The other day I was poking around in the back issues of The Auk, the oldest and most prestigious ornithological journal in the United States. As you do. I found an article from 1906 entitled “Birds Observed In The Florida Keys” by a gentleman named Henry W. Fowler. (The next article was one entitled “A-Birding in an Auto,” in which the author laments giving up his trusty horse for a 16-horsepower “rapid but rather uncertain conveyance.”)
Fowler had actually visited the Keys in 1904 to look for land snails at the behest of a man named Charles B. Moore. But he was not the myopic sort. He kept a wide eye. And he knew his birds.
People complain a lot about the interwebs, and there is much worth complaining about. But there are also a lot of low-key wonders out there. For instance, there is a website called SORA, an acronym for the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive, but also the name of an elusive marsh bird. And on that site it is possible to dig through 140 years of cutting edge ornithological thought from the comfort of your own La-Z-Boy. It is also possible to fall through quite a few rabbit holes.
One of the things I like about the older editions of The Auk is gauging an idea of where ornithology was during different eras. 1904 was a nascent time in the field, an era of just figuring things out. For instance, you could get five pages in the country’s most prestigious ornithological journal just listing and describing the birds you saw in the Keys. (Hundreds, if not thousands, of people share their bird sightings every year in the Keys. Not to mention the rest of the world.)
Fowler visited in June, the month we are about to slide into.
The first bird he listed had the common name of gullie, gull, or black-headed gull. Gullie and gull are not names that I would call precise or enlightening – there have been nine species of gulls reported in the Keys. Black-headed gull is the modern common name for an Old World species that is unlikely to have been here. But because The Auk is a scientific journal he also listed the Latin name, Larus atricilla. I vaguely recalled, and minor Googling confirmed, that was what we in modern times call the laughing gull.
Fowler said they were common on the buoys as you approached Key West. “The buoys mentioned were whited with bird excreta and were used either for resting or roosting by sea-birds,” he wrote. The buoys then were probably shaped differently than they are now, but as anyone who has given the buoys off Key West the most cursory glance can tell you, they are still “whited with bird excreta.”
The second bird had the common names of tern, black-headed tern, and redshank. Tern was useless, as there’ve been more than a dozen species of terns seen in the Keys, seven of which could be described as black-headed. The name redshank is in modern times used as a word to describe a Eurasian shorebird, which doesn’t jibe with a tern.
When I got to the Latin for this second bird, I decided Fowler maybe wasn’t as good at ID as I initially thought, because Sterna hirundo in modern times is called the Caspian tern. We do get the occasional small group of Caspian terns in the Keys, but the royal tern is very similar-looking to the Caspian tern. So similar-looking that John James Audubon confused the two species all his life. And royal terns are, by casual estimation, a thousand times more common in the Keys. Literally.
A little reading, though, told me that royal terns were common in Florida until the late 1800s, and then disappeared. Which correlates with the plume hunting era, when most colonial breeding birds in the state were wiped out for the sake of making stylish hats. Royal terns weren’t recorded breeding in the Keys again until the 1950s.
Confidence in Mr. Fowler’s skills restored.
The third bird had the common name killing-peter, which I found somewhat discordant, as the Latin name Sterna antillarum led me to what is now called the least tern, 1.5 ounces of non-homicidal fluff. Unless you are a very small fish.
I’m guessing Fowler learned killing-peter from the locals, as it is a Bahamian term, most likely one that drifted in taxonomy and pronunciation from the Scottish killileepie, which was used to describe the common sandpiper.
Least terns tend to be colonial breeders, and Fowler reported finding a large group of them at a place called Hailer’s Rock.
“From an ornithologist’s point of view this is one of the most interesting places visited,” Fowler wrote. “It is a low, small, flat island of sand, with a rocky foundation, off Bahia Honda Key. The vegetation consists of a low growth of bushes, with here and there more or less sand. The southern end is of broken or excavated rock leaving numerous tide-pools with an abundant supply of food in the form of anchovies, etc., for most water birds.”
The weird thing is, I can find no other use of the name Hailer’s Rock outside of Fowler’s writing. I even spent time looking at any old maps I could find online. (The Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center has an amazing, and amazingly accessible, online collection of maps.) And I also searched through Jim Clupper’s “Keynames,” an amazingly thorough 57-page list of key names, with notes on etymology and historic names, and found nothing. (If you want to find out, say, where Cudjoe Key got its name, you can download the list from the Monroe County Public Library’s website.)
Looking at maps and reading Fowler’s description, though, I’m 98% sure he saw the terns on Ohio Key. There aren’t really any other islands off Bahia Honda.
Fowler’s visit took place the year before Henry Flagler began construction on the Overseas Railroad bifurcated the island and connected it to the mainland.
Reading Fowler’s words I can almost see what it was like.
Now on to the second page of the article…
