{"id":164,"date":"2006-07-02T21:35:28","date_gmt":"2006-07-03T04:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/03\/whos-laughing-now\/"},"modified":"2017-06-10T05:15:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-10T12:15:30","slug":"whos-laughing-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/02\/whos-laughing-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Who&#8217;s Laughing Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tucson is full of bearded birder Ricks, and one of them (he is fond of calling himself &#8220;the right Rick, not Rick Wright&#8221;) found a <strong>Laughing Gull <\/strong>at Willcox the other day. Alison and I ran over there this afternoon to see it: a fine bird, if a little ratty, and a new one for my Arizona list.<\/p>\n<p>The English and scientific names of certain gulls make up a strange matrix of equivalences and contradictions. Our Willcox vagrant belongs to a species Linnaeus named <em>atricilla, &#8220;<\/em>black-tailed,&#8221; obviously relying on a non-adult specimen of the bird Catesby had already called Laughing Gull. Sixty years later, Vieillot described the Black-tailed Gull, <em>Larus crassirostris <\/em>(&#8220;thick-billed&#8221;). Eight years after describing the Laughing Gull, Linnaeus published his description of the abundant European species we know in English as Black-headed Gull; he gave it the epithet <em>ridibundus<\/em>, &#8220;laughing,&#8221; a translation of the bird&#8217;s common name in a number of other languages. And in 1820, Temminck named the Mediterranean Gull <em>melanocephalus,&#8221;<\/em>black-headed.&#8221; To top it all off, Pallas named the bird we know as Yellow-legged Gull <em>cachinnans<\/em>, another word for&#8211;get this&#8211;&#8220;laughing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Got all that? As if gulls weren&#8217;t hard enough already&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tucson is full of bearded birder Ricks, and one of them (he is fond of calling himself &#8220;the right Rick, not Rick Wright&#8221;) found a Laughing Gull at Willcox the other day. Alison and I ran over there this afternoon to see it: a fine bird, if a little ratty, and a new one for &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/02\/whos-laughing-now\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Who&#8217;s Laughing Now?&#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":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164"}],"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=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8041,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/8041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}