Here is a vivid picture of a situation well calculated to stir the imagination and excite the enthusiasm of this twenty-five year old easterner on his first visit to the virgin West, and thoughts of ornithological discoveries were no doubt reserved for the future. Nuttall could not have been so distracted by the excitement incident to the departure of this wild cavalcade, since he had had several previous experiences of the wilderness, was an older man, and was by nature “shy, solitary, contemplative, and of abstract manner.” At all events he set the ornithological pace immediately at the start of the journey by discovering a new bird. Townsend’s silence in his ‘Narrative’ regarding this important event was of course due to courtesy to the discoverer who had not yet given his species to science.
In my account of Nuttall’s discovery of his “Mourning Finch,” I have assumed that the specimen he took in Jackson County is the type. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in the absence of any definite knowledge regarding the type specimen it is presumed from his description that the specimen here taken was the type. The description referred to was published in the second edition of his Manual (the volume on water birds being a reprint of the first edition) which did not appear until 1840. It will thus be seen that this important species was allowed to remain in obscurity for six years while twenty-four other new species subsequently discovered on the trip had been described, as well as sixteen figured by Audubon in the Great Work, prior to the appearance of Townsend’s Narrative in 1839. Nuttall’s published description of the bird is merely the briefest possible outline of salient specific characters, no measurements whatever being given.
On his return to the East, two years in advance of Townsend, Nuttall had in his possession a quantity of the latter’s material for delivery to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, which Institution had helped substantially in financing the travelers. It was this material that Audubon sought so eagerly to possess, that his great work then nearing completion might not lack the new species.[5] Audubon had called on Nuttall, in Boston, in the hope of assistance from that quarter, and was promised duplicates of all the new species in his possession. It is said that five species were here secured, but the Mourning Finch was not included. Nuttall had reserved this discovery for his own book, and not only was posterity thereby deprived of an Havell engraving of the largest and handsomest of our Sparrows, but Audubon, being kept in the dark, was himself to later publish the bird as the discovery of his friend Edward Harris.[6]
On the same day that Townsend and Nuttall were so picturesquely entering the Indian country, Maximilian, Prince of Wied, who had spent the previous year on the upper Missouri, was making his way down-stream on his return to civilization. On May 13, 1834, when but a few miles from the northern boundary of Missouri, his hunters took specimens of a bird new to him. In the second volume of his published journal,[7] he says: “It was toward eight o’clock in the cool morning of May 13 (1834) that we stopped on the right bank of the river and landed on a fine, green prairie, beset with bushes and high isolated trees.... We found many beautiful birds, among which Icteria viridis and the handsome Grosbeak with red breast Fringilla ludoviciana.... At noon we reached Belle-Vue, Major Dougherty’s Agency.... To the naturalist the surroundings of Belle-Vue were highly attractive. The beautiful wooded hills had shady ravines and small wild valleys.... Many, and some of them beautiful, birds animated these lovely thickets, the Cuckoo, the Carolina Dove, the Red-breasted Grosbeak, Sialia wilsoni, several Finches, among which Fringilla cyanea and erythropthalma, and of about the same size a new species which at least in Audubon’s Synopsis of the year 1839 is not enumerated and which I called Fringilla comata (2)”[8] The (2) in the text refers to a note at the end of the chapter where a description of the Harris’s Sparrow is given in great detail, and where the statement is made that “this bird nests in thickets along the shore of the Missouri River in the neighborhood of the mouth of La Platte River.” The first volume of Maximilian’s journal, containing the record of his trip up the Missouri, was published in 1839, while volume two, covering the period when the Sparrow was taken, did not appear until 1841. Had he published both volumes simultaneously in 1839, his specific name comata would of course be current. It is interesting to note that though he took his first specimen just fifteen days after Nuttall had taken the type, and at a time when the bulk of the migrants had passed north, he had overlooked an opportunity of being the actual discoverer during the previous April, when he had been in the direct migratory path of the Sparrow at the season of its greatest abundance there.
Nuttall himself had overlooked an opportunity of discovering the bird twenty-four years earlier, and had his attention at that time been directed to birds as well as plants, he would no doubt have become acquainted with the species. Referring to the Journal of his companion,[9] John Bradbury, an English botanist, it is found that they passed through this region during the spring migration of 1810, and while Nuttall’s absent-minded preoccupation in collecting plants was a standing joke among the voyageurs, Bradbury was somewhat more alive to ornithological possibilities, and has left many entertaining, and a few valuable notes on the better known birds. They had spent April 8th and 9th at Fort Osage, now Sibley, Jackson County, Missouri; and the writer knows of no more certain place to find Harris’s Sparrows in early April than in the timber and thickets of this bottom land.
The Lewis and Clark party had passed through this region in June, 1804, and again early in September, 1806, and Thomas Say of the Long Expedition had been here in August, 1819. Maximilian was therefore the first ornithologist to enter the range of this species while the birds were in transit.
The last “discoverer” was Edward Harris, in whose honor Audubon gave the bird its vernacular name. The memorable voyage of Audubon and Harris, together with Bell, Sprague, and Squires, up the Missouri River in 1843 is too well known to require comment. A few quotations will serve in connection with the story of the Sparrow. On May 2 the party passed the point in Jackson County, Missouri, where Nuttall and Townsend had left the river nine years previously. Early the next morning they reached Fort Leavenworth. After leaving this post the boat was stranded on a sand-bar from 5 o’clock in the evening until 10 the next morning, giving the naturalists considerable time to do some collecting in the neighborhood. In his famous journal[10] of the voyage, Audubon says under date of May 4: “Friend Harris shot two or three birds which we have not yet fully established.... Caught ... a new Finch.” And on the next day he states: “On examination of the Finch killed by Harris yesterday, I find it to be a new species, and I have taken its measurements across this sheet of paper.” In volume seven of the octavo edition of his ‘Birds of America,’ where the new species taken on the trip are described, the remarks under the Sparrow are as follows: “The discovery of this beautiful bird is due to my excellent and constant friend Edward Harris, who accompanied me on my late journey to the upper Missouri River, &c., and after whom I have named it, as a memento of the grateful feelings I will always entertain towards one ever kind and generous to me.”
“The first specimen seen was procured May 4, 1843, a short distance below the Black Snake Hills. I afterwards had the pleasure of seeing another whilst the steamer Omega was fastened to the shore, and the crew engaged in cutting wood.
“As I was on the look-out for novelties, I soon espied one of these Finches, which, starting from the ground only a few feet from me, darted on, and passed through the low tangled brushwood too swiftly for me to shoot on the wing. I saw it alight at a great distance, on the top of a high tree, and my several attempts to approach it proved ineffectual; it flew from one to another treetop as I advanced, and at last rose in the air and disappeared. During our journey up stream my friend Harris, however, shot two others, one of which proved a female, and another specimen was procured by Mr. J. G. Bell, who was also one of my party. Upon our return voyage, my friend Harris had the good fortune to shoot a young one, supposed to be a female, near Fort Crogan, on the fifth of October, which I have figured along with a fine male. The female differing in nothing from the latter.
“All our exertions to discover the nest of this species were fruitless, and I concluded by thinking that it proceeds further northward to breed.”