On Audubon and Those Confusing Warblers Several of my friends have taken me to task for giving two of the color plates in my eastern field guide the title Confusing Fall Warblers. They are not confusing, they insist. Perhaps not to them, but the little greeny-brown jobs remain confusing to 95 percent of the bird watching crowdor at least to those who do not consider themselves hard-core. Even Audubon was confused. Of the thirty-eight species of wood warblers found normally in eastern North America he eventually knew all but one. In attempting to sort them out, he was relatively late on the scene. Early on, Linnaeus, the creator of the Systema Naturae, and his successor, Johann Georg Gmelin, as well as a number of other workers, had already named and described twenty-five species of North American warblers. That was before Alexander Wilson published his American Ornithology, wherein he described another ten. By the time Audubon came on the scene, twenty years later, he was able to add only two new ones: Swainsons warbler and the now nearly extinct Bachmans warbler, both furtive southerners first discovered by his friend the Reverend Bachman of Charleston. After Audubon, only one species, Kirtlands warbler, a rarity restricted to the pine barrens of Michigan, remained to be described. But Audubon tried hard; he named and illustrated ten or eleven species that did not existvariants or obscure plumages of already well- known species. Many birders have found that the sumptuous showcase of Audubons prints published by Abbeville PressThe Baby Elephant Folio was beyond their pocketbooks. But if they did purchase the book, they may have looked only at the pictures, ignoring the text prepared after considerable research by my wife, Ginny, and me. Inasmuch as the tome weighs eighteen pounds, it is not exactly a field guide or bedtime reading. For the benefit of a wider audience, I have pulled things together and adapted from the book the following capsule accounts of the eleven species of warblers that led Audubon astray: Childrens Warbler (Yellow Warbler) When Audubon painted two little yellowish birds at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana, he tentatively inscribed his drawing Louisiana Warbler, Sylvia ludoviciana. Later, feeling quite certain that they represented something new, he crossed out the scientific name and inked in Sylvia childreni, naming it childrens warbler in honor of the secretary of the Royal Society, John George Children, who managed his affairs in London. He had drawn not a new species but a female and immature yellow warbler. Obviously he became aware of this at a later date, because it was omitted in his octavo Birds of America. It is understandable that Audubon, having virtually no books, should be confused by obscure plumages of certain warblers. Any modern field guide would have informed him that with the exception of the unmistakable female redstart, the yellow warbler is the only warbler with yellow (not white) spots in its ta Excerpted from All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures by Roger Tory Peterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
