Before there was Birding, there was Collecting, with a shotgun. Many people don't realize that type specimens still must be collected to be valid; even a blood sample for DNA is not considered sufficient. And skins of common birds that die are useful for education, and as beautiful as a kind of mortal art. The great bird painter Ray Harris Ching has had surreal fun showing living birds with taxonomic labels.
Blog friend Stacia Novy, falconer and biologist, has been making skins for her prof, Dr. Rick Essner, at grad school in Illinois. She writes:
"My professor has a "salvage permit" and is allowed to collect birds that have died naturally in the wild: hit by a car, starvation, disease, etc. We save the skins for study specimens. It takes 2 hours to prepare each one, so this is 40 hours worth of work, not including the drying time which takes about 2-3 weeks. They are pretty to look at, even in death."
I agree. And look, Reid: an Indigo bunting for you too see up close! Right click...
That there are still hunderds of Passenger pigeon skins in collections means that we can still find out things we don't know. And now there is plausible "Jurassic Park"scenario too-- a lot more DNA remains after 100 years than 65 million...
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6 comments:
That was Farley Mowat's first job.
In Born Naked, he tells of his experiences going along with his uncle, a famed Canadian ornithologist, up to the High Arctic to shoot some specimens and collect their eggs.
He returns home with a wounded parasitic jaeger that he has managed to save. The jaeger then decides to attack everything in site, right up to the point when Mowat's pet great horned owl kills it and becomes a hero.
Very cool!!!
Actually this isn't the case. The ICZN has never explicitly state a dead specimen is required (although it is traditionally the way we do things). Infact the first few iterations of the code didn't require a type to be formally designated at all for a valid species description. Now we are required to formally designate a holotype (and often when revising groups lacking a holotype we'll designate lectotypes or neotypes for taxa lacking defined holotypes) when describing a new taxon. There have been a few species which have been described without deposition of a preserved type specimen including a few species of birds, mammals, and a lizard. There are a variety of reasons for doing this. For example, a shrike was captured in Somalia and because the researchers lacked collecting and export permits they kept it in captivity for a while then released it after saving molted feathers and collecting blood. It was described as Laniarius liberatus, but was synomized with Laniarius erlangeri in 2008 based on additional molecular data. A second example is a new species of leiothrichid, Liocichla bugunorum, which was described based on photos, feathers, and observations (over a 10 year period) because the known population was small enough (14) that scientists felt collecting a type was too risky. This practice has be debated in a series of papers, and its unheard of except in the case of extreme circumstances, but in the eyes of the code at least, it appears to be valid.
Thanks as always, Therese. I think I will designate you as official taxonomic fact- checker at SBQ-- you are always up- to- date, unlike this old guy whose last academic course was almost 40 years ago (;-)
PS --Population of FOURTEEN? Tell us more... seems worth blogging.
The shrike story is even more interesting I think. The bird was sighted at a hospital in Somalia and couldn't be identified by one of the authors. He caught it, and since he'd never seen one before decided it was probably ultra rare and contacted the International Council for Bird Preservation to see if he could describe it without killing the specimen. They agreed it was possible to do the description, so the author kept the bird and observed it. They collected blood, but the package got lost between Somalia and Denmark, so they were stuck with molted feathers and a small amount of dry blood. At some point the author left and went back to Denmark leaving the bird in the care of someone else, who was suppose to release it. But before the bird got released the civil war got bad enough he got evacuated, and somehow he managed to take the bird with him to Germany where he kept it for some period of time before returning to Somalia and releasing the bird.
The bird with 14 known individuals is an Indian species, here is a link (http://www.planetofbirds.com/ns/Bugun%20Liocichla.pdf) to the pdf of the description which provides an interesting short discussion about species descriptions without a specimen. A follow up paper (http://www.bio-nica.info/biblioteca/Peterson2006DistributionLiocichla.pdf) used the known occurrence data to predict other locations where the species could occur.
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