{"id":10599,"date":"2016-09-13T14:54:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T21:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10599"},"modified":"2016-09-13T15:04:39","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T22:04:39","slug":"franklins-pipixcan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/13\/franklins-pipixcan\/","title":{"rendered":"Franklin’s Pipixcan"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems that the\u00a0Terror\u00a0<\/em>has been found\u00a0in the icy waters off King William Island, and poor John Franklin is in the news yet again.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0time, the discovery coincides with the peak southward movement of one of the birds named for Franklin, the graceful, squeaky-voiced gull still widely known in my youth as the prairie pigeon.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot-2016-09-13-17-58-01\"<\/p>\n

John Richardson named the species\u00a0for Franklin<\/a> in February 1832. In his detailed description, he\u00a0directs the reader to the account\u00a0of the same bird in Joseph Sabine’s “Zoological Appendix,” published two years earlier, in which Sabine unfortunately treated\u00a0the bird Franklin had sent home to England as identical to Alexander Wilson’s (and Linnaeus’s) laughing gull — with the notable\u00a0exception that Wilson’s “figure represents the primaries as entirely black.”<\/p>\n

Richardson, of course, was right to distinguish the two, but he was wrong, alas, to believe that he was\u00a0the first to describe the species as new. Less than a\u00a0year earlier, in May 1831, Johann Georg\u00a0Wagler had unpacked a box of specimens<\/a> sent from Mexico by the Bavarian collector Keerl, and in it recognized a gull first described in the late sixteenth century by Francisco Hernandez<\/a> de Toledo, who wrote from Mexico that<\/p>\n

\u00a0this bird of the genus of gulls or diving birds is not at all unlike the gray species depicted by a recent author, in both size and color; but it has both crown and bill black, the latter rather curved and reddish at the very tip. The legs are black tending to deep red, the tail gray above, and the outer portions of the wing are in part white and in part black, with small bright white spots at intervals. It dwells around lakes and rivers, and eats small fish and insects. It is not a resident\u00a0bird here and does not raise its young in Mexican waters. It is edible, but not well suited as food. It is aquatic and noisy, and gnaws on bones and eats whatever it encounters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wagler’s unflattering scientific epithet for the bird comes from Hernandez, who recorded that the Aztecs called it “pipixcan,” or “the thieving bird.”<\/p>\n

It took close to a\u00a0hundred years\u00a0for Wagler’s priority to be recognized<\/a>\u00a0by English-speaking ornithology, and by the time\u00a0pipixcan\u00a0<\/a><\/em>was officially restored<\/a> as the gull’s scientific name, the vernacular name commemorating Franklin had been\u00a0long and\u00a0firmly\u00a0established.<\/p>\n

For observers lucky enough to be watching the great flocks move south these coming weeks, the name Franklin’s gull is\u00a0a reminder of an explorer whose final fate is still imperfectly\u00a0known — but whose spirit floats over every autumn on its way from one hemisphere to the next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems that the\u00a0Terror\u00a0has been found\u00a0in the icy waters off King William Island, and poor John Franklin is in the news yet again. This\u00a0time, the discovery coincides with the peak southward movement of one of the birds named for Franklin, the graceful, squeaky-voiced gull still widely known in my youth as the prairie pigeon. John … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Franklin’s Pipixcan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10599"}],"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=10599"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10608,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10599\/revisions\/10608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}