In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 23rd in the series.
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The plate seems to be unsigned and there is no mention of the artist in the text.
The authors of the accompanying text began:
It is, indeed, a curious thing that an entirely new species of bird should have been made known to science through a mass importation of captive specimens, while it had remained undiscovered in its native country, which, at the same time, is one of the best known, ornithologically speaking.
None of the numerous collectors who had visited the Philippine Islands had ever obtained there a Parrot Finch. The first record of such a bird from the Archipelago was by Mr. L. H. Taft, of the Forestry Service, at Los Bagnos, near Manila in 1920. Several young Parrot Finches were found dead near a wire netting fence, against which they had flown. The four specimens sent to Washington for identification were in poor conditions, and Dr. Richmond could only say that they belonged to the genus Erythrura.
No more was heard of these mysterious birds till 1935, when we heard that a large number of Parrot Finches, sent from Manila, were sold in California as "Luzon Finches". One of us acquired some at once in Los Angeles and began to study them. Others were examined in 1936 in the New York Zoological Park. Many American ornithologists had obtained specimens; on the whole, they did badly and most of them died in the bird shops. However, some survived and even nested, as it happened, in Mr. W. J. Sheffler's aviary in Los Angeles in 1936.
At the same time, this bird was noticed by ornithologists in Manila, where they were sold in great numbers in the streets. But they were thought to be either imported birds that had become naturalized, or migrants. Both assumptions sound most improbable.
The close study that we made of dead and live specimens in California made us conclude that it was a new and distinct species of the genus Erythrura, and we described it in the Bulletin of the B.O.C. for January, 1937, under the name of Erythrura viridifacies…There is a specimen now in the London Zoological Gardens, which was kindly presented to us by Dr. R. A. Woods of Los Angeles.
The authors of this article and the one in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club were Jean Delacour (1890-1985), the well-known and wealthy ornithologist and aviculturist who had an extensive collection of birds at his estate in France, and Marquess Hachisuka.
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| Masauji Hachisuka in 1927 |
Masauji Hachisuka was born in 1903 in Tokyo. In the 1920s and 30s he became a well-known and highly active ornithologist. He arrived in UK in 1919. At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he fell in with local ornithological worthies. He went on expeditions to Iceland and North Africa. Like many aristocrats at Cambridge in that time there is no record that he graduated. In 1927 he travelled through the USA with Jean Delacour while on his way back to Japan. From Japan he made extensive studies in the Philippines. He brought the collection to London which he worked on himself at the Natural History Museum in London and at Tring. A two-volume and then a four-volume series on the birds (with mention of mammals) of the Philippines appeared in 1929-30 and 1931-35 respectively. He travelled to many other places, writing extensively on living and extinct birds. After his father’s death in 1932 he was due to return home to head the family. However, I read that he fell ill in Los Angeles causing him to stayed in California until late 1937. While in California he met his Japanese wife-to-be and they married in Japan in 1939 where he continued his interests ornithological.
I do not now how Hachisuka fared as an anglophile in the Second World War. I read that he lost much of his fortune. However, he had a house built and kept birds, mainly pheasants. He died in 1953, aged 50. His now-rare book on the Dodo and the birds of the Mascarenes was published posthumously. Delacour wrote of his experiences of, and with, Hachisuka in his autobiography ‘The Living Air’ published in 1966.
In their paper in Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club containing a description of the new species, Hachisuka and Delacour had an expanded version of the discovery:
Mr. E. H. Taylor, a resident of Los Baños, Laguna Province, a town not greatly distant from Manila, found in his garden on June 26, 1920, ten Parrot-Finches which had flown into the tennis-court wire-netting with suicidal results. A few of these species came into the hands of [Richard Crittenden] McGregor*, but could not be identified. Thereafter, for fifteen years, the bird escaped observation, and nothing further was known about it until 1935, when Dr. Canuto Manuel noticed venders in Manila peddling great numbers of them from April to July. MeGregor and Manuel, in the Philippine Journal of Science, lix. no. 3, March 1936, p. 325, identify them erroneously as Erythrura trichroa, and thought the birds were either of a migratory or of an introduced origin.
Early in 1936 several hundreds of these unidentified Erythrura were imported from Manila to San Francisco.
It is, however, evident from the very distinct characters of the birds that they represent an entirely new species which had so far been overlooked owing to its habitat.
Nearly 90 years on, the Green-faced Parrotfinch is said to be an irruptive, nomadic species, visiting bamboos even in the lowlands from its normal altitude of over 1,000 metres to eat the seeds. During the sporadic flowering of bamboo flocks of up to a hundred or a thousand birds (the number varies by source) have been seen. The range now appears to include Cebu and Mindoro in addition to its stronghold of Luzon.
And the Shogun connection? Masauji Hachisuka was the nephew of Tokugawa Yoshinobu (1837-1915), the 15th and last shogun. Supporters of the imperial court forced the overthrow of the shogunate, the resignation of Hachisuka’s uncle and the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
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| Jean Delacour and his mother in 1950 |
*1871-1936. McGregor was employed in the Philippines as a collector and also wrote widely on the birds of the island. Born to an Australian father and an American mother in Australia, mother and son moved to the USA.
NOTE: An account of Japan’s aristocratic zoologists of which Masauji Hachisuka was one has appeared in a book I have not read: Culver, AA. 2022, Japan's empire of birds: aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and transwar ornithology. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Delacour J. 1966. The Living Air. London: Country Life
Hachisuka M, Delacour J. 1937. Erythrura viridifacies sp. nov. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 57, 66-67.
Delacour J, Hachisuka M. 1937. The Green-faced Parrot-finch or Luzon Finch (Erythrura viridifacies). Avicultural Magazine 5th series 2, 301-302.
