Add bird-watching to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s vast list of interests.
Thomas Jefferson, who penned the essence of democracy in the phrase “… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” in our nation’s Declaration of Independence, was also an avid bird-watcher.
He created a checklist of birds in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785. The book reflects Jefferson’s powerful intellect in pondering diverse subjects, from government to education, religion, law, society, geography and natural history.
Jefferson listed 125 species of birds he’d seen in Virginia, all of which upon correcting for modern-day nomenclature, you’d recognize at a Fourth of July backyard barbecue. Birds on his list — such as bluejay, redbellied woodpecker and mocking bird — have the same names today, with minor orthographic changes as in “mockingbird” as one word instead of two.
Other birds on the list — including smallest spotted woodpecker, little owl and little white heron — do not correspond to current bird names. More about that later.
Jefferson additionally listed scientific bird names as devised by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who classified all living things into a Latinate binomial nomenclature of genus and species that is still used today.
Jefferson also added scientific names that predated Linnaeus and were used by British naturalist Mark Catesby (1683-1749) in his volume “The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands,” published between 1734 and 1747 with drawings and descriptions of birds.
Common English bird names have, of course, changed, and scientific names have been revised in the 233 years since Jefferson created his list. We’re therefore left wondering which modern bird names correspond to some of Jefferson’s bird names, like “smallest spotted woodpecker.”
Jeff Holt’s “The First American Bird Checklist,” published in the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club’s journal, Cassinia (2002-09), matches Jefferson’s bird names to 21st-century bird names. Holt concludes that smallest spotted woodpecker is a downy woodpecker; little owl is an eastern screechowl; and little white heron, a snowy egret.
But Jefferson listed birds we’ll never see, like the white bill woodpecker, parrot of Carolina and pigeon of passage, birds which Holt determined were ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon, which have long been extinct, due to human depredations.
Our third United States president was a keen bird-watcher using only his naked eyes — binoculars would not be invented until 1825, the year before his death.
“My method is to make two observations a day,” Jefferson wrote about bird-watching, “the one as early as possible in the morning, the other from 3. to 4. aclock [sic] … I state them in an ivory pocket book … & copy them out once a week.”