A Brilliant Insight
Not Mine!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the controversy over bird names. Today, I want to address one of the birds I mentioned and the story associated with the person honored by the bird’s name.
An astonishing bird full of spunk and character, Steller’s jays are one animal you cannot help but see and hear, hopping from branch to branch like Rudolf Nureyev, stealing your food like the Artful Dodger, and calling at you like an upset John McEnroe. They are also central to one of the great leaps of intuition in natural history. On July 20, 1841, German-born naturalist George Wilhelm Steller was on an exploratory expedition with Vitus Bering when they landed on Kayak, or Qe’yiłteh, Island in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. By this point in the journey, they had traveled overland 7,000 miles and been at sea for another 2,000 miles. One of the crew’s hunters brought Steller a specimen of a bird he had never held in hand but which he recognized from a painting he had seen in Catesby’s natural history, the first book to illustrate flora and fauna in North America. “This bird proved to me that we were really in America,” wrote Steller in his journal. He was correct.
In having this insight, Steller illustrated the key importance of paying attention. Crossing east across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, on the lead up to the boat trip to Kayak Island, he had collected plants, fish, insects, mammals, and birds. A diligent observer of the natural world, Steller had noted where, how, and when different species occurred. In reading his journals, I find him to be a delightful companion as exemplified by this wonderful passage. “That’s when I noticed that my horse, named Daurken, was a very good botanist and more knowledgeable about nature than I, because it wanted to make its way consistently on the white cushion moss, not on the green sphagnum, aware that rocks lie right under the former, which gives you a sure step, but pitfalls and big bogs underlie the latter.”
Along the way, he, Steller not Daurken, observed only one species of jay, probably the Siberian jay, seen in the mountains around the Yana River, more than 2,200 miles by air from where his hunter handed him a new variety of jay. Since he knew he had not yet seen this particular species, and knowing that this jay on Qe’yiłteh Island occurred in North America, Steller knew he was in America. It was a brilliant and bold conclusion and based on being prepared and attentive to the natural world.
Similar to what happened with Steller, I think of birds as a gateway to making connections. When I am on a hike and see a robin high on a ridge or flying between trees, I often stop and look more carefully, amazed by what I perceive as “my” yard bird up in the mountains. What are the birds doing here? How do they survive? Familiarity, as well as curiosity, leads me to be more attentive to these Cascade-visiting, lowland species than I am with mountain birds I do not know and, as I see more, not just of the robins, but of the landscape around them, I also begin to notice more flora and fauna. My connections expand as I hear woodpeckers knocking or the drumming sound of running elk; observe lichen growing on high spots where birds defecate (by the way the word to describe these lichen is coprophilic, or poop loving); smell the slightly, locker-room mustiness of a meadow (an aroma I actually like, at least in the mountains); track shadows on the ground of ravens flying overhead; or stick my finger into a pocket-gopher esker.
Each of these encounters supplements a memory I previously formed or creates a new one that I can later draw upon. In doing so, they help populate a picture that ever grows in my mind of the Cascades’ stories and communities, human and more-than-human. And, this multidimensional story of time and landscape is what I think of as the connective tissue that binds me to place.
A quick return to the naming controversy. Recently, a group of birders began to circle a petition calling for the American Ornithological Society to not change eponymous bird names. As I wrote before, as much as I am fascinated and inspired by Steller’s story, I know that it’s just one of many stories associated with this species. The more important stories, and the ones that I think people should be more focused on than the name Steller, are the roles these animals play in the ecosystem and how their lives are being transformed by humans and our warming world. Instead of the infighting in the world of birders, wouldn’t it be better if we spent time addressing the bigger issues of habitat destruction, climate change, and environmental injustices?
And, this will be my final thought on this subject. I would like to point out that in Catesby’s book, none of his names references a person. (His names include Largest White-Bill Woodpecker, Chattering Plover, and Fox Coloured Thrust Thrush.) Furthermore, in Alexander Wilson’s nine-volume American Ornithology; Or The Natural History of the Birds of North America (1811-1812), regarded as the first book about birds in this part of the world, only three (Clark’s Crow, Lewis’s Woodpecker, and Bartram’s Sandpiper) of the 268 species listed incorporate a person’s name. (Wilson’s names include Tell-tale Godwit, Greater Spotted Woodpecker, and Sea-Side Finch.) Perhaps we simply need to look to the past to point a way to the future in how we name birds.
If you live in the north, or want to, or know someone who does, I will be talking about Homewaters at the Stanwood Library on December 9, at 11AM. Hope to see you there.
sorry I'm such a non-birder that I wasn't at all sure. And I often fat finger and an unnoticed spelling error goes by. Then there's the "auto correct" feature on my phone that often trips me up and mangles an otherwise perfect email.... ;^)
Fox Colored Thrust? Is it supposed to be Thrush?