Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:43:23 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Henry Armistead <74077.3176@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: DiMaggio's Bunting: quotes & names. the AOU. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline These quotes and species names are fun, but off-topic. However, I can't resist anymore. This also gives me the chance to indulge my psychiatric disorder, hypergraphia, the compulsion to write. For some time it has been painfully obvious that I don't have enough to do. Poor Liz. Hell ... poor you! 1. SPURIOUS SPECIES. On the way home from our annual string of 5 straight Christmas counts we'd sometimes dream up fake bird species. Baryshnikov's Tyrannulet (from Chris Witt). Lewinsky's Flycatcher. DiMaggio's Bunting (Schmidt's Hitting Away). Sump Buzzard. Southern Fried Chicken. Odd Duck. Saddam's Desert Tyrant. Early Bird. Gutter Snipe. Clinton's Liarbird. Bush's Liarbird. In connection with Southern Fried Chicken along with some others I had dinner with Kenn Kaufman. Kenn started a thread satirizing food on the menu. Southern Pecan Pie segued into Sub-Arctic Pecan Pie, Quaking Sphagnum Bog Pecan Pie, etc. Death by Chocolate inspired Resurrection By Chocolate, Birth By Chocolate, Systemic Lupus Erythematosis By Chocolate. John Sill. John Sill's books on non-existent bird species contain his excellent paintings of such as Mangrove Penguin, Middle Yellowlegs, Auger-billed Clamsucker, Warbling Cormorant, Split Rail and Will (same family as Whip-poor-will, Chuck-will's Widow and Poorwill). They're a hoot. Pete Dunne and the Cape May crowd are famous for renaming birds. Great Black-backed Gull = Great Imperial Landfill Buzzard. Starling = Swill Martin or Dirt Warbler. Local peregrines hacked on coastal plain sites where they never bred historically are Pseudogrines. House Sparrow = Burger Kinglet. Bob Anderson on hearing this quipped "Burger Kinglet, home of the Whooper". Once at the Kiptopeke Hawk Watch Bob looked up in the sky and said: "First record for Blue Marlin for the hawk watch." There was a cloud shaped just like a marlin, I remember it faced left, mouth open, long bill extended, dorsal fin and all. I have my own screwy names for some birds I am especially fond of. Twitterkins the Junco. Belly Bird (bluebird). Lesser Goldeneye (Bufflehead). Blue Bullet (Tree Swallow). Rubber Ducky Bird (Brown-headed Nuthatch). The Race Giganticus (Brown Pelican). Some of the best are colloquial names. Labrador Twister (woodcock). Pond Snout (Hooded Merganser). Pigwitch (Horned Grebe). Sage Hen (Clapper Rail). Thunder Pumper (American Bittern). Bogsucker (woodcock). Chokoloskee Chicken (White Ibis). 2. QUOTATIONS. Many of these I was witness to. Some of the others are classic, legendary, and part of oral tradition. Francis Lee Jacques. "There's not much difference between warblers and no warblers." Jacques loved heroic landscapes populated with big game, large wading birds, Caribou on the Canadian Shield, waterfowl. He didn't have much use of dickey birds. Roger Tory Peterson. "A quick field observer who does not temper his snap judgement with a bit of caution is like a fast car without brakes." This appears on p. xx of the 1947 edition of his eastern field guide. There's something about this guide that makes it still excel, in many respects, over all the others, even today when we stand in awe of the Geo guide and Sibley. Of course a big part of this is its being so venerable. I grew up with it. Nothing else was quite as useful. New guides - all of them - skimp on the text. RTP's illustrations are masterpieces, the distillation of a species' appearance. His earlier editions, east and west, have even better distillations, much more schematic paintings. In RTP's later editions the birds are too painterly, too much portraits, they no longer have that great jizz, gestalt, and essence. "Son, you've got fast eyes." Jack Abbott to Jared Sparks after Jared had spotted something good on a Chincoteague Christmas count. When I was an editor Jack used to send me regular reports, even during his terminal illness. Once a Mississippi Kite showed up in some remote, inaccessible area of Virginia, long before they came to be seen regularly. Jack wrote that had he been able to he would have crawled on his belly to see it and add it to his state list. Such is the hold that this avocation has on some of us. "Have you got all the birds salted down?" Jack Abbott to Fred Scott before a Chincoteague Christmas count. "A thousand birds is a lot of birds." Will Russell. This deceptively simple remark is much deeper than it seems. How many times do you see a thousand or more birds of one species at one time other than geese, Dunlin, blackbirds, Tree Swallows, or a few others? "I make mistakes but I am the first to notice they are mistakes." Ludlow Griscom. "Mr. Smart, Virginia Rails do not occur in Cape Cod in the winter." Ludlow Griscom at a Cape Cod Christmas count compilation. Bob Smart then took the Virginia Rail out of his pocket and it walked around the table. Bob Smart himself is worth a chapter or two. Great sense of humor. He had realistic looking plastic "barnoculars" that could be filled with the liquid of one's choice. I overheard one unwitting person on the Bluenose ferry say: "That man just took a drink out of his binoculars." Bob was known for his "rhymers". What is a quiet alcid? A murmurre. What is a quiet French butter alcid? A beurre murmurre. What is a cold, quiet French butter alcid? A brr-Beurre murmurre. Bob was, I believe, the originator of the tactful yet effective way to make someone aware of their misidentification by asking where the misidentified bird was in relation to the bird that was really there. If the person calls attention to a loon but it's really a cormorant you'd say: "Where is the loon in relation to the cormorant?" Once someone, a prominent birder, (who shall remain unidentified) was asked how to tell a distant gull is not an Osprey. They answered: "A gull looks like an Osprey but it isn't." Someone at the Militia Hill Hawk Watch used to answer the classic question: "How do you know you're not counting the same bird over and over again." "We counted that same bird twice last year." Another situation, when someone wishfully reports, say, the only Greater Scaup on a bird count. They may have seen it poorly or even just assumed there HAD to be one there - this is called stringing - sometimes the result of a poor look or impression only. When asked where it was s/he replied: "It was with the other Lesser Scaup," which makes it sound as it they were all Lesser Scaup to begin with. A sort of Freudian slip. At Stone Harbor in the late 1950s in the fall Will Russell and I were looking at a brown Indigo Bunting at close range. A little tricky but it was pretty obvious what it was. A group we didn't know were talking at length, not able to identify it. Eventually Will, not being able to stand it any longer, and without a trace of oneupmanship or braggadocio, said: "That's an Indigo Bunting." An older man replied: "None of your business, kid." Now THAT's what I call mentoring. Once on Fred Scott's boat I clumsily stepped on my umbrella, snapping the handle in two. Fred, who could be delightfully sarcastic in a genial way, said: "WHY do you do that?" "A Great Blue Heron reminds me of a wasp when it flies." I will not tell you who that was. 3. Time to get serious. AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGISTS' UNION. Although most of the articles require a doctorate in biochemistry, statistics, or physics (They certainly are largely incomprehensible to me) I recommend joining the American Ornithologists' Union and receiving the A.O.U. journal "the Auk". It is a quarterly, has over 1,000 pages a year, and is worth it for the news, obituaries, the occasional letters, and book reviews alone. Even if the articles are mostly at the postdoctoral level the accompanying abstracts are much more intelligible. It is good to support the leading ornithological society in the world. Every few years "the Flock" is issued, a combined membership directory for the A.O.U. and 5 or so other leading North American professional ornithological societies, very useful for land-based addresses, phone nos. & e-mail handles. Starting with the current Jan. 2004 issue, and for the first time, the irregularly issued A.O.U. monographs are mailed to all members, the latest one being number 54: "Population dynamics of the California Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis): a meta-analysis" by Alan B. Franklin (and 16 others), which is 54 pages. While it is true that the articles are not for the faint-hearted, it is also true that so are the membership dues, $42 a year ($20 for students). If interested contact the Treasurer, Jeffrey D. Brawn, Shelford Vivarium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 606 E. Healy St., Champaign, Illinois 61820 (jbrawn@uiuc.edu). Best to all.-Harry Armistead, 523 E. Durham St., Philadelphia, PA 19119-1225. 215-248-4120. 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