"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=10357"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10504,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10357\/revisions\/10504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}