Colorado state bird spurs ornithological controversy

Kevin J. Cook | For the Coloradoan

Pulling the trigger, John Kirk Townsend felled enough birds to preserve as specimens and to initiate a stream of controversies. It probably qualifies as an intermittent stream rather than as a steady stream, but it is a stream nevertheless.

A 24-year-old naturalist hired by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Townsend was paired with Thomas Nuttall, a 48-year-old English botanist. Together they crossed the continent to document its wildlife by collecting specimens. The year was 1834.

Somewhere along the North Platte River in what is now the panhandle of Nebraska, they encountered the birds. With a single shot Townsend killed several, which he called "prairie finch" in American English but in 1837 named "Fringilla bicolor," following the Latin of biological convention.

And here the controversy begins almost 100 years after the story began.

Sometime in the interval of 1731-43, English naturalist Mark Catesby published a painting of a bird he had found while visiting the Bahamas in 1714. This bird he named "Passerculus bicolor."

In 1766 Carolus Linnaeus renamed the bird "Fringilla bicolor." By the rules governing the Latin names of animals, no two species may bear the same name, which invalidated Townsend's name for this newly discovered bird of the western Great Plains because the rules also stipulate the first animal named gets the name.

In 1838 Charles Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, established the name "Calamospiza;" and in 1885 Leonhard Stejneger, a Norwegian-born ornithologist who moved to America, assigned Townsend's bird the Latin name "Calamospiza melanocorys," which, even though 48 years passed while the bird's name was worked out, remains valid to this day.

Since then, the bird has gone by such American names as black-headed finch, prairie bobolink, white-winged blackbird and nearly a dozen others. The American Ornithologists' Union tackled the problem of naming the bird and came up with "lark bunting."

Unfortunately, the bird is neither a lark nor a bunting. This did not discourage Roy Langdon, who took a fancy to the bird and proposed it to be the Colorado state bird. Bitter controversy based on favoring the bluebird or meadowlark delayed adoption for several years, though it was finally designated in 1931.

Thus a sparrow bearing two names of birds from two unrelated families introduced a modest bit of ornithological illiteracy into our state's symbols.

These details cover just the bird's identity and relatedness, but controversy streams on.

Since the 1960s, annual monitoring has shown the bird's population has dwindled by half. The current lark bunting controversy focuses on explaining this drastic decline. It is a story that must wait for another day.