Multitudes of Strange Birds

Since the days when the people of Raleigh's colony settled on the sandy shores of Roanoke-since the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, and Duxbury, and Provincetown-men, with unending enjoyment, have been discovering and naming the American birds. At first, perhaps, it was only a casual looking at them. The settlers were homesick for England, and in certain American birds they saw a resemblance to those they never expected to see again. So they called them the familiar English names, and set down for posterity certain ornithological errors that have persisted ever since. They called our big, russet-breasted thrush a robin, our finches sparrows; our small falcon a sparrow hawk. They named our redwings and grackles "blackbirds," although blackbirds are thrushes, and American blackbirds are orioles.

But the greater number of birds lived wild, free, and unnamed throughout the tremendous continent that bulked behind the little colonies on its eastern shore. As civilization became less of a gamble and more of a certainty in America, English and French naturalists, eagerly delighted to explore virgin territory, began to track down and name multitudes of strange birds. At that time there was no systematic method of determining names. There were no standard authorities; no books on American birds; no checklists. The early ornithologists were on their own in a brave, new field. They made many mistakes; confused female birds and immature birds with new species; recorded birds that never were seen again.

Yet, in spite of errors, one by one the American birds were discovered and added to the growing list of species for America. One of the earliest of the naturalists was the Englishman, Mark Catesby, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina. From 1712 to 1719 he carefully hunted out and named most of the Carolina and Florida birds. Only one, however-the yellow-billed tropic bird, Phaethon lepturus catesbyi-bears the name of this pioneering bird-namer. Yet it was he who first described the cardinal, which he called the Red Bird; he who thrilled at a redstart flashing through the Spanish moss in the swamps outside Charleston; he who had first chance at the summer tanager, the pied-billed grebe, the painted bunting, the red-winged blackbird, the bluebird, and a great many more. Fresh from England, he must have marveled.

Then, in the middle of the 18th century, a man of science in Sweden revolutionized the scientific field by giving a binomial nomenclature to everything that walked, swam, flew or grew.