{"id":6482,"date":"2014-01-02T03:33:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T10:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=6482"},"modified":"2013-12-29T08:47:25","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T15:47:25","slug":"hermits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/02\/hermits\/","title":{"rendered":"The Russet-clothed Brotherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

I knew in advance how this one was going to work out: the OED would lead me to the earliest citations for the English hummingbird label “hermit,” and a little bit of e-drudgery would let me push the name back to its apparent source, probably among the French\u00a0trochilidistes\u00a0<\/em>of the early nineteenth century. And along the way, perhaps I would find an unexpected motivation for the now opaque metaphor that compares these birds to the early desert ascetics.<\/p>\n

That, after all, is how scholarship works — even when it comes to so trivial a question as that and so ephemeral a medium as this.<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, not always. In this case, the citation hunters in Oxford fail us. The French ermite\u00a0<\/em>appears to be modeled on the English\u00a0hermit<\/em>. And if we trust John Gould, the name seems to be due entirely to the bird’s<\/p>\n

frequenting the darkest and most retired parts of the forest … affecting dark and gloomy situations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As far as I have been able to discover, it was Gould who introduced the name to ornithology. Interestingly, though, he makes no claim to originality: Gould’s\u00a0Introduction to the Trochilidae\u00a0<\/em>expressly says that these hummingbirds, “remarkable for being destitute of metallic brilliancy,” are “popularly known by the name of Hermits.”<\/p>\n

I was surprised to learn that hermits were “popularly known” at all in the English-speaking world of the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, though, Gould wasn’t referring to the streets of London. In the 1849 description of\u00a0Pha\u00ebthornis eremita<\/em>, he explains the source of the species epithet (later elevated by Reichenbach to generic status): this bird, he writes, is the<\/p>\n

Little Hermit of the collectors of Para<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

in Brazil. And just who were those collectors?<\/p>\n

The residents of many parts of Brazil employ their slaves in collection, skinning, and preserving them for the European market; and many thousands are annually sent from Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One segment of the clientele didn’t care much for dull hummingbirds, though: the Brazilian collectors<\/p>\n

also supply the inmates of the convents with many of the more richly coloured species for the manufacture of artificial-feather flowers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is my guess — an especially safe guess, given that it can never be tested or disproved — that the Luso-Brazilian “eremita” originated at the door of one of those monasteries, where a monk or a nun declined to pay for a brown hummingbird, rejecting it as too drab, like the sackcloth-clad hermits of the wilderness, what Alfred Newton would later call “the russet-clothed brotherhood.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew in advance how this one was going to work out: the OED would lead me to the earliest citations for the English hummingbird label “hermit,” and a little bit of e-drudgery would let me push the name back to its apparent source, probably among the French\u00a0trochilidistes\u00a0of the early nineteenth century. And along the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Russet-clothed Brotherhood”<\/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":[36,38,1,2,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482"}],"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=6482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8200,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482\/revisions\/8200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}