![\"Merrem](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Merrem-Iiwi-materials.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
T<\/strong>he stunningly scarlet and black\u00a0iiwi<\/strong> was the first endemic Hawaiian\u00a0landbird known to European science: it was the first to be drawn by a European — in 1778, by John Webber<\/a> aboard Captain Cook’s\u00a0Resolution<\/em> — and the first to be formally described — two years later, by Georg Forster<\/a>.<\/p>\n Forster<\/a>, who had accompanied his father on Cook’s second voyage<\/a>, was professor of\u00a0natural history at Kassel when\u00a0the German sailor Barthold Lohmann<\/a> brought him the type specimen — now lost — of what Forster named the “carmine treecreeper<\/a>.” A testimony to the considerable\u00a0excitement<\/a>\u00a0with which discoveries from the South Seas were welcomed, Forster’s description appeared in print a scant three months after Cook’s ships arrived, without the late Cook himself, in London.<\/p>\n Most of the bird skins from the voyage remained in Britain, but as early as December 1780, Forster had seen\u00a0no fewer than three specimens of his\u00a0Certhia coccinea, <\/em>well justifying his claim that the bird was “decidedly common” in its native range. Indeed, the expedition’s surgeon, William Anderson, recorded<\/a> “great numbers of skins” of this species offered\u00a0up for sale by the Hawaiian natives,<\/p>\n often tied up in bunches of 20 or more, or [with] a small wooden skewer run through their nostrils.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Forster’s type was\u00a0apparently one of those that had been tied rather than skewered, as he describes in detail<\/a> the characteristic operculum<\/a> covering the nostrils.<\/p>\n The Hawaiians, it turns out, had not collected\u00a0all those iiwis\u00a0just to please their\u00a0European guests.<\/p>\n In Forster’s words<\/a>, the natives of Hawaii<\/p>\n make\u00a0ornaments and various articles of clothing using the feathers of this bird, which must be extraordinarily abundant there given that such items are not at all rare. Mostly, capes are thoroughly covered with feathers<\/a>, but the young women also wear\u00a0necklaces, as thick as a thumb, made entirely of\u00a0such feathers.\u00a0For\u00a0ceremonial dances, they\u00a0weave as many of seven\u00a0of these bands around their heads…. Barthold Lohmann …\u00a0has donated one of these necklaces to the royal museum here [in Kassel].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But what exactly were, in the systematic sense, these birds that gave their brightly colored feathers and their lives to the lush beauty of Hawaiian featherwork<\/a>? Forster<\/a> in his original description<\/p>\n had no hesitation in assigning this new species [Gattung<\/em>] of bird to a place among the treecreepers….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He considered and rejected the possibility of affiliating his new bird to a more exotic group:<\/p>\n Only its bill shape suggests any connection to the birds of paradise, in that it is bent like a scimitar, but shows not a sharp culmen, as in the other treecreepers, but a convex culmen. Incidentally, in the collections of the\u00a0Landgrave of Hessen’s\u00a0natural history museum, I have had the opportunity to discover that there are both curve-billed and straight-billed species [Gattungen] in the family [Geschlecht] of birds of paradise…. Already on my trip around the world I\u00a0noted similar variation\u00a0among other\u00a0species [Gattungen], without feeling myself\u00a0justified\u00a0in increasing the number of families [Geschlechter]. A treecreeper from Tongatapu has fleshy wattles or beards… and two further species from New Zealand… are distinctive for their stronger, longer feet, just like the one [namely, the iiwi] lying before me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There were competing taxonomic assessments, though. Blasius Merrem reported<\/a> finding a specimen in the museum at G\u00f6ttingen (kept there with a fine example of featherwork) labeled with the name “Red Humming-Bird.” Merrem moved the erstwhile treecreeper into the genus\u00a0Mellisuga<\/a><\/em>, erected in 1760 by Mathurin Brisson for the vervain hummingbird; in 1783,\u00a0Joseph M\u00e4rter<\/a>\u00a0shifted it into another Brissonian hummingbird genus,\u00a0Polytmus.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The\u00a0most influential early\u00a0recognition that the iiwi was not a close\u00a0Certhia\u00a0<\/em>relative (and indeed not a hummingbird, either)\u00a0came in 1820, when Coenraad Jacob Temminck described the genus\u00a0Drepanis<\/em><\/a> on the basis of the now extinct Hawaii mamo; his new genus also included the iiwi.<\/p>\n Today, following a suggestion first offered by R.C.L. Perkins<\/a> in 1893, the iiwi and its finch-like Hawaiian relatives are recognized as a close assemblage within the\u00a0“winter finch” subfamily Carduelinae<\/a>. Support for grouping them<\/a> together is provided by a range of shared features, including similarities in plumage, musculature, tongue structure, nostril structure, and vocalizations.<\/p>\n And smell. Odor. Scent. Aroma. Fragrance. Stench.<\/p>\n Perkins was the first western scientist<\/a><\/p>\n to notice the scent emitted by so many and so different species of Hawaiian birds. I cannot liken this scent to any other that I know; but I should certainly call it disagreeable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was in fact “the peculiar odour<\/a>” like that of mildewed canvas that first led\u00a0Perkins to conclude that the thin-billed and the thick-billed Hawaiian honeycreepers belonged to one and the same family. The smell, apparently produced by the uropygial gland, is said to be so strong that it contaminates the feathers of birds placed in the same museum drawer with honeycreepers, and traces of\u00a0the odor can be transferred from specimen to specimen\u00a0by the hands of researchers.<\/p>\n Which raises a question, I think. Heinrich Zimmermann<\/a>, Cook’s coxswain on the third voyage, noted that<\/a> one only rarely saw the red feathered cloaks and capes worn, which led him to believe that their use\u00a0must be largely restricted to religious ritual. I wonder, though, if perhaps, for all their visual splendor, they weren’t just too smelly.<\/p>\n The iiwi is the 2018 Bird of the Year<\/a> of the American Birding Association<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The stunningly scarlet and black\u00a0iiwi was the first endemic Hawaiian\u00a0landbird known to European science: it was the first to be drawn by a European — in 1778, by John Webber aboard Captain Cook’s\u00a0Resolution — and the first to be formally described — two years later, by Georg Forster. Forster, who had accompanied his father on … <\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screenshot-2017-12-26-12.22.37.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Blumenbach](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Blumenbach-Iiwi.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/deyoung.famsf.org\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/new_slide\/public\/exhibitions\/5948_cape_9670_001_use.jpg?itok=-gs9c_q1\")
<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screenshot-2017-12-26-11.50.45.png\")
\nJohn Latham was of the same opinion, retaining the species in the genus Certhia\u00a0<\/em>in his 1790 account<\/a>; inexplicably, Latham took it upon himself to\u00a0replace Forster’s perfectly good epithet\u00a0coccinea <\/em>with\u00a0vestiaria\u00a0<\/em>(“of clothing”), an invalid alteration that would nevertheless give rise to\u00a0a widely used genus name for the\u00a0iiwi. Even as late as 1820, Louis-Pierre Vieillot agreed<\/a> that the\u00a0“eee-eve” (another example of\u00a0the great French ornithologist’s\u00a0struggles with written English)\u00a0was simply the representative of “a different tribe” of treecreepers found in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screenshot-2017-12-26-16.19.09.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screenshot-2017-12-26-16.31.29.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Shaw](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Shaw-and-NOdder-Iiwi-1791.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screenshot-2017-12-26-17.52.31.png\")
<\/p>\n