{"id":8207,"date":"2014-01-06T05:12:59","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T12:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8207"},"modified":"2018-08-25T11:16:06","modified_gmt":"2018-08-25T18:16:06","slug":"the-ruffed-honeysucker-by-a-hair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/06\/the-ruffed-honeysucker-by-a-hair\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ruffed Honeysucker: By a Hair"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The\u00a0Rufous Hummingbird\u00a0<\/strong>was “discovered” for European science by the naturalists of the Cook Expedition aboard the\u00a0Resolution<\/em>. As we’ve already seen<\/a>, the Englishmen didn’t actually come across the bird themselves, but rather first saw it when it was brought to them “in great numbers” by the native inhabitants of Canada’s Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n

According to Thomas Pennant<\/a>, who in his Arctic Zoology<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>worked up many of the specimens that came back with Cook’s ships (and without Cook), some of those hummingbirds came to the crew of the\u00a0Resolution\u00a0<\/em>still breathing:<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Indians brought them to our navigators alive, with a long hair fastened to one of their legs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just where Pennant came up with this piquant detail isn’t clear: it isn’t in the report of Cook’s voyage, and I don’t find it in Latham<\/a>, either, whose\u00a0General Synopsis\u00a0<\/em>provides the illustration at the top of this entry. But it’s a fine picture, isn’t it, little red birds buzzing around at the end of their tenuous tethers like flies in a bored high school classroom. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t; but it’s worth pondering.<\/p>\n

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

The\u00a0Rufous Hummingbird\u00a0was “discovered” for European science by the naturalists of the Cook Expedition aboard the\u00a0Resolution. As we’ve already seen, the Englishmen didn’t actually come across the bird themselves, but rather first saw it when it was brought to them “in great numbers” by the native inhabitants of Canada’s Vancouver Island. According to Thomas Pennant, who … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Ruffed Honeysucker: By a Hair”<\/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":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207"}],"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=8207"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9095,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions\/9095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}