click on the pictures to see larger versions!
Jeremy Nicholson’s great picture of a Red-hooded Woodpecker.
Woodpeckers from the genus Melanerpes are some of the most fascinating of birds. Melanerpes is latin for “black creeper.” There are six species in the genus, and none seem to have any more black than you would expect from a woodpecker. They don’t seem anymore creepy than other woodpeckers, either. We have two species here in South Mississippi the Red-headed Woodpecker and the Red-bellied Woodpecker. The two are often confused by beginning birders, mainly I think because the two birds both have red heads, and neither has a noticeable red belly.
It’s all Mark Catesby’s fault. Catesby was a young Englishman who visited his sister in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1712. The first bird that Catesby saw as he got off the boat was a Red-headed Woodpecker. That bird seemed so wonderfully exotic that it inspired Catesby to become the first naturalist to systematically describe and paint Colonial America’s flora and fauna, a task that would consume his professional life. Red-headed Woodpeckers are edge-lovers, and even in 1712, these birds had developed the habit of hanging around the ultimate edge-makers—homo sapiens. Catesby no doubt turned to the nearest colonist for an identification and was told, “That’s a red-headed Woodpecker, aye?”
And so it became. Later Catesby would encounter the Red-bellied Woodpecker and ask the same question, and I imagine that he got the same answer. When he began to skin that bird —yes, birding was just a bit different in those days— he found that it had a red blush around its vent, and the bird was named after a feature that no self-respecting woodpecker would show in public. A little more investigation by Catesby would have turned up several other colloquial names for this Melanerpes, including Ladder-back, Zebra Woodpecker, and my favorite, the Calico Woodpecker.
Of course, Catesby was working without a net. He landed on American shores when Carl Linnaeus was a five-year-old Swedish boy who hadn’t even dreamed of inventing binomial nomenclature, the system that is still used to describe and classify all living things. Catesby honored many local colloquial names, and when he created names from whole cloth he was straightforward. He named the Downy Woodpecker the “Smallest Spotted Woodpecker” and the Ivory-billed he called the “Largest White-billed Woodpecker.” He published his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands between 1731 and 1743.
When Linnaeus did grow up and revolutionize how man looks at this world, he followed Catesby’s example by building on the knowledge that was already there. He used Catesby’s careful observations in his descriptions of North American birds seventy-one times. Thus, we still see many of our birds through Mark Catesby’s eyes. He gave us “Yellow-rump”—now the Yellow-rumped Warbler, “Pine Creeper”—the Pine Warbler, “Cat-bird”— the Gray Catbird, “Oyster Catcher”—American Oystercatcher, “Humming-bird”—the Ruby-throated Hummingbird and many more.
I’ve always been a fan of Mark Catesby, nevertheless, the man simply made a mess of our Southern Melanerpes. I know it’s been just a smidgen less than three hundred years since young Catesby made this blunder, but is it too late to correct the mistake? I think not!
I hereby move that Southern birders start calling the bird known to science as Melanerpes erythrocephalus the Red-hooded Woodpecker and that we also restore to the bird whose scientific name is Melanerpes Carolinus the name of Calico Woodpecker.
Do I hear a second?
Jeremy Nicholson got shot of a nice Calico Woodpecker.
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