{"id":9905,"date":"2015-04-04T08:57:18","date_gmt":"2015-04-04T15:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9905"},"modified":"2015-04-04T10:04:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-04T17:04:03","slug":"april-calendar-puzzle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/04\/april-calendar-puzzle\/","title":{"rendered":"April Calendar Puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC02996\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No one who has dallied in the pet section at Woolworth’s will have any difficulty identifying these two creatures: the upper bird is a black-and-white mannikin<\/strong>, its companion a\u00a0spotted munia<\/strong>. Neither is a sparrow, and only the munia occurs as a wild bird in China.<\/p>\n

The mannikin, or at least the population depicted here,\u00a0nigriceps<\/em>, was first described by John Cassin<\/a> on the basis of specimens from the collection of the Duc de Rivoli, purchased for the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1846. The munia had been long known at that point: Linnaeus<\/a> gave the species its epithet, punctulata<\/em>, basing his description on that in Edward’s\u00a0<\/a>Natural History of Birds<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>of 1743.\u00a0Edwards’s painting of the bird, which he called the “Gowry Bird … being sold for a small Shell apiece, call’d a Gowry,” in the East Indies, places it in an unusual pose, apparently for compositional rather than behavioral reasons.<\/p>\n

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

Edwards also tells us that this species was commonly kept in England in “Gentlemen’s Houses”; the one he painted was in the possession of Charles du Bois<\/a>, treasurer of the East India Company.<\/p>\n

More to the point of the monthly puzzle, Edwards reports that Eleazar Albin, too,<\/p>\n

figur’d a Bird something like this, and makes it the hen of another Bird he has placed it with; he calls it a Chinese Sparrow….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Edwards correctly doubts that the two birds on Albin’s plate are conspecific — but that matters less to us than the fact that that image, first published in the 1730s, is clearly behind, at whatever remove, the calendar plate that started all this.<\/p>\n

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

Albin drew\u00a0his birds<\/p>\n

at Mr. Bland’s at the Tiger on Tower-Hill<\/a>… they were brought from China in East-India by the Name of Chinese Sparrows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’re still left to wonder who pirated the plate and added all those eggs. Maybe next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one who has dallied in the pet section at Woolworth’s will have any difficulty identifying these two creatures: the upper bird is a black-and-white mannikin, its companion a\u00a0spotted munia. Neither is a sparrow, and only the munia occurs as a wild bird in China. The mannikin, or at least the population depicted here,\u00a0nigriceps, was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “April Calendar Puzzle”<\/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":[434,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9905"}],"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=9905"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9909,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9905\/revisions\/9909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}