Who Discovered That Warbler?

Now here’s a true mega: A Cape May Warbler, the second for Britain, is being seen on Unst, that delightfully named island in the Shetlands.

Inevitably, the oldtimers have already started reminiscing about that much brighter, male Cape May that set up shop in Paisley, Scotland, in June 1977. And, inevitably, journalists and others have been trotting out the old canard:

Interestingly, the ornithologist who first discovered the species, Alexander Wilson, was born and spent his youth in Paisley….

But our warbler had been known to science for half a century by the time Wilson learned of its existence. In 1789, more than two decades before Wilson put pen to paper about what he mistakenly considered a “new and beautiful little species,” Gmelin knew the bird — and gave it the nicely descriptive name Motacilla tigrina in his edition of Linnaeus’s Systema.

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The real eye-opener here is — or should be — all the earlier citations Gmelin is able to adduce. EdwardsBrisson, Buffon, Pennant, and Latham had all described this warbler in the mid- and late eighteenth century, a couple of their accounts even accompanied by paintings.

Edwards, 1758
Edwards, 1758
Brisson, 1763
Brisson, 1763

So much for the notion that Wilson — who died 200 years ago this year — was the “discoverer” of the species.

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Indeed, not even Wilson himself, though laboring under the notion that the warbler was unknown when he first saw it, claimed the bird as his own discovery. In his American Ornithology, he puts it as clearly as anyone possibly could:

This new and beautiful little species was discovered in a maple swamp, in Cape May county, not far from the coast, by Mr. George Ord….

The latest book-length study of Wilson, Burtt and Davis’s Alexander Wilson, points this out — and identifies what has meanwhile become the authoritative source of the subsequent error, namely, Audubon’s account of the species in the Ornithological Biography:

Of this beautiful species, which was first described by Wilson, very little is known…. I am indebted for the fine specimens … to my generous friend Edward Harris….

Now there’s an irony. Audubon devoted so much energy to denying Wilson‘s priority in other cases, but here, thanks to his profound disdain for George Ord (or to sloppy reading and even sloppier bibliographic work), he created a myth that is still being retold nearly two hundred years later.

But we all know better. Three cheers for Edwards and the rest!

 

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Point Breeze

After yesterday afternoon’s cold front, we thought we had it made this morning. The woods along the Delaware River would, we thought, be swarming with warblers and vireos and flycatchers and tanagers. All we needed to do, we thought, was get there.

Point Breeze. Charles Lawrence, before 1820.

“There” in this case is a very special place in the history of American ornithology.

Point Breeze was the country estate of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of the first Napoleon and erstwhile king of Naples and of Spain. At the mouth of Crosswicks Creek in Bordentown, New Jersey, Point Breeze was also the home for some five years of Charles Lucian Bonaparte and his cousin-wife, Zénaïde, and it was here on the banks of the Delaware that the Prince of Musignano and Canino conducted much of the work that would lead Coues to call the 1820s “the Bonapartian Period” in American ornithology.

Bonaparte had better luck with the birds than we did. But still we enjoyed treading the same paths trod almost two hundred years ago by the man Coues styled “the princely person.”

Point Breeze

Back in Bonaparte days, the marsh at the bottom of the hill was a lake, formed by damming Thornton Creek. The view down Crosswicks Creek to the Delaware is still impressive, and this would be a great place to simply set up and wait on a day when migrants really did decide to show up.

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The house Joseph built above the lake for his daughter and son-in-law is long gone, replaced by tall beeches and tulip trees.

Point Breeze

The tangled banks held chipping Northern Cardinals and mewling Gray Catbirds; on a warbler day, the edges could be lively.

The most evocative spot we discovered was this crumbling stretch of carriage road.

Point Breeze

The only intact structure from Bonaparte’s day is the old Garden House, a modest building now overlooking lawns and a sparse orchard but once guarding the entrance to Joseph Bonaparte’s formal gardens.

Point Breeze

This little house, too, has its place in ornithological history. You can read about that, and more about Charles Bonaparte and American ornithology, tomorrow at the newly remodeled ABA Blog. See you over there!

Point Breeze

Thanks to Alison and to Hidden New Jersey‘s Sue and Ivan for the excellent birding company, and to the Divine Word Mission in Bordentown for allowing us access to their grounds. 

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Murres’ Eggs and Bullocks’ Blood

Click to read Joe Metzler's essay on eggers in the Farallones.
Click to read Joe Metzler’s essay on eggers in California’s Farallones.

Tens of thousands of cars, back and forth, every day, all night long, without cease: the Garden State Parkway bridge over Great Egg Harbor is as busy as it is dramatic. Whoosh. Whoosh. On to Cape May. On to Atlantic City. On to Philadelphia and New York.

Of the human hordes crossing the bridge, only a vanishingly few look out at the vastness of the salt marsh to ask where this place got its name; I even know birders who have never thought about it, too absorbed in the Great Black-backed Gulls and the occasional Peregrine Falcon perched atop the light poles whizzing past at 65 mph.

A moment’s consideration, or a quick glance at google, answers the question: this is one of the many sites worldwide whose wild birds — ducks, gulls, terns, shorebirds — once supplied eggs to nearby urban markets, often in astonishing numbers.

The locus classicus for such activities is Audubon’s description of the eggers of Labrador:

At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause…. But nothing of this sort occurs to the Egger, who gathers and gathers, until he has swept the rock bare. The dollars alone chink in his sordid mind…. With a bark nearly half filled with fresh eggs they proceed….

The year before, Audubon’s party had encountered a similar scene two thousand miles to the south, beneath the glare of a Dry Tortugas sky:

At Bird Key we found a party of Spanish Eggers from Havannah. They had already laid in a cargo of about eight tons of the eggs of [the Sooty] Tern and the Noddy. On asking them how many they supposed they had, they answered that they never counted them, even while selling them, but disposed of them at seventy-five cents per gallon; and that one turn to market sometimes produced upwards of two hundred dollars….

A hundred twenty years later, James Fisher did the math for us, determining that eight tons was about 250,000 tern eggs.

I’d always assumed that all those eggs were for eating. But then I read this, in the prose notes to James Jennings’s Ornithologia:

 The Torda, Razor-bill, Auk, Common-Auk, or Murre …. lays one very large egg, size of a turkey’s of a dirty white colour, blotched with brown and dusky, on the projecting shelves of the highest rocks…. The eggs of this bird, and of the foolish guillemot, are an article of trade in several of the Scottish isles; they are used for refining sugar.

Though I wouldn’t call Jennings the most reliable source on the shelf, he turns out to be right. David A. Wells, in his Principles and Applications of Chemistry, informed a no doubt eager public that crude sugar is refined

by dissolving the brown sugars in water, adding albumen (whites of eggs, or bullocks’ blood), and sometimes a little lime-water, and heating the whole to the boiling point. The albumen, under the influence of heat, coagulates, and forms a kind of network of fibers, which inclose and separate from the liquid all the mechanically suspended impurities.

I assume that the process today does without auks’ eggs and cow blood, presumably substituting manufactured chemicals for those earthy ingredients.

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Small, Smaller, Smallest

I’m guessing that ninety-nine out of a hundred readers of this ‘blog’ identified this Least Sandpiper at the merest of a glance. And I’m equally sure that not one out of that hundred (yes, someday we just might have fully one hundred people reading this blog) could give this familiar and abundant species’ scientific name without hesitating.

Me, I don’t just hesitate. I have to look it up. Every single time. For thirty-five years now.

It’s not that the name is difficult or vague or nonsensical. Calidris minutilla makes as much sense to us today as it did to Vieillot when he named the species (including it in the catch-all genus Tringa) in 1819.

The name of this bird was given it on account of its small size … it shows some affinity to the Tringa minuta of Leisler, which is found in Europe; I believe, however, that it is a separate species.

Minuta is the Little Stint, and in naming his new species, Vieillot simply gave it an even more diminutive diminutive.

So far so good. But the problem is that there are so many of these small sandpipers — and so few good names to go around.

Brisson started it all in 1763, when he described the Semipalmated Sandpiper from a specimen sent from Hispaniola by André Chervain. When Linnaeus gave the French ornithologist’s “petite alouette-de-mer” its Latin binomial, he, sensibly enough, called it  Tringa pusilla, simply adopting and translating Brisson’s adjective “petite.”

By the time Middendorf came along in 1851 with the newly discovered Long-toed Stint, all the good names for the “little” sandpipers were used up.

This little bird of our is so similar to Tringa minuta that I have noticed the differences only now, after a closer examination. In its structure, size, and coloration, it cannot be distinguished at all from Tringa minuta in its summer plumage (cf. Naumann), except for its strikingly long toes and the dark-colored shafts of the flight feathers…. I would have classified this bird as a distinctive variant of Tringa minuta if the typical form of that species did not also occur in the Stanowoj Mountains without the least hint of intergradation with [the new bird].

But what to call it? Middendorf settled on subminuta, a name indicating both the bird’s apparent similarity to the sympatric Little Stint and its tiny size, “less than small.”

The long middle toe of Middendorf's new stint.
The long middle toe of Middendorf’s new stint.

What we have today is a bunch of rather similar little sandpipers with a bunch of incredibly similar names:

Calidris pusilla (“small”), Semipalmated Sandpiper

Calidris minuta (“small”), Little Stint

Calidris subminuta (“even smaller”), Long-toed Stint

Calidris minutilla (“really small”), Least Sandpiper

If you can keep ’em all straight all the time, good for you. Thank heavens for Temminck and Mauri!

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Other People’s Bird Books: J. D’Arcy Northwood

Of the making of many books there is no end — and in my case at least, of the reading of many of them there is no beginning. My mind is full of the dimly remembered names of all those “minor” writers I’ve wanted to read, or should have read, or — when it comes to so many of my high school English assignments — claim to have read.

Every once in a while I try to make it up.

Donald Culross Peattie was a famous name well before I was born, one encountered again and again in all that sturdy, workman-like prose we read mid-century. For some reason, though, in spite of the praise heaped on him by my favorite naturalist authors, I never actually bothered to take up anything he’d written.

In this Wilson year, though, and in preparation for my August tour, I’ve been trying to read everything I can about the Father of American Ornithology; and I vaguely recalled that Peattie had somewhere published a brief biography.

It doesn’t take long in these days of internet wonders to put flesh on the bones of memory, and soon enough I had downloaded Green Laurels onto my trusty little kindle.

It will surprise some of you (wasn’t I called “an old fogey luddite” in a letter to the editor of Birding a couple of years ago?), but I don’t always mind reading books on line. In this case, though, I decided that I’d want to make some notes, an activity that I still find physically more comfortable with a pad and pencil and a “hard copy” of the book on the desk. So off trundled Alison to the library for me.

I was surprised that the book was available, and more surprised when I opened the clunky green-bound volume, its dust jacket long gone. The accession date penciled onto the flyleaf was nearly forty years later than the publication date: this book had been bought used. And whoever bought it had also purchased the original owner’s bookmarks.

Here, from July 1942, the receipt for something called “295 American Birds,” sold for $2.15 cash in Honolulu, Hawaii; and here, dated some 27 years later, a newspaper clipping observing the erection of a monument on Mauna Kea to the great botanist and explorer David Douglas.

The Hawaii-Montclair connection, puzzling at first, came clear with a look at the bookplate on the front pastedown.

The volume was bought in January 1973 ex libris J. d’Arcy Northwood, a much-traveled figure in the history of twentieth-century birding, in New Jersey and across North America and its most far-flung islands, right up to his death in March 1972. Choate’s Cassinia obituary has Northwood — a British pilot during World War I, then a California-based sailor — landing in Hawaii, where he supervised plantations, served as a police chief, and in 1939 founded the Hawaii Audubon Society. A year later, he published his Familiar Hawaiian Birds

Then came Florida, where Northwood worked as an Audubon warden, and then Ithaca, where he studied ornithology. Montclair must have come into the picture during his tenure (“short,” says Choate, and not abundantly documented — thereby must hang a tale) as Executive Director of the New Jersey Audubon Society; we know he was living there in 1951, when he published a pretty trivial note in The Auk about swimming yellowlegses.

Northwood’s bookplate is adorned with a sketch of John James Audubon’s Mill Grove, where he was curator of the “Audubon Shrine” until his retirement. According to Clay and Pat Sutton, Northwood, “a character in his own right,” moved with his new wife, the writer and artist Anne Ardrey, to Cape May; their “ramshackle cottage” there is now the Northwood Center of the Cape May Bird Observatory on Lily Lake.

It will be an easy matter to find out which others of the books from Northwood’s Montclair library stayed in town after his death; meanwhile, this volume serves as a direct line from a twenty-first-century reader to a twentieth-century personality I might otherwise never have bothered to look up.

And I highly recommend Green Laurels, by the way.

 

 

 

 

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