Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arkansaw Flycatcher given several names over the years
The notable wildlife painter John James Audubon visited Arkansas Post in 1822. On April 17, with the aid of a shotgun, he collected a specimen of a bird that he had never seen before.
That specimen was a female, according to documentation in his journal, and its body held partly formed eggs. At first he named the bird species “Arkansaw Flycatcher,” using a spelling common in the era.
A century and a half later, the University of Arkansas Press published “Arkansas Birds: Their Distribution and Abundance” by Doug James and Joseph Neal. The authors included an image of Audubon’s “Arkansaw Flycatcher.” Beneath the image, James and Neal noted that Audubon’s specimen is “the only species of bird that first became known to science through its discovery in Arkansas.”
James and Neal, however, did not call the bird an Arkansaw Flycatcher, or even an “Arkansas Flycatcher,” instead, they called it the Willow Flycatcher, the common name by which the species is known today.
The reason for the name change provides insight into the personality of Audubon and into the process by which scientific names are chosen.
A BIRD BY ANY OTHER NAME
According to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Audubon was born in Haiti in 1785, the illegitimate son of Capt. Jean Audubon and a French chambermaid. The mother of young “Jean Rabin” died early on and, after a slave revolt, his father returned to France where he remarried. Eventually adopted by his father, Jean Audubon grew up in France.
In 1803, he escaped having to serve in Napoleon Bonaparte’s military by emigrating to the United States under the name John James Audubon. He was 18. He survived yellow fever at New York, married in Pennsylvania, had three children, ran a store in Kentucky and then a sawmill, went bankrupt.
He passed himself off as a rough-and-tumble American.
A resident of Philadelphia and only a few decades younger than the respected scientist Benjamin Franklin, Audubon coveted Franklin’s international reputation. What Franklin had done with electricity, Audubon tried to match in ornithology. He tried to do so by schmoozing his way into the Royal Society of England, Great Britain’s foremost scientific community.
To ingratiate himself with professor Thomas Stewart Traill, a Scottish naturalist at the University of Edinburgh, Audubon renamed his Arkansaw Flycatcher the Traill’s Flycatcher.
The schmooze worked. Traill also was an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Audubon won admission into the Royal Society and an introduction to publishers of scientific works, and he eventually sold copies of his book to Royal Society members.
With the first publication of Audubon’s “Birds of America” in 1840, the Arkansaw Flycatcher became broadly known as Traill’s Flycatcher. The bird was beautifully drawn atop a sweetgum tree on Plate 45. It continued to wear that name as Audubon was busy selling subscriptions to his book in England.
When his book sales lagged a bit and he commenced marketing the book in the United States, he added another plate of flycatchers: He painted a male and a female of one species in a bush with two other species of flycatchers — Plate 359. He titled these male and female birds “Arkansaw Flycatchers” — but they don’t look like the bird he drew in 1822.
Today ornithologists have grouped Traill’s Flycatcher among four other similar birds in the genus Empidonax. The accepted common name for the species today is indeed Willow Flycatcher, but professor Traill’s influence is reflected in its scientific name, Empidonax traillii.
NAMED FOR ARKANSAS
Audubon later painted two other birds he named after Arkansas and published their images in “Birds of America”: the “Arkansaw Goldfinch” and the “Arkansaw Siskin.”
These two birds had already been introduced into science before Audubon painted them. The first is what we call today a Lesser Goldfinch; it is seen on Plate 183 of “Birds of America” hanging from a saw briar. The one Audubon called a siskin might also be a Lesser Goldfinch or perhaps a mislabeled redpoll.
Neither the Lesser Goldfinch nor the redpoll is commonly seen in Arkansas today, nor did these birds wear the Arkansaw moniker anyplace other than in Audubon’s picture book.
These paintings can be seen in digital format online at audubon.org/birds-of-america.
STATE BIRDS
Though 13 states have bird species that are named in their honor, Arkansas has none. Three states whose borders are adjacent to the Natural State do. There is the Louisiana Waterthrush, the Tennessee Warbler and the Mississippi Kite (a kind of hawk).
Six bird species are associated by name with California: condor, gull, gnatcatcher, thrasher, towhee and quail.
The Carolinas give their name to three species: chickadee, wren and the now extinct Carolina Parakeet.
There is a Florida Scrubjay, a Kentucky Warbler, a Connecticut Warbler, an Oregon Junco, a Virginia Rail, an Arizona Woodpecker and a Hawaiian Petrel.