{"id":8313,"date":"2014-01-24T09:25:22","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T16:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8313"},"modified":"2014-01-24T10:03:25","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T17:03:25","slug":"other-peoples-bird-books-howard-saunders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/24\/other-peoples-bird-books-howard-saunders\/","title":{"rendered":"Other People’s Bird Books: Howard Saunders"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Howard Saunders was a big name indeed in British ornithology in the late nineteenth century. Co-editor of the Ibis<\/em>, editorial executor of the last two volumes of Yarrell, and the author of any number of still useful papers, Saunders was a particular expert on the larids, one especially lovely species<\/a> of which still bears his name.<\/p>\n

In the late 1870s and early ’80s, Saunders was a member of the BOU group charged with assembling an official list of British birds “in accordance with the most approved principles of modern nomenclature.”<\/p>\n

\"SAunders,<\/a><\/p>\n

His own copy of the list, which was published in 1883, now resides in the library of the University of California at Davis<\/a>, and the annotations reveal a man not always satisfied with the results of committee work.<\/p>\n

Among Saunders’s co-authors, Henry T. Wharton, responsible for, among other things, the book’s etymologies, comes in for some particularly withering criticism.<\/p>\n

\"SAunders,<\/a><\/p>\n

Saunders honestly (and often rightly) disagrees with some of the derivations offered here, but he seems to have had a more fundamental objection to the whole enterprise, writing at one point, when Wharton has gone on a bit too long,<\/p>\n

Is this a Latin Dictionary?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At times, Saunders reproaches Wharton for being too tentative. Where Wharton derives the epithet\u00a0curruca\u00a0<\/em>“perhaps” from\u00a0curro<\/em>, “I run,” Saunders writes in bold pencil that<\/p>\n

Curruca<\/span>\u00a0was the derisive title of the lover of the adultress — he had to “cut and run,”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

an amusing and helpful reminder of the relationships, etymological and ornithological, between\u00a0Lesser Whitethroats\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Common Cuckoos<\/strong> and common cuckolds.<\/p>\n

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

Neither does Saunders have much faith in his colleague as a bibliographer. Along with correcting simple transcription and spelling errors in the citations, he calls Wharton’s attribution of the genus name\u00a0Linota\u00a0<\/em>to Bonaparte<\/p>\n

Nonsense: it was used by Gmelin in 1788.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dudgeon rises even higher when his fellow committeeman misreads or overlooks something in Saunders’s own work. The account of the Stock Dove <\/strong>avers that that species “does not occur in Scotland or Ireland,” a claim Saunders underlines and furnishes with an editorial exclamation point before adding at the bottom of the page,<\/p>\n

Certainly it\u00a0does<\/span>,\u00a0<\/em>in both<\/span>; as Saunders<\/span> tells you, Mr. Wharton!,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

a reference to the citation — “Saunders<\/em>, iii. p. 8″ — in the account’s bibliographic header.<\/p>\n

\"Bonaparte's<\/a><\/p>\n

And then, inevitably, there are those cases where one of Saunders’s own contributions to the list was altered before publication. The published account for the\u00a0Bonaparte’s Gull\u00a0<\/strong>says that<\/p>\n

this transatlantic species is said to have occurred in Ireland, and near Falmouth, Cornwall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saunders’s pencil underscores the verbs, then adds<\/p>\n

Not my writing — I said it\u00a0had<\/span> occurred, for I had seen examples, but some people\u00a0rush in<\/span> etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He crosses out vigorously the statement of the range of the\u00a0Ross’s Gull<\/strong>, writing in its place<\/p>\n

“A circumpolar species,”\u00a0I<\/span> wrote, because I\u00a0knew<\/span>, but some sapiento-ignoramus must needs alter it.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

In a note following the\u00a0Glossy Ibis\u00a0<\/strong>account —\u00a0badly truncated by the binder’s knife and the scanner’s edge — Saunders explains what had happened:<\/p>\n

I left for the winter, Dec’r 1882, at this point,\u00a0and all the rest\u00a0<\/span>was\u00a0rushed<\/span> before my return in Mar [?] 1883.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

I don’t especially have the feeling that Saunders would mind our reading these comments, nearly a century and a half later. But I’m going to be very careful about where my own books and their annotations end up, that’s for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard Saunders was a big name indeed in British ornithology in the late nineteenth century. Co-editor of the Ibis, editorial executor of the last two volumes of Yarrell, and the author of any number of still useful papers, Saunders was a particular expert on the larids, one especially lovely species of which still bears his … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Other People’s Bird Books: Howard Saunders”<\/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],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313"}],"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=8313"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8320,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313\/revisions\/8320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}