canberrabirds

Answer to Monday trivia

To: <>
Subject: Answer to Monday trivia
From: "Geoffrey Dabb" <>
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 09:57:49 +1000

A much better performance.  Ian Fraser got it in 10 minutes, and Anthony O was just about there.  All other entries had correct elements, and made up for the missing elements by exposing lateral thinking or an original approach. Here is a small version of the picture again:

 

triv mom 2.jpg

 

I took the precaution of writing the answer beforehand so I would not be overborne or intimidated.  Here it is:

 

Captain Philip Gidley King RN (1758-1808), third governor of NSW, 1800-1806, and Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE (1876-1949), the latter from a portrait in oils in his 53rd year.  In 1939 Mathews donated his large ornithological book collection to the National Library, where it is available to be consulted by the more bookish Canberra birdwatcher.

 

The King Parrot (the stretched sub-species A scapularis elongatus shown here) is named for Governor King.  George Caley, a botanist engaged by Joseph Banks, came to Sydney in 1800 on the same ship as the returning King, and for the next 10 years collected many Australian bird specimens.  He called one of the local birds ‘King’s Parrot’ and that was the name used in his notes that were quoted by Vigors and Horsfield in their presentation to the Linnean Society in June 1825.  However the “ ‘s” was soon dropped.  In a discussion at the society in March 1825 about another bird named for King it was noted that ‘the bird commonly called the King Parrot was also originally called King’s Parrot after the same gentleman’.   153 years later, in 1978, an RAOU panel decided that a good name for this species would be ‘Australian King-Parrot’ and that remains the English name recommended by that organisation and used by COG.  However the effect is to obscure the origin of the name and lead to a common assumption that the bird has some king-like quality.

 

Gregory Mathews was an industrious name-inventor.  In 1911 he decided the King Parrot (as it then was) needed to be in a new genus rather than the same one as the Red-winged Parrot so he called the new genus Alisterus for his 4-year-old son Alister William Mathews.  So the two men each had a significant role in determining what we call (or don’t call) the King Parrot.

 

Incidentally, not directly related to the question, the nesting habits of the King Parrot are not well-known and there is uncertainty over whether it ever breeds in the Canberra area.  (There is an article by Chris Davey in CBN in 2002, and a follow-up note by Michael Lenz in 2003.)  Gould, who called it a ‘King Lory’, was unable to ‘gather any information respecting this part of the bird’s economy’.   He added:  ‘I am inclined to look with suspicion on the account of its breeding given by Mr Caley in the Linnean Transactions:  in my opinion it must have reference to some other bird’.  Must have been those 12 speckled eggs that worried him. 

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