{"id":9089,"date":"2014-08-22T02:56:04","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T09:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9089"},"modified":"2014-08-21T12:30:42","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T19:30:42","slug":"from-san-francisco-to-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/22\/from-san-francisco-to-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"From San Francisco to Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lesson,<\/a>We asked the other day what the quickest set of connections was between the Allen’s hummingbird and the imperial court of Napoleon’s France. Twitter and Facebook produced a few plausible responses, but nothing can match Shannon’s response<\/a> in the comments on this b-log:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m guessing one of the degrees is Napoleon\u2019s ornithologist nephew, Charles Bonaparte (son of Napoleon\u2019s brother Lucien), who lived in Bordentown, New Jersey in the 1820s at his father-in-law\u2019s (Napoleon\u2019s brother Joseph\u2019s) estate called Point Breeze. As Allen\u2019s hummingbird is a west coast bird, and Charles never ventured that far west, the second degree is probably Adolphe Mailliard, son of Joseph Bonaparte\u2019s long-time secretary Louis Mailliard. Adolphe moved to California and died there in 1890. He (or his descendants) perhaps knew Allen?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep, that’s exactly the chain I had in mind<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Adolphe Mailliard<\/a>‘s sons, John and Joseph, both born in Bordentown<\/a>, met Charles A. Allen in California in 1874; in the early 1880s, the Mailliards gave Allen a house<\/a> on their Rancho San Geronimo, where he was still living as late as 1927. Robert T. Orr’s obituary of John Mailliard<\/a>\u00a0credits the collector and taxidermist\u00a0with having in large part inspired the brothers’ natural historical interests.<\/p>\n

In 1877, Henry Henshaw named what he thought was a new hummingbird for Allen<\/a>,<\/p>\n

but for whose efforts in obtaining the specimens necessary for comparison, and careful field-notes, the species might have remained for a long time still unrecognized.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So there it is: the hummingbird – Allen – the Mailliard brothers – their father and grandfather – Joseph Bonaparte – and the First Empire.<\/p>\n

Well done, Shannon!<\/p>\n

“What he t h o u g h t was a new hummingbird”? For a quick entr\u00e9e into the muddle that is the history of the Allen’s hummingbird, have a look here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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

We asked the other day what the quickest set of connections was between the Allen’s hummingbird and the imperial court of Napoleon’s France. Twitter and Facebook produced a few plausible responses, but nothing can match Shannon’s response in the comments on this b-log: I\u2019m guessing one of the degrees is Napoleon\u2019s ornithologist nephew, Charles Bonaparte … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “From San Francisco to Paris”<\/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":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9089"}],"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=9089"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9094,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9089\/revisions\/9094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}