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7  Reprisal of My Evaluation of Bartram.

More than two years have now passed since my evaluation of the case of William Bartram’s “Painted Vulture” was presented on the website Wildbirds Broadcasting, this critique being what may be the last word on the mystery. 

http://wildbirdsbroadcasting.blogspot.com/2014/06/vultur-sacra-invalid-taxon.html

(The “Vultur sacra” as an Invalid Taxon and Shortcomings in the Veracity of Bartram’s “Travels” by Mathew Louis).

I was motivated to write not simply as a response to an earlier posting on Wildbirds Broadcasting (“Painted Vulture a Former American Species” (March 25, 2013)) which had cited a recently-published report in the peer-reviewed Zootaxa (“Validity of Bartram’s Painted Vulture,” 3613(1): 61–82) on the subject, the authors of which, Noel Snyder and Joel Fry, having endorsed the “Painted” as described by Bartram as a now-extinct form of vulture formerly resident in Florida.  My investigations into this mystery actually began rather inadvertently.

In the late summer of 2013 I had decided to summarize my findings on the Andean Condor in a research paper, which, as I had then believed, would concisely present the material in a general way but within a limited space.  The paper was presented for review to a publication which had just been launched, and it was meant to be the end result of my efforts.  Ultimately, it was not published, and this blog now serves that end of how I have dealt with the task of dissemination.  As I had previously taken similar issue with another publication I had approached that summer, I was apprehensive to see my findings presented in a manner that would not allow them to be readily accessible (despite its recent launch and the appearance of successive numbers, the former publication has now been without an installment for two years).  Further, I soon realized that, as the scope of my findings broadened and I clearly had more to evaluate, it would be impractical to attempt containing the report to a few thousand words per the criteria of that or any journal publication.  

This paper was reviewed, and from comments in a recommendation by one of the two Reviewers were my attentions drawn to the subject of the “Painted Vulture.”  Otherwise, I hardly saw any relevance, in my paper, of the former to the underlying discussion I had presented on the Andean Condor.  I would not be complicit to the recommendation as I felt it was a digression and saw an impasse in having my work appear in that journal.  The Reviewer wanted me to propose and evaluate the question of the King Vulture Sarcorhamphus papa as being a possible identity of the bird sightings my reported covered, and the paper by Snyder & Fry (cited above) was invoked.  I took the suggestion seriously and wanted to make certain that I had an argument to not include it in the submission itself; my paper had only considered the best cases of sightings of giant birds which I could by diagnosis attribute as sightings of the Andean Condor, thus removing from consideration all other bird species, especially one that would hardly account for any of the whole contagion of sightings of mysterious avian giants:  the King Vulture.  [Though authors use the spelling of the genus as Sarcoramphus, I have decided to retain the usage of it as it appears in this and other posts.]

I did not simply consider the case of Bartram’s “vulture” to establish a counterargument to the Reviewer’s recommendation.  I, too, was intrigued by it and had long questioned whether or not the bird Bartram had identified was a now-extinct species or if it was an accidental King Vulture.  I am aware of a great number of extra-limital records which are supported by just one sighting or specimen without any further substantiation in the given area by the form represented, an example being Worthen’s Sparrow Spizella wortheni, which was first collected in New Mexico in 1884 but has not been observed in the state since.  It is possible that a single record can be a legitimate one despite the hiatus.

As much of the discussion on Bartram is well known and need not much exposition, I will here contribute those additional or novel details of which that have not been incorporated into the greater debate.  I first became familiar with the reference to the “Painted” from the popular work Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World (Brown & Amadon, 1: 182) where the authors mention it in their entry for the King, suggesting that Bartram may have erred in his description, the error being either that he had misidentified a King or that the claim was a more generalized error and that no Sarcorhamphus vulture ever occurred in Florida.  As my summary would show, the latter is the case (excluding records of escapes), but in this post, I will take license to further elaborate on that point and question the integrity of Bartram’s work overall.  Brown & Amadon’s stance differs somewhat from that of another popular author, Roger Tory Peterson, who was convinced that the bird was a King Vulture and gave it treatment in his field guides, of which I quote: 

KING VULTURE. Sarcoramphus papa. Found by William Bartram in Florida, 1774 or 1775. A huge white or pink-bodied Vulture with black and white wings, and a black tail. Head highly colored (red, yellow, etc.).

—-Peterson, R. T.  Field Guide to the Birds..  (Second Revised Edition (1947)); 248.  [APPENDIX I.  West Indian and Tropical Birds.]

Roger Tory Peterson gave especial interest to the King Vulture.  Outside of his field guide series, he probably produced more portraits of it than he did of the Caracara Caracara cheriway, the true identity of Bartram’s bird (Eagles, Hawks,.. plate 2 (vol. 1); World of Birds, 13).

BARTRAM POSSIBLY A FRAUD

In considering the matter I felt it necessary to go the source.  I queried Noel Snyder, who co-authored the Zootaxa paper.  I offered some critique in my query, and in his response he maintained the legitimacy of the arguments.  As I later realized, much of what I was asking served as just a counterargument to their thesis; I was not getting to the actual question itself:  what exactly was the “Painted Vulture”?  With reflection on the source, Bartram’s travelogue, I took interest in his detail of the bird’s crop (“…what is singular, a large portion of the stomach hangs down on the breast of the bird, in the likeness of a sack or half wallet,…”) and then realized that the Caracara does also possess a crop, an image in a title in my collection (Photographic Guide to the Birds of the World (A. Gosler, ed.), 105) being responsible for affording me the comparison that sprung to mind.  In my query to Snyder, I had not even mentioned the Caracara, but, not having been passionate to give priority evaluating it, I then started taking account of other comparisons of it to what Bartram had described.  Bartram’s description clearly revealed a bird that was very different from a Caracara, as he described a bare-headed bird with a red crown and with “lobed lappets of a redish [sic] orange colour” along its beak, which, among other points, are more characteristic of the King Vulture.

On June 13, 2014, I was able to consult a number of important works in a library and took note of the reference in Friedmann (cited in my original post in Wildbirds Broadcasting) to a resident population of the Caracara along the St. Johns River, the same locality where Bartram  made his own sighting.  John James Audubon would first encounter them in the same general area (roughly eighteen miles separate the St. Johns from St. Augustine):

     “I was not aware of the existence of the Caracara or the Brazilian Eagle in the United States, until my visit to the Floridas in the winter of 1831.  On the 24th November of that year, in the course of an excursion near the town of St. Augustine, I observed a bird flying at a great elevation, and almost over my head.  Convinced that it was unknown to me, and bent on obtaining it, I followed it nearly a mile, when I saw it sail towards the earth, making for a place where a group of Vultures were engaged in devouring a dead horse.”

—-Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography (II: 350); Birds of America,..   (I: 21–22)

(The Florida population of Caracara would later be described after him by John Cassin– Polyborus Audubonii  (Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia, 1865; 2), however this name is not usually accepted as valid.)

Other peculiarities were evident.  Bartram, having described a considerable diversity of fauna, particularly avifauna, in his Travels.. seems to have omitted any reference to anything that could be readily construed as a Caracara.  Proponents of the “Painted” form argued that its diagnostic “character” was its tail–white tipped with dark brown or black.  It is the Caracara, which, if seen from a distance, has such a pattern.  As Bartram never categorically owned to having obtained a specimen, I could imagine that he was only able to observe them at such a distance to not cause one to flee; thus he would not have been able to take note of the indistinct barred pattern along the white areas of the Caracara’s tail.  Further, both caracara species of the South American genus Milvago (M. chimachima,  M. chimango) have in common such similar tail patterns.

With this much to consider, among other points, I was faced with the task of assuming Bartram had indeed described a Caracara but had somehow conflated it with a description of the King Vulture, and thus, he had never seen an example of the latter.  The question remained:  was Bartram familiar with the description of the King?  The answer to that proved to be true, and which arrived before my day of researching was done, but the truth was also shocking.  Bartram had merely appropriated the text from an earlier description of the King into that of his “Painted,” and, as I revealed in my summary from Wildbirds Broadcasting, Bartram’s source was A Natural History of Uncommon Birds,.. by George Edwards.  Further, Bartram took license to give his bird a scientific name similar to that of the King Vulture.  He called it “Vultur sacra,” and there can be no doubt that that name speaks to a familiarity with the name and Linnaean description of V. papa.

Within days I wrote my summary for Wildbirds Broadcasting, which was posted (“Vultur sacra an Invalid Taxon”).  The material was presented hurriedly and some references and scientific names should have appeared in italics, but nonetheless the arguments I still uphold, especially my point relating to the feather in the portrait of Micco Chlucco of either ambiguous identity or not correlative to the purported “Painted” as indicated by Snyder & Fry.  A serious error in my post, my negligence being its genesis, is found in the first statement of the final paragraph, where I meant valid in place of invalid.  This summary became a truly fitting sidebar project originating from my researches on the Andean Condor, the project of which I now realize I cannot present so concisely.  (Another mystery specimen, the Townsend’s Bunting, I would also later evaluate in Wildbirds Broadcasting (June 4–19, 2015).)

I was faced with a difficult predicament in presenting my findings, that William Bartram displayed an underhanded side in his writing.  In my post I tried to approach this difficulty by invoking an unknown; I referred throughout my piece to “the hand by which his ‘Travels’ was edited,” that some copy editor had appropriated the description for Bartram, who had not meant to see it published in such a manner.  With further reflection, I regret it.  What “explanation” I offered as to how the deception originated (see section, “Veracity of Bartram Compromised in “Travels…” within the post) represents the part of my summary that I would now wish to retract, as it was only conjectural and as I soon came to a better explanation.  When I was writing, I kept in mind that Bartram had made subsequent corrections to further printings of his book, and that a simple examination of those would determine whether the verbatim description of “sacra” was his intention.  Any of the errata making reference to it would show that he did or did not wish to see anything changed in respects to it.  After examining a copy of the Library of America edition of Travels.. (T. Slaughter, ed. (No. 84)) I found what I needed.  This was all but certainly not the case.  The Library of America edition offered a more comprehensive treatment of the material, including much of the roughly 28-item errata Bartram had proposed to see in a future revision of the James and Johnson edition of Travels..  None of these refer to the “Painted” description, and as the very aspect of an errata is to denote only brief corrections, I think it appropriate to argue that he did in fact write the “Painted” description without any intent to make changes, as any such changes would require a more substantial revision of an entire paragraph.

A month after my writing was posted, I offered some further commentary, specifically addressing the veracity of Bartram (Wikipedia entry “King Vulture”), among other particulars, on this page–

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:King_vulture#Painted_Vulture_probably_a_misidentified_Caracara

“…I will add that it is more likely, than what I originally presumed, that William Bartram took it upon himself to perpetuate the deliberate augmentation of his description of “Vultur sacra” from the heavily paraphrased “King of the Vultures” by George Edwards.  Bartram did write a 28-item errata after his Travels were published, and due to the likelihood that no reference to the “Painted Vulture” would have been mentioned in that errata, thus by implication meaning that Bartram felt that there was nothing to correct, it gives argument to the notion that Bartram alone wrote the heavily paraphrased description.”

From this there are multiple facets to consider.  It is unequivocal that William Bartram appropriated the text from another author’s description to create a description of something from his own experiences.  It was not just that he was describing a bird species already familiar to the literature–Bartram was describing something new.  To characterize this as a paraphrasing of George Edwards was polite of me, and it is evident from this that the wording of the description can be compared to plagiarism.  I can only consider that any new description or claim appearing in the present-day, having been presented with material heavily adapted from another, earlier author’s work, would be one that would not nor should not be taken seriously nor given special heed.  It would be one that would further diminish the credibility of its author. 

I might suppose that perhaps Bartram was working from memory, not having a skin, and somehow conflated the description of the King in Edwards to that of the Caracaras he had seen.  This much does not reconcile the circumstances of his describing it the way he did, that he all but plagiarized.  The “Painted” is like the King in having colorful lappets along its beak, and overall it is a bird far more colorful than the Caracara in terms of the bare skin of its head and neck and a crown, also bare of feathers, red in color.  Bartram did not make a singular mistake in his sighting–he made numerous, and each point should be considered for what it is.  The Caracara is without lappets along its beak and has a head with a feathered crown of black.  Multiple characters of the King, among other details, were incorrectly attributed to the Caracara.  I can only ponder this difficulty, that he wrote his book some seventeen years after seeing them and was grossly flawed in his recollections and judgments.  This difficulty is only compounded by the description he wrote of the “Croped Vulture” in his manuscript letter to John Fothergill about 1775 (my original post on Wildbirds Broadcasting), that being much unlike the “Painted.”  Importantly and to Bartram’s credit, as I noted in my earlier summary, that an important character–color of beak–he omitted altogether in his published work, may demonstrate how Bartram may have been attempting to provide a faithful description of the Caracara on certain other points where his “Painted” differs from the King (i.e., color of iris).  If that holds, it only does with a caveat, that the Caracara is a far less colorful (attractive) bird than the King, and that Bartram may have just as well wanted to describe something that would appeal to an audience of readers who would purchase and read his book.  Zoological collections likely have more examples of the King than they do of the Caracara (though the latter is of symbolic significance in México).  Even while writing this post, I learned that the Wikipedia Foundation intends to use an image of the King Vulture as their website’s “Picture of the Day.”  

Overall, I will refrain from describing William Bartram as a fraud, as much of what else he wrote relating to his interests in natural history are still no less worth merit; I mean to characterize his description of his “Vultur sacra” as having been done fraudulently.  This is a departure from what has been written of Bartram and his work and how it has been characterized (especially as Snyder & Fry, as a reinforcement of their thesis, argue that he was reliable in his observations), but it is necessary as my assessment shows that Bartram demonstrated a departure from the truth that compromised his veracity and the veracity of his writing overall.  In my researches of the condor and sightings of giant birds and other anomalous mysteries, I have likewise come across a trend, in numerous cases, where witnesses, having had their respective sightings and experiences, go further to embellish or fabricate their claims, thus rendering major suspicion to the stories themselves; an allusion to those as respects this discussion is, in my view, appropriate.

THE “PAINTED VULTURE” AS A CARACARA

The summary of my findings on Bartram’s bird being a Caracara poses the question of the disposition of the scientific name he created for it.  The name “Vultur sacra” Bartram is a nomen dubium owing to the botched description by which the author allowed in borrowing from the description of the “King of the Vultures” of George Edwards.  Edwards wrote before the use of Linnaean names began, but no less he has long been incorporated into the synonymy of Sarcorhamphus papa as Linnaeus made such reference in his original description.  As “sacra” is a nomen dubium, it should not be placed in the synonymy of any species.  This is also particularly true because it was a description based on a sighting and no specimen was obtained to allow for an appropriate designation.  However, if I were to give the name any special disposition, place it in synonymy somewhere, it should be ascribed not to Sarcorhamphus but to Falco [=Caracara] cheriway Jacquin.  I feel that the synonymy in Caracara exclusive of Sarcorhamphus is appropriate because Bartram’s observation by itself was legitimate (as was his original description in his letter to Fothergill) and was an observation of the former, where the latter he had never seen.  This also applies to combinations of the name as proposed by Snyder & Fry and elsewhere:  Sarcorhamphus (S. sacra, S. sacer) and Sarcoramphus (S. sacer, S. sacra, S. papa sacra, S. papa sacer).

RESEARCH PAPERS IN ZOOTAXA

In their report in Zootaxa, Snyder & Fry argued that William Bartram had not been mistaken in his observations:

“That any beginning bird student might construct a description resembling Bartram’s painted Vulture based on viewing a Caracara seems extremely doubtful. That Bartram might have done so seems beyond all credibility.”

Though they did not consider the comparison of Bartram’s description to Edwards, the authors felt that “…his description bears almost no resemblance to a Northern Caracara, but it does match the King Vulture in all important respects except tail color….”  

I will own at the time of writing to still not having been able to examine Snyder & Fry’s paper in its entirety, and some of my comments will draw attention to outstanding points; however, I nonetheless feel that, from what I have read, an argument for the validity of the “Painted” deserves rejection in place of what I have presented and other criticisms.  Snyder & Fry go further to add a narrative as to the natural history of the “Painted” in Florida and how a population once flourished there.  This brings to mind how disjunct populations or subspecies of Floridian fauna have parallel populations in the Western U.S., namely the Caracara, Scrub Jay Aphelocoma spp., or Mountain Lion Puma concolor as examples.  However, the King Vulture was never known as a breeding bird in those more arid western regions where the above examples are found, and I found their argument in that respect to be novel if the “Painted” ever did exist.  The King is a tropical vulture, and it is impossible to understand why any “parallel” of it would occur in northern Florida (29° N), where the portion of the peninsula south of the Everglades region (27° N), where “it” had never been observed, is tropical or subtropical.

Attention has been afforded to the “Painted” in two putative representations which appear at the following links–

1)  http://narcamoorecraig.blogspot.com/2013/03/bartrams-painted-vulture.html

[“…at long last, the acceptance of this now-extinct species – or subspecies – into the roster of North American avifauna.”]

2)  http://novataxa.blogspot.com/2013/02/bartram-painted-vulture.html

Endorsement also appeared in 2013 on Birdwatching Daily (“Florida’s Lost Vulture” (April 22)) and the American Birding Association [ABA] Blog (“North America’s Oldest New Bird?” (March 19)).

Another recent report, also from Zootaxa (3918(4): 579–586), took up the issue of the “Painted,” though the author, Jiří Mlíkovský, rejected the validity of “sacra” as a taxon (both of these Zootaxa papers being reviewed by R. T. Chesser).

As a digression, and after reading again the review of Harper on this subject in Auk (53: 381), I will offer a reasoning behind this underlying problem of how a lack of attention paid to important points by earlier authors can perpetuate and establish a thesis that is and was, all along, without merit.  In Harper’s paper is, for the first time, Bartram’s letter to Fothergill, the description of a bird which merits no comparison whatsoever to an exotic vulture like the King Vulture; yet, as a result of nearsighted selective bias, the discrepancy of the description in that letter and what Bartram, whose credibility deserved scrutiny, wrote in his published work, was not considered; the oversight has been readily accepted since then.

MOVEMENTS OF KING VULTURE

The discussion on the King Vulture, Caracara, and any hypothetical forms ascribed as being congeneric to either is relevant to my findings on the Andean Condor, especially as this discussion relates to the movements of birds species.  In my previous post [UAC4] I decided to allow inclusion into the discussion the genera related to that of the condor where such inclusion would be applicable.  In that post I determined that a misidentified King Vulture egg specimen from Panamá was not that of an Andean Condor as had been previously recorded, thus removing that country altogether from the record of the condor’s distribution.  That the Andean Condor is without established precedent as a species occurring in Panamá stressed a difficulty of mine in presenting my arguments on its extra-limital movement–that the condor is greatly lacking in this respect and thus would not likely occur as far away as the state of Illinois let alone a country proximate to its known breeding range in the Andes.

With my evaluation of Bartram, a similar point is necessary to consider.  With the exception of two series of Kings sighted in Florida, these very likely escaped birds (see above link from my Wikipedia reference), there is, unequivocally, no known record of Sarcorhamphus ever naturally-occurring in that state.  If I am arguing that condors are given to extreme extra-limital movement, how should I consider the extra-limital movements of related vulture species (or lack thereof)?  In evaluating this point, I stress that differences in movements and habitat can affect the dynamic of how an accidental or vagrant bird may be seen or where it may be seen; that there is a relationship between species or genera (as the King and Andean have even been treated in the literature as being congeneric) does not necessarily imply an exact analogy in their propensity for movement.  With regards to the King Vulture, there is, however, reason for comfort:  it may very well have had historic occurrence in the United States.  As the King formerly was resident along the coast of Sinaloa, México, but in more recent times having been extirpated from the northernmost part of its range, I can clearly gauge the possibility of a pair of adults being displaced by summer tropical storms to be pushed so far north as to appear in Arizona in 1865, as was recorded by Elliott Coues (my original post on Wildbirds Broadcasting), despite this record not being accepted as it was not substantiated by his not collecting a  specimen.  (If it was west of the territorial line, this sighting would have occurred in what is now Greenlee County, Arizona).  As I had noted on my original post, the additional claim of one having been seen along the Verde River in Arizona warrants discredit, but the Coues sighting in itself is nonetheless compelling and more credible than the arguments put forth by Bartram’s adherents.  It is the only case where I am all but given to believe a Sarcorhamphus vulture as naturally-occurring north of México, but that it may be the only does not diminish the likelihood or potential of any extra-limital occurrence of this species or of the Andean Condor.  (I have not assessed the question of possible extra-limital movements of the King in other parts of its distribution.)

I was not able to examine the image of the limestone bowl from Alabama as considered in Snyder & Fry, but from what little I know of it, there is nothing of it that reveals a diagnosis to “sacra” nor anything to remove it from being construed as a possible representation of another familiar bird form.  The “white eagle” that they correlate to the “Painted,” is, from my appreciation of that description (correct attribution of the author, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz), one that better fits an Osprey Pandion haliaetus carolinensis. 

“Brasilian Caracara Eagle.”  Polyborus vulgaris.  Plate CLXI in Audubon, Birds of America.

In conclusion, I will include a picture, it being the only for this post, that could not be more fitting to this topic and which also elegantly underscores my point.  The “Painted Vulture” can, in a sense, be construed as a legitimate concept, but, contrary to what has for more than two centuries been asserted or suggested, not one any different than that which John James Audubon faithfully portrayed in the above illustration.

Written October 27, 2016.

Mathew Louis

Wordpress:  UAC7 

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This entry was posted in Andean Condor, King Vulture.