White-breasted Nuthatch

White-breasted Nuthatch
Chestnut Hill Reservation, Brighton, Massachusetts, USA
June 2019
Member of the Nuthatch Family
§A Jar of Nuthatches§
★The Largest of the Nuthatches★ (Not for nothin, but still quite a small bird)

~true bird fact~ Like many birds, this one is monogamous. The reason for this arrangement is pretty easy to guess at, it makes both birds less likely to get surprised by a predator. This is also, evolutionarily, a reason many birds travel in flocks. However, this relationship isn't of equal benefit to both partners. The male nuthatch has to watch out less for predators, but the female has to also watch out for the male crowding her out of foraging areas. That means the male ends up better off, and the female, well, probably better off too, but not as much. Sounds familiar somehow... The ladies out there know what I'm talking about.

First Described by....

John Latham

(1740-1837)

This guy! This is a fun guy! I'm excited I get to talk about him, because I feel like in many ways, he's the spiritual predecessor to Amateurnithologist (this blog). We'll get there, but first, some boring stuff. He was an English physician and ornithologist, and the bulk of his work was in Australian birds, which began making their way to England in the 1780's. His first book, A General Synopsis of Birds (nailed it on the title) contained 106 illustrations, which he did himself, many of them never previous described in England. Sounds pretty awesome, but whoopsa-doopsa, he forgot to give them scientific names (the Linnean binomial system was pretty new at the time. He tried to fix his mistake by publishing the same book 10 years later, but this time with a latin title (Index Ornithologicus, still nailin' it) to go along with latin names for all the birds. Unfortunately by that point another dude had already named many of the birds that Lathan had first described, meaning the other guy gets the name and the credit. Still though, they were some pretty good birds that John here introduced to his Western audience, including Emu, Black Swan, and Hyacinth Macaw. No word on how this North American Nuthatch made it's way into his body of work.

He also was not particularly good at identifying birds- his books often had the same bird described multiple times with different names, causing confusion among Ornithologists for years to come. He was still publishing books in his 80's, and according to one reviewer his misidentifications only got worse with time. Quoth one Alfred Newton "his defect as a compiler, which had manifest itself before, rather increased with age, and the consequences were not happy." Ouch. Shoutout to a real one, John Latham, I know your struggle.