![\"Grayson,](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screenshot-2017-10-31-14.04.26.png\")
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These two squirrel cuckoos<\/strong> were shot in Sinaloa 150 years ago today, by the ornithological explorer Andrew Jackson Grayson. Grayson — the would-be Audubon of the West — painted the birds in a way that, alas, makes the reasoning behind the “would-be” portion of the epithet clear.<\/p>\n Grayson was not the first to illustrate this common and widespread species, which had been discovered by European science in\u00a0northern South America\u00a0more than a century before Grayson commenced his ill-fated work in Mexico. Jacques-Fran\u00e7ois Artur, royal physician in Cayenne, sent the first specimen to R\u00e9aumur, in whose collection it was catalogued by Mathurin Brisson<\/a> in 1760; there may also have been one, slightly larger, in the cabinet of Mauduyt de la Varenne. Brisson commissioned Fran\u00e7ois-Nicolas Martinet to prepare an engraving<\/a> of the exotic novum, which he named, logically enough, “le coucou de Cayenne.”<\/p>\n Martinet produced a second, less dramatic portrait of the\u00a0cuckoo a few years later, for Buffon’s\u00a0Natural History<\/em>.<\/p>\n When Buffon and his collaborators came to write the text for the species<\/a>, they adopted a new name, calling it “le coucou piaye,” borrowing\u00a0the native American name that would later be\u00a0pressed into formal nomenclatural service. But, they added, they could not carry over<\/p>\n the\u00a0superstition that has given the bird that name: “piaye” in the native language of Cayenne means “devil,” and also “priest,” such that among these idolaters the name refers to the minister or messenger of the devil. This is why, they say, the natives and even the blacks find its flesh repugnant….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This rather startling story (with its richly suggestive “even”) is not found in Brisson, and the\u00a0Natural History\u00a0<\/em>provides no citation to its source. A bit of reading around, however, traces the\u00a0poor\u00a0cuckoo’s demonic reputation all the way back to the sixteenth century.<\/p>\n Francisco Hern\u00e1ndez introduced<\/a> his patrons and colleagues back in Spain to\u00a0an American bird known as the Quapachtototl:<\/p>\n When this bird sings, it imitates laughter, and for this reason it is considered by the natives a bird of ill omen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just why the sound of giggles, otherwise so innocent, should have been deemed so sinister would be explained in Eusebius Nieremberg’s 1635 “edition<\/a>” of Hern\u00e1ndez’s Mexican zoology. Nieremberg heads the account with what has all the hallmarks of a proverb or, more likely, the superscriptio of an emblem:<\/p>\n Saepe non secura laetitia,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n translated later<\/a> in the century by Willughby as “mirth is often insecure.” This\u00a0bird is not just demonic, it’s deceptive.<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Screenshot-2017-11-01-16.52.42-1024x522.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Screenshot-2017-11-01-17.26.48.png\")
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![\"Squirrel](\"https:\/\/farm3.staticflickr.com\/2562\/3997718671_e01bddd107.jpg\")
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