{"id":11070,"date":"2018-07-01T00:21:20","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T07:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=11070"},"modified":"2018-06-30T12:26:17","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T19:26:17","slug":"the-first-racket-tail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/01\/the-first-racket-tail\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Racket-tail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Booted Rackettail Ecuador September 2007 675\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rickwright\/2598461009\/in\/photolist-4XG3MQ-59gftQ-4XG46Q-59c4c6-8P1EEz-8P1EEe-4XBMVT-59gfFS-4XBMKD-4XG3SS-8P1EE6-59c3Zg-4XPhji-59gRBA-91oohR-4XBMue-8P1EE4-59gfnb\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/3079\/2598461009_2146cdbb5b.jpg\" alt=\"Booted Rackettail Ecuador September 2007 675\" width=\"500\" height=\"374\" \/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re truly implausible little creatures, hummingbirds so tiny as to hardly be there, their feet tucked in to great puffy boots and bizarre spoons trailing behind them.<\/p>\n<p>There used to be (&#8220;be&#8221;!) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/50583#page\/129\/mode\/1up\">just one species<\/a>, but now &#8212; <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=h9hEAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA259&amp;lpg=PA259&amp;dq=cory+ocreatus+1918&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=xPmEktxAz9&amp;sig=ulgldbwlvP6pMOfKhQUyVxf0mPk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwisvfu9ufvbAhWOslkKHb74CkwQ6AEIOjAC#v=onepage&amp;q=cory%20ocreatus%201918&amp;f=false\">once again<\/a> &#8212;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/profile\/Karl_L_Schuchmann\/publication\/311004563_Biogeography_and_taxonomy_of_racket-tail_hummingbirds_Aves_Trochilidae_Ocreatus_Evidence_for_species_delimitation_from_morphology_and_display_behavior\/links\/583dbbde08ae61f75dc46c42\/Biogeography-and-taxonomy-of-racket-tail-hummingbirds-Aves-Trochilidae-Ocreatus-Evidence-for-species-delimitation-from-morphology-and-display-behavior.pdf?origin=publication_detail\">two or three are recognized<\/a>, differing in the color of their footwear and in vocalizations and other behaviors.<\/p>\n<p>The first description of any taxon of racket-tail was published in 1832 by Lesson, under the scientific name <em>Ornismya underwoodi\u00a0<\/em>and the\u00a0slightly tortured vernacular label &#8220;la raquette empenn\u00e9e.&#8221; &#8220;Ornismya,&#8221; which the French trochilidist had coined a few years earlier, is simply the rendering into Greek of the usual &#8220;oiseau-mouche,&#8221; while the species epithet honors the Englishman who had supplied Lesson with a drawing of the bird, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.birdforum.net\/archive\/index.php?t-284824.html\">probably the painter Thomas Underwood<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/182896#page\/303\/mode\/1up\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11071\" src=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-29-at-7.39.25-PM-300x254.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"254\" srcset=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-29-at-7.39.25-PM-300x254.png 300w, http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-29-at-7.39.25-PM-768x651.png 768w, http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-29-at-7.39.25-PM.png 920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Lesson did not know the bird &#8220;en nature,&#8221; that is to say, as a skin or mount, but he was assured that there were several specimens in the hands of London collectors of the day.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, collectors and natural historians had known the bird for some time when Lesson finally got around to naming it. William <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/127339#page\/383\/mode\/1up\">Bullock had exhibited at least one<\/a> male in London in the 1820s.<\/p>\n<p>But what neither Bullock nor, apparently, even Lesson knew, and slightly later on neither <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/74422#page\/176\/mode\/1up\">Jardine<\/a> nor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/109468#page\/193\/mode\/1up\">Gould<\/a>, was that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oiseaux.net\/buffon\/tome6\/oiseau-mouche.a.raquettes.html\">the &#8220;racketed hummingbird<\/a>&#8221; had in fact been described &#8212; but not, sadly, properly named &#8212; a full fifty-five years before Lesson introduced it as new.<\/p>\n<p>In June 1777, the Paris\u00a0<em>Journal de physique\u00a0<\/em>published a characteristically miscellaneous article describing a beetle, a &#8220;water scorpion,&#8221; and a hummingbird from South America. The hummingbird was represented by two specimens, one said to be from Guyana &#8212; yet another illustration of the danger of confusing collection localities with postmarks.<\/p>\n<p>There can be no doubt about the identity of the hummingbird, which &#8220;differs from all other members of the family in the shape of the two long feathers of the tail&#8230; Among the birds we know, only this one has the two tail feather widening at the end <a href=\"https:\/\/babel.hathitrust.org\/cgi\/pt?id=mdp.39015077781121;view=1up;seq=519\">as is shown in the figure<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/booted-racketttail-ecuador-september-2007-294.bmp\" width=\"450\" height=\"254\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Oddly, neither the text nor <a href=\"https:\/\/babel.hathitrust.org\/cgi\/pt?id=mdp.39015077781121;view=1up;seq=519\">what I can see of the figure<\/a> on line offers any information at all about <a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/03\/go-go-booted-rackettail\/\">the strikingly puffed feet<\/a>, which must have been damaged beyond recognition when the birds were collected or prepared.<\/p>\n<p>The article in the <em>Journal de physique\u00a0<\/em>gave the new hummingbird no name at all, scientific of vernacular.\u00a0Very shortly after its publication, though, Buffon and his collaborators provided <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oiseaux.net\/buffon\/tome6\/oiseau-mouche.a.raquettes.html\">an account<\/a> of &#8220;this still little known and apparently very rare&#8221; species in the\u00a0<em>Histoire naturelle<\/em>, naming it the &#8220;oiseau-mouche \u00e0 raquettes,&#8221; which means exactly what one might think it means.<\/p>\n<p>Much of their description duplicates the earlier report, and as there, no mention is made of the bird&#8217;s remarkable bootlets. Buffon says that he examined a specimen in the famous cabinet of <a href=\"http:\/\/data.bnf.fr\/13319860\/pierre-jean-claude_mauduyt\/\">Mauduyt de la Varenne<\/a>, but it remains unclear whether that was a third individual or one of the two described earlier in the year.<\/p>\n<p>The usual French failure, or rather refusal, to assign a new bird a Linnaean name has kept these earliest accounts of the racket-tail out of the ornithological synonymies. Just as significantly, the failure by Buffon et al. to mention the hummingbird&#8217;s distinctively plumed feet allowed the ornithologists of the next generations to &#8220;discover&#8221; and name it themselves, without recognizing, or at least without acknowledging, the earlier descriptions.<\/p>\n<p>Lesson gives no sign of having even read the 1777 accounts, and John Gould did not think of the &#8220;oiseau-mouche \u00e0 raquettes&#8221; when he described his new\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/46216#page\/30\/mode\/1up\"><em>Trochilus caligatus<\/em><\/a> (&#8220;booted&#8221;) in 1848; neither did he cite them in the greatest of all nineteenth-century hummingbird books, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/109468#page\/193\/mode\/1up\"><em>Monograph of the Trochilidae<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, there is no requirement, there is no obligation, for subsequent authors to adduce every single thing ever written about a species. Never has been. But the story of those first booted racket-tails is an important reminder that sometimes the human history of a bird goes back farther &#8212; in this case, nearly half a century farther &#8212; than the strictly &#8220;scientific&#8221; record shows.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re truly implausible little creatures, hummingbirds so tiny as to hardly be there, their feet tucked in to great puffy boots and bizarre spoons trailing behind them. There used to be (&#8220;be&#8221;!) just one species, but now &#8212; once again &#8212;\u00a0two or three are recognized, differing in the color of their footwear and in vocalizations &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/01\/the-first-racket-tail\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The First Racket-tail&#8221;<\/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\/11070"}],"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=11070"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11075,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11070\/revisions\/11075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}