{"id":9219,"date":"2014-09-14T11:15:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-14T18:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9219"},"modified":"2014-09-14T11:20:20","modified_gmt":"2014-09-14T18:20:20","slug":"did-anybody-ever-really-think-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/14\/did-anybody-ever-really-think-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Anybody Ever Really Think That?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The find of the fall — so far — at Cape May has been the continental US’s third whiskered tern, discovered a couple of days ago and still showing nicely, I hear. I’ve got fingers, toes, and eyes crossed that it linger until next Monday, when my group will be there<\/a> with hopeful bells on.<\/p>\n

In all the excitement, there’s inevitably been some shooting from the hip about this bird’s name,\u00a0Chlidonias hybrida<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>and we’ve been reminded more than once now over these past days that the species owes that funny epithet to the quaint belief that these birds actually\u00a0were\u00a0<\/em>hybrids.<\/p>\n

But that’s not true. Though there are plenty of cases in which “good” species were originally mistaken for the products of miscegenation, this isn’t one of them.<\/p>\n

Peter Simon Pallas observed this “extremely rare bird<\/a>” a few times in the course of his expedition to central and eastern Russia, and almost 40 years later, he gave it its first formal scientific description<\/a> in the Zoographia Rosso-asiatica<\/i>. He named it\u00a0Sterna hybrida<\/em>, not because he or anyone else had thought it was a hybrid, but because its appearance combined features of the “white” and of the “black” terns.<\/p>\n

You might say that it was born of the black and the common tern.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You might\u00a0<\/em>say — “diceres” — but no one did.<\/p>\n

Of course, Pallas was not the first to see this widespread tern. He himself indicates<\/a> that it had perhaps\u00a0already been described and depicted — in neither case very well — in Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s pre-Linnaean\u00a0Danubius pannonico-mysicus<\/a><\/em>, where the bird is said to differ from the black tern in its reddish bill and feet.<\/p>\n

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

The\u00a0account of the plumage here more closely recalls, if anything, a molting black or white-winged tern; indeed, Brisson<\/a> would later use\u00a0Marsigli’s description as the basis for his own “patchy tern,” Sterna naevia<\/em>, which, if memory serves, Bonaparte eventually identified as a black tern.<\/p>\n

The sorting out of the marsh terns and their names took some time; as late as Coues’s “Review<\/a>\u00a0of the Terns of North America,” there still obtained “a state of great confusion,” and even more than a dozen years later, Taczanowski could mix\u00a0up the names<\/a> of the whiskered and the white-winged terns.\u00a0We were well into the twentieth century before any sort of stability could be declared.<\/p>\n

But never did we really believe that\u00a0any of them were hybrids.<\/p>\n

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

And why is it\u00a0<\/em>hybrida? We’re told that this is a noun “in apposition” and not an adjective. Hmph.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The find of the fall — so far — at Cape May has been the continental US’s third whiskered tern, discovered a couple of days ago and still showing nicely, I hear. I’ve got fingers, toes, and eyes crossed that it linger until next Monday, when my group will be there with hopeful bells on. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Did Anybody Ever Really Think That?”<\/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":[63,36,38,52,64],"tags":[602,253,254],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9219"}],"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=9219"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9225,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9219\/revisions\/9225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}