tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80399498732842592132024-03-17T17:58:54.117+00:00Zoology JottingsZoology has a discipline: evolution; zoology is vertically integrated, concerned with biological organisation at the level of organisms in their environment, organs, tissues, cells and molecules. This blog meanders through the animal kingdom, from aardvarks and anoles, through mouse and man, to zorillas and zebras.Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.comBlogger622125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-41033516991865497502024-03-17T17:58:00.000+00:002024-03-17T17:58:07.022+00:00Miss Waldron's Red Colobus: Who was R W Hayman who first described and named the monkey?<p>The man who named Miss Waldron's Red Colobus was Robert William Hayman of the Natural History Museum in London. Although his dates were not known at the time of writing of the <i>Eponym Dictionary of Mammals</i> in 2009, I see somebody must have found them since they do appear in articles online.</p><p>Hayman is an interesting case study of the organisation of science in Britain in the 20th century and of how it was possible for boys to rise to a position of leader in the field without being admitted to the full status of ‘scientist’.</p><p>Robert William Hayman was born on 11 November 1905 in Fulham, London, the son of James Hayman, a cheesemonger and then provision merchant born in Otterton, Devon, and his wife Eleanor Louise. He was one of nine children. The family lived at 6 Crondace Road, Fulham. Hayman was educated at Harwood Elementary School and then, from September 1917 until 22 December 1920 at Latymer Upper School.</p><p>On 29 December 1920, when the title of the establishment was British Museum (Natural History) and it was still controlled by the classicists of the Bloomsbury edifice, the <i>London Gazette</i> announced that Hayman, aged 15, was appointed ‘without competition’ as Boy Attendant. In the 1921 Census, a few months after he began work, possibly on 1 January 1921, he is living at home in Fulham and shown as working as an ‘articulator’ at the Museum with Asst [Assistant] in brackets. In other words he was preparing skeletons for exhibition. The Census return also showed that he was in part-time education, probably some form of evening classes. In 1924 the<i> London Gazette</i> announced promotion to Attendant, again without competition.</p><p>The announcement of the most junior of jobs (male sorting clerk in the Post Office, for example) illustrates just how seriously employment at any level in the Civil Service was taken. Attendants did the menial jobs. In 1928 for the more senior and capable Attendants a new grade was introduced, Technical Assistant. It was the latter who were encouraged to take on curatorial duties.</p><p>Hayman must have been highly regarded because we find him travelling First Class to Mombasa in January 1930 on board the SS Adolph Woermann. The<a href="https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/fbr_item_modsi3776" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Smithsonian</a> in Washington DC has information on what he was up to:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Photographs of a 1930 expedition to Uganda, Eastern Belgian Congo [Democratic Republic of Congo], and the Sudan to collect zoological and botanical specimens for the British Museum of Natural History. Approximately 240 photos, mostly labeled, on front and verso. A newspaper article about the expedition tipped in. Descriptions detail a combination of location and subject matter. Photographs depict terrain (coast lines of lakes and rivers), vegetation, specimens collected (wart hogs), candid images of local staffing (i.e. gun bearers, porters) and hunters, group portraits of "half-pygmies" from Ruwenziri mountains, members of expedition (some identified),and specimen preparation…</i></blockquote><p></p><p>It was as a result of collecting during that expedition that his name was given to a species of tree mouse but <i>Dendromus haymani</i> is now considered a synonym of another species.</p><p>By 1935 Hayman was being given responsibility for working through collections in order to identify hitherto undescribed species and subspecies, and to name them. In his paper on the Lowe-Waldron collections he thanks <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hinton" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Martin Hinton</a> (1883-1961) for giving him the opportunity. Hinton was Deputy Keeper of the Zoology Department at the time and shortly to become Keeper. </p><p>In the 1939 Register (the emergency census of 29 September just after the outbreak of war) shows Hayman was living at 16 Hackbridge Park Gardens, Sutton, Surrey, with another employee of the Natural History Museum and the latter’s sister. His occupation is shown as ‘Civil Servant Technical Work’ and in red ink has been added ‘Natural History Museum’. He was also a Volunteer in the Fire Service.</p><p>Hayman was also involved in the evacuation of preserved specimens from London to caves at Godstone, Surrey in 1941/42. He must also have taken part in the evacuation of dry specimens to a number of country houses from 1940: The mammals ended up in: Huntercombe Place (later removed to Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire; Herriard Park, Hampshire; Red Rice, near Andover, Hampshire, and then Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire; Theddon Grange and then Clatford Lodge, Hampshire; Althorp Park, Northamptonshire; Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire; How Caple, Herefordshire; South Warnborough Lodge, Hampshire then to Swallowfield Park, Berkshire; Weston House, Bagshot, Hatton Hall, Ashney, Charlecombe, all at Bagshot and all all houses on Sir John Ellerman's estate. The logistics of doing all that in wartime do not bear thinking about.</p><p>Hayman can be seen from reports to have been active in various natural history societies around London and East Anglia.</p><p>In the postwar years Hayman was co-author of a number of major papers on mammals that were published from the Museum and is particularly remembered for his work on bats. The size of some of these works is remarkable. For example, the two volumes of<i> The Families and Genera of Living Rodents</i> written with the reclusive shipping line owner and devoted voluntary worker at the Museum, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_John_Ellerman,_2nd_Baronet" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sir John Reeves Ellerman</a> (1909-1973) and George William Charles Holt (1897-1975), another technical assistant, ran to 1417 pages.</p><p>As well as these large works, Hayman commented more widely on issues of identification and taxonomy. One amusing example, published as a letter to <i>Nature</i> in 1957 (Rabbits in Africa, 179, 110) was the claim that the Rabbit, <i>Oryctolagus cuniculus</i>, had been found living successfully living ‘within two degrees of the equator” in Central Africa—an account incorporated into the 1956 book on the rabbit by Harry Thompson and Alastair Worden in the <i>New Naturalist</i> series. The person who set that hare running (in a rare case of both literally and metaphorically) was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Douglas_Hale_Carpenter" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Geoffrey Douglas Hale Carpenter</a> (1882-1953) in a 1925 letter to <i>Nature</i>. Carpenter, a medical man and entomologist, became well known for his work on mimicry and the book he wrote with E.B. Ford in 1933. Carpenter claimed to have found a well-established colony of rabbits at Masindi, Uganda. Hayman wrote to put the record straight:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>In 1928 Capt. C.R. S. Pitman, then game warden of Uganda, collected a series of rabbit-like animals at Masindi. He described them as being abundant along grassy roads at night. The specimens formed the basis of the description by J. St. Leger of a new lagomorph under the name </i>Lepus marjorita<i>. The characters of skin and skull separated it clearly from other hares and rabbits. Later, St. Leger raised the new species to generic rank, </i>Poelagus<i>, on the basis of skeletal characters. Later, St. Leger reported another race of </i>P. marjorita<i> from south-west Sudan, near the Belgian Congo border, and Hatt has recorded it from north-east Belgian Congo on the evidence of specimens collected in 1912. Superficially there is a resemblance to the European rabbit; but closer examination shows that its characters are perfectly distinct.</i></p><p><i>In view of these facts, it seems that Hale Carpenter's report of European rabbits in Uganda was based on a misidentification of </i>Poelagus marjorita<i>, and this misleading claim should now be rejected. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p><i>Nature</i> in 1953 carried the following news:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>The Zoological Society of London, at the request of the Colonial Office, arranged a study-leave course during the month of September for selected members of the Colonial Service in Africa; those attending came from game, veterinary and forestry departments. The course was designed to help the members of those services who wish to do some serious work on the African fauna, particularly the mammals, but need some assistance and guidance in setting their steps in the right direction.</i></p><p><i>The course consisted of lectures, demonstrations and practical work; it included instruction on elementary anatomy and physiology, reproductive cycles, parasites, classification, ecology and the techniques of field-work. Prof. E. C. Amoroso (Royal Veterinary College) and Mr. R. W. Hayman (British Museum (Natural History)) collaborated with the Society's staff: it is hoped that similar courses will be arranged in future years.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Hayman was elected an honorary Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1963.</p><p>In 1947, those employed in the Natural History Museum were assimilated into the ‘Scientific Civil Service’. The senior staff (Keepers etc) were placed in the Scientific Officer Class, while the Technical Assistants were in the Experimental Officer Class. It was virtually impossible to move between the two classes. Thus, while being indistinguishable in terms of scholarship from a Scientific Officer, Hayman remained in the Experimental Officer class until he retired. However, what was remarkable about him was the seniority he achieved within that four-point class.</p><p>In his history, <i>The Natural History Museum at South Kensington</i>, published in 1981, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Stearn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">William Thomas Stearn</a> (1911-2001) wrote of Hayman (while getting his birth date wrong by two years): ‘…who joined the Department in 1921 as a Boy Attendant and who retired in 1967 as a Chief Experimental Officer’. A Chief Experimental Officer was a very rare beast indeed. Career Grade was two grades below (Experimental Officer) and promotion even to Senior Experimental Officer was difficult and unusual. Hayman must not only have been very highly regarded within the Museum itself but also by those on the external promotion and grading panels that controlled the promotion system.</p><p>Had Hayman retired 4 years later he would have found himself a Scientific Officer when the two classes were merged in 1971 as a result of the Fulton Report. He would have found himself a Principal Scientific Officer, the career grade for the former Scientific Officer Class.</p><p>Incidentally, it is somewhat paradoxical that dead animals in British museums are looked after by Curators under the direction of Keepers while live animals in zoos are looked after by Keepers under the direction of Curators. The opportunities for solecisms by an unsuspecting visitor to the museum world are great. I was told the story of an animal dealer who took some frogs to the Museum to be identified. While there he reported to his friends ‘a bloke came in and said he was a Keeper. He had a lovely suit on. I don’t know how he could afford that on a keeper’s wages’.</p><p>ROBERT WILLIAM HAYMAN FLS died on 25 February 1985. He was then living at 71 Mill Street, Ottery St Mary in Devon, eight miles from where his father was born.</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2009. The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hayman RW. 1935: On a collection of mammals from the Gold Coast. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.1935, 915-937.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Wheeler A. 2000. The zoological collections of the British Museum (Natural History) - evacuation of the collections during the war years 1939-1945. Archives of Natural History 27, 115-122.</span></p><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-10017456953977347782024-03-13T15:25:00.000+00:002024-03-13T15:25:06.727+00:00Hong Kong: Male Asian Swallowtail<p>AJP sent this photograph of an uncommon butterfly he saw three weeks ago in a park in Kowloon Tong. It is a male Asian Swallowtail, <i>Papilio xuthus</i>. Hong Kong is at the southern edge of its range in Asia. I have previously shown a photograph of a female he found in the same park in 2021.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCTeCRrdqx2yejXRK5hzzH3MZhqIS7PeeJMYbWc0qN2vSPXH6UyPJZyMMorl713QemYcwnNOYIQ_M2nYQwMV7sYhIQC_fWbm175lX1EFCOiCLwe0VDNQVT-vbRPW4eiVqc3JeB47tsynVH7jqxSagZwiMN8oGmaC2yi6wXj1XrUrBYRQntbpwrVq0K4Fs/s3407/IMG_1983.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3407" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCTeCRrdqx2yejXRK5hzzH3MZhqIS7PeeJMYbWc0qN2vSPXH6UyPJZyMMorl713QemYcwnNOYIQ_M2nYQwMV7sYhIQC_fWbm175lX1EFCOiCLwe0VDNQVT-vbRPW4eiVqc3JeB47tsynVH7jqxSagZwiMN8oGmaC2yi6wXj1XrUrBYRQntbpwrVq0K4Fs/w448-h398/IMG_1983.jpg" width="448" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-45663718500132093802024-03-12T17:34:00.000+00:002024-03-12T17:34:08.739+00:00Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. The Story Moves to the 1950s and Angus Booth<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin49sG1JYwsegFrjzpDMLMJgz8v3_vuCkkRM6Z2pztHMfWlN4PujuH0_ACm3F_kOQYp1uTbi2QYpuezgeOK6KX-ztzPuKjpNcSka3RxC6gyrg1W8lo3HbgYirepsQFyzGCR624n_1daxumLEqjoHj6q7Ya3ha_ZfzkdhK8OIWdTdkM-pjyYZNo74xWF5E/s2390/M01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2390" data-original-width="1624" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin49sG1JYwsegFrjzpDMLMJgz8v3_vuCkkRM6Z2pztHMfWlN4PujuH0_ACm3F_kOQYp1uTbi2QYpuezgeOK6KX-ztzPuKjpNcSka3RxC6gyrg1W8lo3HbgYirepsQFyzGCR624n_1daxumLEqjoHj6q7Ya3ha_ZfzkdhK8OIWdTdkM-pjyYZNo74xWF5E/s320/M01.jpg" width="217" /></a></div><br />A visit to stay with a distant aunt in London always included time in Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which held as far as I ever found the best selection of books on natural history at the time. There, in 1961, I found a new book by A.H. Booth <i>Small Mammals of West Africa</i>. It was in a series West African Nature Handbooks and had been published in 1960. It was at a price I could afford (not very much as a schoolboy with very little in his pocket) and I duly went through the bizarre process of paying. First, queue at the sales assistant’s counter. Hand over the book and be given a chit to take the one cashier’s counter on each floor. Queue again, pay, wait while the cash went through pneumatic tubes to a central office and the chit came backed stamped. Take the chit to the first counter. Queue gain and collect the book. Find the rackety lift surrounded by narrow grubby stairs and eventually find your way out of the shop. Amazon it was not.<p></p><p>On the back cover was printed the following paragraph: </p><p></p><blockquote><i>Angus Booth, the author of this book, was on the staff of the Department of Zoology at the University College of Ghana. He died suddenly and tragically shortly after completing the manuscript of this delightful book. His untimely death at the early age of thirty robbed the world of a brilliant young man, already recognised as one of the leading authorities on the mammals of West Africa.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>and after his own Introductory chapter:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>The reader will learn with sorrow of the sudden and tragic death of Angus Booth shortly after completing the manuscript of this delightful book. He was originally appointed general editor of the series and planned himself to write a companion book on the larger mammals. His untimely death at the early age of 30 not only stopped this work abruptly but robbed the world of a brilliant young man, already recognised as one of the leading authorities on the mammals of West Africa.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>And that is all I knew of Angus Booth until I started my search for the identity of Miss Waldron. I found that Angus Booth had provided 26 specimens of the eponymous red colobus to the Natural History Museum, 7 in 1956 (6 from Ghana; 1 from Côte d’Ivoire) while 19 have the admission date of 1971 suggesting they were passed to the museum some years after his death.</p><p>I then found that Angus Booth was indeed a pioneer of primatology in West Africa, his work remembered in such comments as:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Before his tragic death at age 30, Angus Booth provided some of the earliest observations on West African monkeys in a series of influential papers.</i></p><p><i>As early as the 1950s the biologist Angus Booth warned that unless sufficient protective measures were taken, this monkey would become extinct in the near future.</i></p><p><i>Angus Booth of University College, Ghana, did sophisticated studies of synecology of west African primate communities in the early 1950s. Booth surely would have had a major influence on primate field research if he had not died tragically in 1959</i> [sic - 1958]<i> at the age of 30.</i></p><p><i>In his later, classic paper on the zoogeography of West African primates, Booth (1958)…</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Angus Herdman Booth was born on 1 September 1927 in Ashton under Lyne Registration District, Lancashire. In 1950 he married Cynthia Pamela Mary Knight in Cambridge. Both were Cambridge zoology graduates. A daughter was born in 1954 and a son in 1957. When travelling between UK and Ghana he gave an address in Southport, Lancashire, possibly that of his parents. I can no trace of him in the 1939 Register, the emergency census. Could the family have been abroad at that time or was he simply missed out?</p><p>Angus Booth, a Lecturer at University College Achimota died on 16 March 1958 at the Ridge Hospital Accra after what a note on a conference, of which he was the original secretary, in <i>Nature</i>, described as a short illness and having spent six years in Ghana (i.e. appointed in 1951 or early 1952).</p><p>While in Ghana Booth appeared in several newspaper accounts describing his work on monkeys but also in this one by Craven Hill, the <i>Evening Standard</i>’s Zoo Correspondent, which was syndicated throughout the country and taken up by the <i>Londonderry Gazette</i> of 2 September 1952.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNa5UWmMRSsD5xAdiILtRUPBLk4h_shWQOhf2R3O2BLk1j1rw9c3SQmGek-UCLU4iTrqDwfnxZKOF7sVioig2VI2uc4A6Q055eG190fbG6J3uSljy4iwbaZgxsEClfPU0bqej4iW85h0gHoRB5f4J1x_diM89Z5SQZyhhm9qRexXcMWIv-1V4YpOVhNrk/s1366/Booth%20Clipping.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="600" height="566" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNa5UWmMRSsD5xAdiILtRUPBLk4h_shWQOhf2R3O2BLk1j1rw9c3SQmGek-UCLU4iTrqDwfnxZKOF7sVioig2VI2uc4A6Q055eG190fbG6J3uSljy4iwbaZgxsEClfPU0bqej4iW85h0gHoRB5f4J1x_diM89Z5SQZyhhm9qRexXcMWIv-1V4YpOVhNrk/w249-h566/Booth%20Clipping.png" width="249" /></a></div><br /><p>Angus Booth did not confine himself to research on the primates. Papers appeared on geckos and on mammals in general. I have appended a probably incomplete list of Booth’s publications.</p><p>The story of the Booths does not end with the death of Angus in Ghana. This is from the Kenya Institute of Primate Research website:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>The idea to start a primate research centre in Kenya was mooted in 1958 when Dr. LSB Leakey was visiting Ghana. He found that his friend…Angus Booth, had died very suddenly after about nine [six] years of primate research work in Ghana, which he had carried out jointly with his wife, Cynthia Booth. Both of them had been known to LSB Dr. LSB Leakey for a long time, and both were very highly qualified Cambridge University graduates in Biology and Animal Behavior. Dr. LSB Leakey enquired of Cynthia what she planned to do now that her husband had died, and she said that she would finish off the publication of their latest joint report, and wind current research, and then she would wish to leave Ghana. After pondering the matter for 24 hours, LSB suggested the next day that she should come and continue research on monkeys with a base somewhere near Nairobi. Accordingly, at the end of 1958 she arrived in Kenya, and the Tigoni Primate Research Centre came into existence.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Writing in 1983 James G Else wrote of the establishment:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>The history of the IPR is a thorny one, beset with financial difficulties and other crises. The institute began, through the urging of Louis Leakey, as a private venture of Cynthia Booth, a zoology graduate of Cambridge, who had studied primates in Ghana for ·several years. The first outdoor enclosures were constructed on her 10-acre farm at Tigoni in 1960. Many of these cages and even some of the buildings were built by Cynthia Booth and Louis Leakey on weekends, to save money. </i></p><p><i>In the early days, most of the work at what was then called the Tigoni Primate Research Centre involved collecting and maintaining a variety of primate species; research was restricted primarily to taxonomic studies. Kenyan independence resulted in a need for land for the resettlement of thousands of homeless people. Large areas of forest were cut down, resulting in the loss of habitats for many of the country's indigenous monkeys. Thus the major task of the fledgling institute was the collection of monkeys, particularly rare species. This was carried out as rapidly as the budget and construction of facilities allowed. </i></p><p><i>Eventually the need for expansion made it clear that the Institute could no longer remain a private venture. In 1968, funds from the Munitalp Foundation were used to purchase a 20-acre plot half a mile from the original location. All the outdoor enclosures and 120 monkeys representing 12 species were moved to this new site and Cynthia Booth became the salaried director. During these formative years, Dr. Leakey managed to obtain financial support from a variety of sources, including the National Institute of Health, but there was never enough money to provide for more than basic care and feeding of the monkeys, a small staff and very modest research. In 1968 NIH discontinued its support of the IPR and Cynthia Booth resigned.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>The only other information I have been able to find is that Cynthia remarried and died in Australia, in 2010 aged 80.</p><h4 style="text-align: center;">The Book: Small Mammals of West Africa</h4><p>The illustrator was Clifford Lees. The only information I have on Lees is that he was a regular and frequent contributor to the <i>Halifax Courier</i> on natural history, illustrated by his own drawings. He was a member of the Halifax Scientific Society. I thought the illustrations to be excellent.</p><p>As I read the text I realised that Booth had kept a number of the animals he described, including monkeys. He thanked his wife, ‘who puts up with mammals around the house, and treats them as part of the family’.</p><p>He does not mention Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus by name because in dealing with the whole of West Africa, he dealt with it as one of the four subspecies of <i>P. badius</i>. I suspect he still would. He wrote:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>They live in large troops, often of up to fifty monkeys. Their ability to leap is quite unrivalled, and most spectacular jumps are made from one tall tree to the next. A troop of Red Colobus is rarely silent. Their high-pitched ‘kyow’, a very bird-like sound, betrays even a resting troop. Moreover, their behaviour when hunted by Man is far from cunning. Hence these harmless and beautiful creatures are in danger of becoming extinct…The young are considered impossible to rear in captivity.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>In this plate from the book, it is possible to see from the coloration of the hind limbs that Lees actually shows Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus of Ghana, as might be expected.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAz282-7WypESO_AsJ6n8qhM09sx_e4Ic4ras1xCDV3oW1AoXzVeoX9k6BRLrpSUPgdZ3axXMRfj6mB30RaSWtBqPEIaIoL60d-i21Hn3IN37yiubhQXA-sjRl_uzhKJYJeVEFR-Ijm9Nu4DhG3N9NGiD46qd_jSvjwI0XRLzlg40e6njTKap-81EtSMo/s2066/M04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2066" data-original-width="1329" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAz282-7WypESO_AsJ6n8qhM09sx_e4Ic4ras1xCDV3oW1AoXzVeoX9k6BRLrpSUPgdZ3axXMRfj6mB30RaSWtBqPEIaIoL60d-i21Hn3IN37yiubhQXA-sjRl_uzhKJYJeVEFR-Ijm9Nu4DhG3N9NGiD46qd_jSvjwI0XRLzlg40e6njTKap-81EtSMo/w413-h640/M04.jpg" width="413" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: center;">Angus Herdman Booth’s Scientific Publications</h4><p><br /></p><p>Booth AH.1954. A note on the colobus monkeys of the Gold and Ivory Coasts. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 12, 857-60.</p><p>Booth AH. 1955. Speciation in the Mona monkeys. Journal of Mammalogy 36, 434-49.</p><p>Booth AH. 1956. The Cercopithecidae of the Gold and Ivory Coasts: geographic and systematic observations. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 9th Ser. 9, 476-80.</p><p>Booth AH. 1956. The distribution of primates in the Gold Coast. Journal of the West African Science Association 2, 122-33.</p><p>Booth AH. 1956. An annotated list of the Gold Coast geckos with key. Journal of the West African Science Association 2, 134–136.</p><p>Booth AH. 1957. Observations on the natural history of the Olive Colobus Monkey, Procolobus vera (van Beneden). Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1957, 421-430.</p><p>Osman Hill WC, Booth AH. 1958. Voice and larynx in African and Asiatic Colobidae. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54, 309-321.</p><p>Booth AH. 1958. The Niger, the Volta and the Dahomey Gaps as geographic barriers. Evolution 12, 48-62.</p><p>Booth AH. 1958. The zoogeography of West African primates: a review. Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire 20, 587-622.</p><p>Booth AH. 1959. On the mammalian fauna of the Accra Plain. Journal of the West African Science Association 5 26-36.</p><p>Booth AH. 1960). Small Mammals of West Africa. London: Longmans.</p><p style="text-align: center;">————————————</p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Finally, two more of Lees's plates from the book: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge4Ue1PVk-aQuGwCyEG8L9jEaE1iNLPLB9kYUB_Pc2MApC9yDG8evOfm6_v0H8HaeCakDCCXpObJwQkuCxQGyRld4cyI5ZqkGJwAze2ZrWh7MBtEzC9GpN2JTV4MR95rYXYkXJGSBxa72KIH_bh9rpiceeMQzb0Up6I3YpL9Kog6PLobrbOhDdR63T-dA/s2088/M06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2088" data-original-width="1329" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge4Ue1PVk-aQuGwCyEG8L9jEaE1iNLPLB9kYUB_Pc2MApC9yDG8evOfm6_v0H8HaeCakDCCXpObJwQkuCxQGyRld4cyI5ZqkGJwAze2ZrWh7MBtEzC9GpN2JTV4MR95rYXYkXJGSBxa72KIH_bh9rpiceeMQzb0Up6I3YpL9Kog6PLobrbOhDdR63T-dA/w408-h640/M06.jpg" width="408" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTykSlAO40MlZK7Ihc1BEpWLPwWVwOqPuQ56jaalZfFfILZzHqCa0uZdmCf-p-pPF2WW6zuNNXWPhyqrsvUoYZg_kRQNuAnJatDAMydQdTgcvRd4r4eWCej3quF8jcBb13P8H0smrjePOWwiLrjUhg0DN5o8xQhhmj05VoKytvpe0W35bO7e8Q8CGdlwg/s1946/M07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1946" data-original-width="1329" height="604" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTykSlAO40MlZK7Ihc1BEpWLPwWVwOqPuQ56jaalZfFfILZzHqCa0uZdmCf-p-pPF2WW6zuNNXWPhyqrsvUoYZg_kRQNuAnJatDAMydQdTgcvRd4r4eWCej3quF8jcBb13P8H0smrjePOWwiLrjUhg0DN5o8xQhhmj05VoKytvpe0W35bO7e8Q8CGdlwg/w413-h604/M07.jpg" width="413" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Else JG. 1983 A national primate centre for Kenya. Kenya Past and Present 15, 35-39.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div></div><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-20305870618875194802024-03-10T15:50:00.003+00:002024-03-10T15:50:53.199+00:00Blue-Shouldered Robin-Chat: a colour plate from 1952<p></p><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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 17th in the series.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">– – – – – – – – – –</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWYK_MAqF1K0IDB6ftpOJTrN4_knKzbx9U3Tv9g2fXReohutzEGtzIIcrab9UVX1WnOARp0jKeDyy7rrp8hErE-h4F0v8zq508-GvXrf5xGZhB31T2dLHRqsV9q5Wa6RTf2eJ6k3kWfJs3UWOBaIi8l9NUy7Qomsn8rldMR2l-ybeh3XIzWrTi-3Kebw/s2158/M01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2158" data-original-width="1401" height="603" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWYK_MAqF1K0IDB6ftpOJTrN4_knKzbx9U3Tv9g2fXReohutzEGtzIIcrab9UVX1WnOARp0jKeDyy7rrp8hErE-h4F0v8zq508-GvXrf5xGZhB31T2dLHRqsV9q5Wa6RTf2eJ6k3kWfJs3UWOBaIi8l9NUy7Qomsn8rldMR2l-ybeh3XIzWrTi-3Kebw/w392-h603/M01.jpg" width="392" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>The plate was the work David Morrison Reid Henry (1919-1977) in 1952. He signed his work as D.M. Henry and was an artist favoured by the Avicultural Society for the plates published in this period.</p><p>The accompanying note was by Cecil Stanley Webb (1910-1977) described by Geoffrey Marr Vevers as ‘one of the greatest animal collectors of all time’. Webb started collecting in 1919, reaching his heyday in the 1930s and 40s (after finding himself stranded on Madagascar during the Second World War). He became Curator-Collector for the Zoological Society of London, then Curator of Mammals and Birds. He then moved to Dublin Zoo where he was Superintendent. From then until his death he lived in Kenya.</p><p>Webb describes how where in West Africa (British and French Cameroons) and how he caught these birds (the one illustrated was one he brought to London in 1947); the 'how' can best be described as 'uncomfortably'.</p><p>The Blue-shouldered Robin-Chat (<i>Cossypha cyanocampter</i>) across a swathe of Africa in the following countries: Cameroon; Central African Republic; Republic of Congo; Democratic Republic of Congo; Côte d'Ivoire; Equatorial Guinea; Gabon; Ghana; Guinea; Kenya; Liberia; Mali; Nigeria; Sierra Leone; South Sudan; Sudan; Tanzania;Togo; Uganda.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Avicultural Magazine Vol 58, 1952</span></p><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-89981192309602351332024-03-05T16:04:00.000+00:002024-03-05T16:04:01.731+00:00Hong Kong: Yellow-cheeked Tit<p> AJP spotted Yellow-cheeked Tits (<i>Machlolophus spilonotus</i>) in the New Territories of Hong Kong last week. They are marked in the Hong Kong bird book as an uncommon resident, but also of captive origin. I am always suspicious of that latter label since the bird is known to occur across China not that far to the north. The habitat - mature woodland - would not have been available for many decades at least. Photographs from the early decades of the 20th century show a far more denuded landscape and with the use of anything for firewood during and immediately after the Japanese occupation, mature woodland was very sparse indeed. Re-introduction by artifical (i.e. the cage bird market) or natural (i.e. range expansion) means would seem a better term.</p><p>Whatever the origins of the present population, it is a stunning little bird.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wJkvAgIe140Up5CY2yt4FOvPDYxLjdh8uKAM1-OWiZ-51qIXad9Mzumv0QZucMLVV24APt-KF-3F9dcxrFZEeR3PmwVPejBzh7nU6_rIZyeE99ve-sBiJbf7HSvPgKFpecZWmmcFa_rbjxNg3phsK914KTHJT_P2m6B8uOVwxQQeTbo5rnmCIuvfaGs/s1280/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="542" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wJkvAgIe140Up5CY2yt4FOvPDYxLjdh8uKAM1-OWiZ-51qIXad9Mzumv0QZucMLVV24APt-KF-3F9dcxrFZEeR3PmwVPejBzh7nU6_rIZyeE99ve-sBiJbf7HSvPgKFpecZWmmcFa_rbjxNg3phsK914KTHJT_P2m6B8uOVwxQQeTbo5rnmCIuvfaGs/w542-h542/1.jpg" width="542" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht9Xv6dK3qcFjPRV364tFKWGi4MjZc3d_1blsOh5M0Ut-te2kJ9fk14rWIKvzVELv5YthIXcvXngM8-EgBWaVxEeQ9oBi4xEg4ASgHCgjlU3J5J12c1xkNcQvySnVStEjZGw0MOCGb4Q2yRlmVjnLvOuOKt5Hx5c23KJhpv9nF555CcsiRX-vksUve_Q0/s1280/2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="543" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht9Xv6dK3qcFjPRV364tFKWGi4MjZc3d_1blsOh5M0Ut-te2kJ9fk14rWIKvzVELv5YthIXcvXngM8-EgBWaVxEeQ9oBi4xEg4ASgHCgjlU3J5J12c1xkNcQvySnVStEjZGw0MOCGb4Q2yRlmVjnLvOuOKt5Hx5c23KJhpv9nF555CcsiRX-vksUve_Q0/w543-h543/2.jpg" width="543" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWmHOjwY3yqbLEgYaEAgrFnoHe9A4m-iWGuQvpIHcOyqF-ABsQV30BTVeY0-WfXDqNz1HJcXZtZOrYaHZpIDoAweNEt0kd7AVvCkftFOPZeQWb1p1y0vwxQQEMskNUJYEE41tX200uiXJcY1P-mwgCbEHZ8Uu6R2SjKriAV_wB2kxqzuq36dKzRL2qWkM/s1280/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1162" data-original-width="1280" height="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWmHOjwY3yqbLEgYaEAgrFnoHe9A4m-iWGuQvpIHcOyqF-ABsQV30BTVeY0-WfXDqNz1HJcXZtZOrYaHZpIDoAweNEt0kd7AVvCkftFOPZeQWb1p1y0vwxQQEMskNUJYEE41tX200uiXJcY1P-mwgCbEHZ8Uu6R2SjKriAV_wB2kxqzuq36dKzRL2qWkM/w544-h495/3.jpg" width="544" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-32118178141983082492024-03-05T12:04:00.000+00:002024-03-05T12:04:08.840+00:00Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. Its role in understanding Yellow Fever<p>Willoughby Lowe in <i>The End of the Trail</i> noted that it was on their second visit to Goaso (i.e. during the 1934-35 expedition to Gold Coast) that blood samples were obtained from the specimens of monkeys they shot, including Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. He wrote:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>…the blood sample of the new monkey, brought home by my companion for Dr. Findlay, of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>The importance of this sample is that it contained antibodies to yellow fever, indicating that at some stage of its life it had been infected. Blood they collected from specimens of other species contained no antibodies against yellow fever. Such research was a beginning to the understanding of the role of asymptomatic non-human primates as reservoir species for the virus in Africa and the complex interactions between populations of insect vectors, human and non-human primates.</p><p>Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus thus found its way into the classic texts on yellow fever.</p><p>Does Lowe’s mention of Fannie Waldron ‘my companion’ indicate merely that she delivered the phials to Findlay or that she was responsible for their collection and treatment? Did, I wonder, Findlay have some sort of standing arrangement with the Natural History Museum, asking collectors to obtain serum samples from mammals living in yellow fever areas?</p><p>The two papers of interest by Findlay and several co-workers are behind an Elsevier paywall. However, the gist is that Findlay with collaborators from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s laboratory in Sierra Leone, in a preliminary papers published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in January 1936, reported antibodies in a Chimpanzee, a baboon and the red colobus. A later paper showed that Findlay with a colleague at the Wellcome had obtained further blood samples from the Gold Coast, this time obtained by two medical men and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cansdale" target="_blank">George Soper Cansdale</a> (1909-1993), then a forestry officer and part-time naturalist.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhKM0NcaOF2x-H6dw1C2NR60iK5rYcDMxtsSH7TQAJOI7dAAfAU3dGfa5tBmzgojTB0VBljxmqjqtB2na98QXbUBpY1jZWeGSKhm89W_isVHsHGx3DC2qmqAr5ZwF40EikIce6f9_NkDrjNrulGICSepjJGH293IAdqvuoUN40m_HooxWGtRaMA6J63uk/s3246/Findlay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3246" data-original-width="2172" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhKM0NcaOF2x-H6dw1C2NR60iK5rYcDMxtsSH7TQAJOI7dAAfAU3dGfa5tBmzgojTB0VBljxmqjqtB2na98QXbUBpY1jZWeGSKhm89W_isVHsHGx3DC2qmqAr5ZwF40EikIce6f9_NkDrjNrulGICSepjJGH293IAdqvuoUN40m_HooxWGtRaMA6J63uk/s320/Findlay.jpg" width="214" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">George William Marshall Findlay<br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photograph by Bassano<br />Wellcome Collection</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />George William Marshall Findlay (1893-1952) was at the forefront of research on yellow fever in the British Empire. While a medical student in Edinburgh he immediately volunteered as a medical assistant with the Belgian Army. For that he received an award from Belgium in 1914. He then graduated in 1915 and on 24 December was commissioned as ’temporary Surgeon in His Majesty’s Fleet’ in the words of the London Gazette. After the war, he held medical research fellowships and was then appointed as assistant pathologist to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In Edinburgh he acquired both an MD to (with gold medal), and a DSc. (there was no PhD then, and the DSc in Scottish universities was very different to that awarded today). After a spell at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund he joined the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research and began research into tropical viral diseases, including yellow fever in the field in Gambia. He wrote Advances in Chemotherapy in 1930, that term being used for chemical treatment of all diseases, infectious as well as non-infectious. During the second world war he was brought into the Royal Army Medical Corps to investigate yellow fever in Sudan and trench fever in Tunis and by 1942 was a Brigadier in the West Africa Command.</p><p>Findlay received civil honours for his work on yellow fever. He left Wellcome in 1948 to join the staff of the British Medical Association to become editor of two abstracting journals: Abstracts of World Medicine and Abstracts of World Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He had wide interests including microscopy and in 1950 was elected became President of the Royal Microscopical Society. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Findlay GM, Stefanopoulo GJ, Davey TH, Mahaffy AF. 1936. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 29, 419-424.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Findlay GM, MacCallum FO. 1937. Yellow fever immune bodies in the blood of African primates. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 31, 103-106.</span></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-10661124045789340872024-03-01T12:21:00.000+00:002024-03-01T12:21:13.612+00:00Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. The Lowe-Waldron specimens were NOT the first to reach London’s Natural History Museum<p> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRXNDbOJe1gZ2GP98JDTcx8rtQdSkbP-JusAhUqYuwayj41f3hTCr3GOottAowLbF1N-2vg5xBvtix9fs-IiOzxDkb6tuD7QL4Ny_FiwetSiWBzBUswZQ5dV9K2F_KAJ9aUCLjVwzrBOtAFgYPjq6RprSZyLgstLik6nshArqS7p-jdn-dTCbhWPZmW80/s1149/Red%20Colobus1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="883" data-original-width="1149" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRXNDbOJe1gZ2GP98JDTcx8rtQdSkbP-JusAhUqYuwayj41f3hTCr3GOottAowLbF1N-2vg5xBvtix9fs-IiOzxDkb6tuD7QL4Ny_FiwetSiWBzBUswZQ5dV9K2F_KAJ9aUCLjVwzrBOtAFgYPjq6RprSZyLgstLik6nshArqS7p-jdn-dTCbhWPZmW80/w320-h246/Red%20Colobus1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">From McGraw 2005</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Willoughby Lowe’s entry in the <i>Eponym Dictionary of Mammals </i>has a couple of unkind sentences:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>He is also notorious for having shot eight specimens of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus</i> Piliocolobus badius waldroni <i>in Ghana in 1933…The colobus was already rare and is now thought to be extinct. </i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p>There is no evidence that in the 1930s where suitable forest remained the red colobus it was rare. Indeed in the 1970s large troupes were observed. Lowe did warn—correctly—that further loss of forest would have devastating effects on it and other species. In addition, providing series of specimens was exactly what the Museum instructed collectors to do since it was realised that it is important to study variation between individuals from the same location. Lowe’s specimens (12, not 8, are shown in the catalogue) were joined later by 26 collected by Angus Booth (1927-1958) (on whom more in a future article) who was warning even more vociferously about the dangers of deforestation which was proceeding apace and the ease of hunting the red colobus for meat.</p><p>Willoughby Lowe clearly believed that he and Fannie Waldron had discovered the monkey named for Miss Waldron. However, looking at the catalogue of the Natural History Museum that was not the case. Two had arrived more than 20 years earlier.</p><p>The job of sorting the collection of mammals brought back by Lowe and Waldron in 1934 and 1935 from the Gold Coast (Ghana) was given by Martin Hinton, who was in charge of mammals, to Robert William Hayman (1905-1985). Hayman made a mistake in the introduction to his paper. He had just Lowe on the 1933-34 expedition with Miss Waldron also present in 1934-35. That is incorrect. Waldron and Lowe travelled together on both.</p><p>Hayman named the red colobus as a new subspecies, <i>Colobus badius waldroni.</i> In his description he compared these specimens from Goaso with the nominate subspecies:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>A red Colobus closely related to the Liberia and Sierra Leone form,</i> Colobus badius badius Kerr,<i> but differing in the distribution of the black in the pelage. In true badius the black extends from the front of the forehead back over head, neck, shoulders, and upper arms, all the back, and thence on to the outer side of the thighs as far as the knee. The black on the outside of the thighs extends behind to meet the white perineal area. The tail is dark reddish on the basal half, darkening to black on the apical half.</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>In this new Gold Coast race a series of eleven specimens (six adult male skins and skulls and one immature male, three adult female skins and skulls, and one adult female in alcohol) shows the following constant differences:—The forehead is dark red, deepening on the crown to black. The black either does not extend to the thighs at all, as in the majority, or, at most, as in one specimen goes no further than part way down the centre of the outside of the thigh, not passing behind to the back of the thigh. The tail is jet-black above and below throughout.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>One of the males, represented by a skin and skull was chosen as the type (holotype) for the new subspecies: ‘Collected at Goaso, Ashanti, December 31, 1933, by Willoughby P. Lowe’</p><p>Hayman went on to note:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>The whole series exhibits little variation in colour. In one female skin the thighs have a thin median streak of blackish brown quite narrow, and the back of the thigh is broadly red, as is the whole of the thigh in the rest of the series. In the British Museum Collection is a very young skin from Bibianaha [Bibiani], Gold Coast (Spurrell, 12.6.20.1), which exhibits all the characters of this race with the sole exception of the tail, which is mainly reddish below, although completely black above from root to tip.</i></p><p><i>I have much pleasure in connecting with this remarkably handsome discovery the name of Miss Waldron, who contributed much to the success of the expedition.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>The specimens collected by Spurrell in 1912 are currently listed in the catalogue as <i>Colobus</i> (<i>Piliocolobus</i>) <i>badius waldroni</i>.</p><p>Hayman must have realised that Spurrell’s red colobus was of the same subspecies he had described from the new series of specimens. Bibiani is less than 30 miles from Goaso.</p><p>Thus we have a situation in which the name of the original collector was overlooked as an eponym. I can see two or three reasons why one of the later specimens was selected as the type and why Miss Waldron’s name was chosen. The greater range of adult males and females brought back by Lowe and Waldron enabled a greater certainty of separation from the nominate subspecies. Secondly, I suspect museum employees were told when possible to honour Fannie Waldron the best they could. Money was very tight in the 1930s. Grateful thanks and recognition may have brought funding for further trips from Miss Waldron. She had at least part-funded the first expedition and probably wholly funded the second. A fish, a bird and a mammal were duly named. Thirdly, Spurrell (Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell, 1877-1918, on whom more in a later article) was dead.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFTOm3JDn4qyhvZhm2eeniYWeKg_3w7UPZH5JqBlwaDEY7asx7STqQtl_sPupQj8ZQ5KP8zgRqTzwxkdEPlumpciljEKgoGaFDAeCq0No_a3-oie84sRhKpvdPRvybaM_tANmDhjqVT4zrC8XOCSXYoiZHGFNwqCv7W7dqfc0tg6cIqy01d6bPzLOAICM/s1402/Red%20Colobus%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1181" data-original-width="1402" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFTOm3JDn4qyhvZhm2eeniYWeKg_3w7UPZH5JqBlwaDEY7asx7STqQtl_sPupQj8ZQ5KP8zgRqTzwxkdEPlumpciljEKgoGaFDAeCq0No_a3-oie84sRhKpvdPRvybaM_tANmDhjqVT4zrC8XOCSXYoiZHGFNwqCv7W7dqfc0tg6cIqy01d6bPzLOAICM/w400-h338/Red%20Colobus%202.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This excellent comparison is from McGraw (2005)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>In terms of taxonomy, Reginald Innes Pocock (1863-1947) changed the generic name in the paper that followed immediately on from Hayman’s in <i>Proceedings of the Zoological Society</i>. As can be seen it was Pocock (working on mammals in the Natural History Museum after retiring as Superintendent of London Zoo) who asked Lowe to bring back a specimen preserved in spirit from the second expedition:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>On his return in 1934 from the first of his two recent expeditions to Ashanti, Mr. Willoughby Lowe informed me that he had shot female examples of the Red Colobus</i> (Procolobus badius waldroni)<i> showing a swelling of the external genitalia which he had never previously observed in any representatives of this genus. The swelling in question, obviously similar in its nature to that of Baboons</i> (Papio), <i>Mangabeys</i> (Cercocebus), <i>and of some species assigned to </i>Macaca, <i>was clearly indicated, although in a shrivelled and otherwise distorted condition in two of his dried skins. Since the phenomenon in question had apparently never been described, or even recorded, in any representative of this family of Monkeys, I begged him, before starting on his second expedition to the same district, to bring back, if possible, a specimen of this monkey preserved in alcohol or formalin. To his kind acquiescence in this request I owe the opportunity of describing and figuring not only the catamental swelling in question, but other external characters of a Red Colobus for the most part previously known only from dried skins. A comparison of the characters with those of examples of the Black and White Colobus Monkeys recorded in my paper on the external characters of the Catarrhine Monkeys (Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond, 1926, pp. 1479-1579) suggests that the two main divisions of these monkeys may be generically distinguished; and since the name Colobus belongs primarily to the "Black and White" section, typified by</i> polykomos (<i>=</i>ursinus),<i> the red section may be provisionally assigned to</i> Procolobus,<i> its oldest available name, with</i> verus<i> van Bren. as the the type species.</i></p><p>…<i>Rochebrune…also proposed the generic name</i> Piliocolobus <i>for one or two different kinds of "red " species, and Allen selected </i>badius <i>as the type. It remains to be seen if there are generic differences between</i> Procolobus<i> and </i>Piliocolobus.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Fast forward to 2024 and the accepted generic name is <i>Piliocolobus</i>.</p><p>Hayman’s retention of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus in the species now known as <i>Piliocolobus badius</i>, but as a new subspecies, seems entirely reasonable since there is a series of red colobus forms along the forest regions of West Africa which have become delineated by river systems and geological features. However, it was inevitable given the species concepts being employed on some groups of mammals in the latter part of the 20th century and beyond that <i>P. badius</i> would be split. Thus we have <i>Piliocolobus waldroni</i> (or infuriatingly so as to supposedly agree with the rules of nomenclature on using the correct gender of the latin genitive eponym in specific names, <i>Piliocolobus waldronae</i>. That stupidity seems to have been stopped but it is under that name that the species is described in the Primate volume of <i>Handbook of the Mammals of the World </i>published in 2013. Equally infuriating is the fact that the ‘split’ was based on the mitochondrial genome of a single individual. As an aside, I do find it amazing that in no other branch of science are decisions made by one individual or school of thought so readily accepted as gospel by others in essentially the same field. While there may be a little to and fro, by and large and for a time at least, the new designation is just accepted.</p><p>Becoming bogged down in arcane taxonomic niceties does not answer the pressing question of whether any of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus remain alive. The devastating losses caused by destruction of its forest habitat and by hunting for human food have been such that the species has, after searches, been declared extinct but for that conclusion to be challenged after local hunters across the border in the Tanoé Swamp Forest of Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) have claimed to have seen it, to know its call, and have produced skins as evidence. However, there seems to have been no further positive news in the past 15 years. The IUCN Red List (where it is listed as a species) has it as ‘Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct)’. Whether it is a true biological species or a form of P. badius is immaterial to the conservation message: when you lose habitats you lose their inhabitants. The whole ecosystem (for want of a better, non-teleological, term) is gone. The history of how this came about was outlined in a paper by Oates, Struhsaker & Whitesides in 1997:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Three subspecies of forest primate are known only from southwestern Ghana and parts of neighboring Côte d'Ivoire to the east. These are the white-naped mangabey</i> (Cercocebus atys lunulatus),<i> the Roloway guenon</i> (Cercopithecus diana roloway), <i>and Miss Waldron's red colobus </i>(Procolobus badius waldroni)…<i>The rainforest area where these endemic primates occur has undergone very rapid development since World War II. Logging activity has been more intense than in almost any other part of tropical Africa, and many people have moved into the region to cultivate the land as it has been opened up. Logging, farming and human population growth in the region have been accompanied by the increased hunting of wild mammals and larger birds for meat, much of which has been traded out of the immediate area for sale in towns.</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2009. The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hayman RW 1935. On a collection of mammals from the Gold Coast. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1935, 915-937.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">McGraw WS. 2005. Update on the search for Miss Waldron’s Colobus monkey. Internatikonal Journal of Primatology 26, 605-619.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Oates JF, Struhsaker TT, Whitesides GH. 1996/97. Extinction faces Ghana's Red Colobus monkey and other locally endemic subspecies. Primate Conservation (17), 138-144.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Pocock RI. 1935. The external characters of a female Red Colobus Monkey (Procolobus badius waldroni). Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1935, 939-944.</span></p><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-82396991537807269772024-02-27T17:48:00.000+00:002024-02-27T17:48:08.604+00:00A Plaintive Cuckoo devours caterpillars in Hong Kong<p>AJP spotted this Plaintive Cuckoo (<i>Cacomantis merulinus</i>) in the New Territories of Hong Kong on Christmas Eve last year—an unusual sighting at that time of year. It was devouring caterpillars of the Red-based Jezebel (<i>Delias pasithoe</i>), a very common butterfly during the winter months.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMss_NzIBO0tBlGzudFry46fUc99tUb2XbbFJHt1CU4OwiML1rvzcNze046dQrKMRneXIg12lTn0a8fiAUxcUhr-rYDjUKqvu_X6OJ31N5uWq9H2GEQnxJ6lPz3MnN8zLGpHYMafKYMenT5wyPYhRm1fRL6zXGylVTjsfEfcnaFIjFy1JkhLMc2Hfc34/s1280/IMG_1777-Edit-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="843" data-original-width="1280" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMss_NzIBO0tBlGzudFry46fUc99tUb2XbbFJHt1CU4OwiML1rvzcNze046dQrKMRneXIg12lTn0a8fiAUxcUhr-rYDjUKqvu_X6OJ31N5uWq9H2GEQnxJ6lPz3MnN8zLGpHYMafKYMenT5wyPYhRm1fRL6zXGylVTjsfEfcnaFIjFy1JkhLMc2Hfc34/w640-h422/IMG_1777-Edit-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy-jPlAhnAUoddMReh57EtUQ9pW58O-m3w3X-lXAKzct4t7xOSj2hUIia-og38DRJtH8O60bDjp5NA-IgYUzObIxWVxG2hwf8sGRKQsHlQxf73HOBcf5waso-xFwAsgq3c5UPfehxNPHlK2wWLGvfE8Ci46WFx2eDDl9hErqwJTc3cCOpPNDTDmdK48y4/s1270/IMG_1778-Edit-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1270" height="485" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy-jPlAhnAUoddMReh57EtUQ9pW58O-m3w3X-lXAKzct4t7xOSj2hUIia-og38DRJtH8O60bDjp5NA-IgYUzObIxWVxG2hwf8sGRKQsHlQxf73HOBcf5waso-xFwAsgq3c5UPfehxNPHlK2wWLGvfE8Ci46WFx2eDDl9hErqwJTc3cCOpPNDTDmdK48y4/w640-h485/IMG_1778-Edit-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiphcgjbwOib3BibD3ZKZmKvIHrs4A0h1Rvi7fj-H1DNrA-I_YaAbCMXL_EJGvgpFEkm9onTIBOrwXGx8eMwNliIPdg4Z7XVxDoYNdqUehWC0f2jFwvLy4mF2_wUgdR1WU5BdkTt4niyC6goRbsrRTwkRx0Y6NIROG6K1JpI8HY01oUjBIceL02dphV76g/s1280/IMG_1780-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="829" data-original-width="1280" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiphcgjbwOib3BibD3ZKZmKvIHrs4A0h1Rvi7fj-H1DNrA-I_YaAbCMXL_EJGvgpFEkm9onTIBOrwXGx8eMwNliIPdg4Z7XVxDoYNdqUehWC0f2jFwvLy4mF2_wUgdR1WU5BdkTt4niyC6goRbsrRTwkRx0Y6NIROG6K1JpI8HY01oUjBIceL02dphV76g/w640-h414/IMG_1780-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdiCmw6v1JOjqd4ZYDpdtmfoCVllimZf7S3llphgmIsSI27Wt4GbsfNxP-zznTysY0C7klwwsTurfNlrMBO4elKSIIAn4AdVRTWXIBkn2uGgFWI4GEehEtJebM0KgMkS-VXTb-f6etb918aCRGPg2914Ie4mHbYNm2jR49KzwPpb1sD7sza5f-hvVywks/s1280/IMG_1781-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="854" data-original-width="1280" height="429" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdiCmw6v1JOjqd4ZYDpdtmfoCVllimZf7S3llphgmIsSI27Wt4GbsfNxP-zznTysY0C7klwwsTurfNlrMBO4elKSIIAn4AdVRTWXIBkn2uGgFWI4GEehEtJebM0KgMkS-VXTb-f6etb918aCRGPg2914Ie4mHbYNm2jR49KzwPpb1sD7sza5f-hvVywks/w640-h429/IMG_1781-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgNW6qDhrThjiwzGa07YDVYPpo3x81uv5YenYD32GTGGD0u3FHXPeaRL_8nP0lXqzbQ6sXDhfFYuOY6Ylg5fHzKL1YhQ5a03b_E4mXbz1pd31zdYLOwclQAX_hjmIvkN2WJKs7Qgeb3qH9LHUJguFzjEru_ooNgEgPxV0iPqXToAz31SR-z8e0d3h7a94/s1114/IMG_1786-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1114" height="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgNW6qDhrThjiwzGa07YDVYPpo3x81uv5YenYD32GTGGD0u3FHXPeaRL_8nP0lXqzbQ6sXDhfFYuOY6Ylg5fHzKL1YhQ5a03b_E4mXbz1pd31zdYLOwclQAX_hjmIvkN2WJKs7Qgeb3qH9LHUJguFzjEru_ooNgEgPxV0iPqXToAz31SR-z8e0d3h7a94/w640-h552/IMG_1786-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKp0i3lpz1x4Ugpq4CjJa56HzF5gZl_gnKhiMzGHJXGcetb1yOzsM3zSmRrG7-Eg3Anle45ija6_QCENjjxMy-_9t_H-vjS4YyCuDxkw8w8fQmQm3Q7OvGjM2p-rnyqZb_BbG13_lhSMsQtrELA8bfqY_drgTlejpF7lCGxZ1oU1ExyhXiCXR4DSp6Ooc/s1280/IMG_1791-Edit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="956" data-original-width="1280" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKp0i3lpz1x4Ugpq4CjJa56HzF5gZl_gnKhiMzGHJXGcetb1yOzsM3zSmRrG7-Eg3Anle45ija6_QCENjjxMy-_9t_H-vjS4YyCuDxkw8w8fQmQm3Q7OvGjM2p-rnyqZb_BbG13_lhSMsQtrELA8bfqY_drgTlejpF7lCGxZ1oU1ExyhXiCXR4DSp6Ooc/w640-h478/IMG_1791-Edit.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p> </p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-52164321902684288952024-02-27T17:14:00.000+00:002024-02-27T17:14:08.526+00:00The Lowe-Waldron Expeditions to the Gold Coast in 1933-34 and 1934-35<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHA3ZNmcYoVCdB4eo_voyY_cVMmjLtQCAuVa8_PVnrh1PpesrqF90Vou_hyphenhyphenmBUIAwTsRUsYPlzfRS51u3oOzEQA2EWR594NmjuDACX2LmaMGiCZWH5QoP2uH1r6kzImoEtpvRnCjQuJeeWJzTIelKcUeyOn4KNZmNZ3O892QHX6EeuthzegfnafWi7SN0/s1897/M03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1143" data-original-width="1897" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHA3ZNmcYoVCdB4eo_voyY_cVMmjLtQCAuVa8_PVnrh1PpesrqF90Vou_hyphenhyphenmBUIAwTsRUsYPlzfRS51u3oOzEQA2EWR594NmjuDACX2LmaMGiCZWH5QoP2uH1r6kzImoEtpvRnCjQuJeeWJzTIelKcUeyOn4KNZmNZ3O892QHX6EeuthzegfnafWi7SN0/w564-h340/M03.jpg" width="564" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One of Fannie Waldron's photographs of the expeditions</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div><p><br /></p><p>In following up my tracking down of Fannie Waldron (1876-1959) as the person after whom Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus was named, I have obtained a copy—the only one I could find on sale—of Willoughby Lowe’s final book<i> The End of the Trail</i>. The expeditions in 1933-34 and 1934-35 with Fannie Waldron were Lowe’s last collecting trips and his account is the final chapter of the limited edition of 400 copies published in Exeter by the printers, James Townsend & Sons, in 1947.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrCQt3IVTgYcZT1ckJCUh_5UAMgJzpkGOWYbmDi5vesL7AiNXHt4gMzXu1GYChogTIZjp2_TmGOfb2z5EAHk7WM67XcRy_7o4ilM3j-A_IcwjNx3eOBWN_WtGW-lur5d87WTLYi4F7smmZhpSXUO0mmWTcc-jrdBJFISQ4wgraWL2rKSZ4oAMxwC90VrA/s1950/M02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1950" data-original-width="1254" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrCQt3IVTgYcZT1ckJCUh_5UAMgJzpkGOWYbmDi5vesL7AiNXHt4gMzXu1GYChogTIZjp2_TmGOfb2z5EAHk7WM67XcRy_7o4ilM3j-A_IcwjNx3eOBWN_WtGW-lur5d87WTLYi4F7smmZhpSXUO0mmWTcc-jrdBJFISQ4wgraWL2rKSZ4oAMxwC90VrA/s320/M02.jpg" width="206" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Frontispiece from<br /><i>The End of the Trail</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />The strange thing about this chapter is that Lowe does not refer to Fannie Waldron; she is always ‘my companion’. Indeed, the only clue that she was there at all is in the caption to the photographs: ‘Photo by F. Waldron’. Having mentioned her by name (wrongly as Fanny) in his earlier account of the birds they collected, the omission does seem odd. Did Fannie wish to arrange anonymous and was annoyed by the earlier public acknowledgement of her presence and funding? Had there been gossip about their travelling together as, for the time, an elderly spinster and a married man?</p><p>What does emerge from Lowe’s account are some of the jobs which Fannie undertook. However, there is no indication whether she worked as a collector of specimens per se, or did any of the arduous jobs of skinning, curing, pickling and preparing the specimens for shipping with them to London. Lowe comments on the time needed to prepare a monkey skin (the collected numerous individuals of seven species Goaso) and it would appear that he alone did the preparation:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>…I was fully occupied attending to the preservation of these creatures [monkeys], and no one knows the amount of labour required, until they have tried, to preserve a monkey properly. The hands and feet are particularly troublesome as every finger must be turned back to the nails, the the skin is coated with a tough muscular fat as far as the digits, every particle of which must be removed with scissors, or the specimen will be ruined.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Museum staff praised Fannie for the collection of fish (caught by the locals in a fish trap and by poisoning a stretch of river) and I suspect she took on the job of preserving specimens in spirit.</p><p>We do know from Lowe’s account some of things Fannie did: she took the photographs; she raised a young Woodford’s Owl (fate unknown) and in London (Lowe lived in Exmouth, Devon) she delivered a lungfish cocooned in dried mud to London Zoo and blood samples from what was to become her eponymous monkey and the other species to the Wellcome Bureau for Scientific Research. Those blood sample proved important in the study of yellow fever as I shall describe in a further article.</p><p>On Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus, and other monkeys, it would seem from reading his account that some were shot for Lowe by the local hunters, partly because his large supply of cartridges had been held up by muddle at customs and they used their own cartridges until he could repay them in kind. Lowe though noted:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Never shall I forget hunting my first specimen</i> [of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus], <i>when I waded and struggled nearly up to my waist in filthy decayed vegetable matter, tormented with insects, but luckily getting what I was after.</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p>Lowe was greatly alarmed by the rate of destruction of the forests:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>But there is yet another sad and serious view of these forests and their hidden secrets, their destruction. It is obvious to every traveller that vast forests in different parts of the world have been, and still are being, destroyed, and West Africa is no exception. Man with even crude axes, aided by fire, has done more to destroy once fertile lands than most people conceive.</i></p><p><i>We have already enough desert and arid areas in the world and it is high time those in authority should exercise their persuasive powers to prevent further destruction. Probably the forest region of West Africa is already more than half destroyed. Fires rage yearly from the dry northern regions through the savannah to the edges of the forest, into which it gradually creeps. The interior of the forest is cut, burnt and cultivated, and Forestry Officers told me they are in many places fighting in their last trench. With the destruction of the trees go the fauna and flora; and a hideous country, once beautiful and yielding fruit and products for mankind, is all that remains.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>The second trip, a year later, concentrated on the northern parts of the Gold Coast. Lowe explained:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Contrary to our intentions we decided to make a second journey to Ashanti, and also to visit the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. This decision was made because, after a cursory examination of our zoological collections, it was found that there were many animals and birds not represented, and others which could not be properly determined without more material. This being the case arrangements were immediately made to have the same servants and lorry, plus a trailer, and to travel through the extensive dry northern part which we had left untouched.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Travelling by lorry was not comfortable.</p><p>West Africa was not a healthy place. Even thirty years ago with most of the benefits of modern medicine I was told by somebody who worked there as a wildlife consultant that visitors who stayed for more than short periods often became ill, not from any specific recognised disease but just generally debilitude. It would seem that was the case 60 years earlier because Lowe noted how the Gold Coast took its toll on the District Officers and other expatriates involved in administration and commerce:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>I feel I cannot refrain from some remarks on the term these men have to do under such trying conditions. West Africa used to be a nine-months’ tour, then it was raised to a year, only to be altered again to 18 months, and now there is talk of making it two years!</i></p><p><i>I myself have seen a little of the world and of varying climates and, I repeat what I have stated before, that no one should do more than a year’s work in really bad climates.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Lowe does not describe the work needed to prepare specimens for the museum. For that we have to rely on the Museum’s own <i>Handbook of Instruction for Collectors</i> which appeared in various editions over the years. One, from 1902—shortly after the discovery of the Okapi—can be found <a href="https://archive.org/details/handbookofinstru1902brit/page/4/mode/2up" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a> I had, and still may have, a copy I bought in the Museum’s shop in the late 1950s which dated from the early decades of the century. He does, though, describe the hard and frustrating life of the collector in a tropical forest, expressing thoughts not dissimilar to those of wildlife watchers of the 21st century:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>The reader may exclaim-what an interesting and exciting place for work! And yet, though these and many other animals and birds exist, a naturalist's work in dense evergreen forests can be deeply disappointing and trying. Anything may exist, but to find it, even after years of experience, is terribly difficult. Sharp eyes are required, keen ears, and the matured field-craft of a lifetime, as well as the patience of Job, for almost every day seems a failure to get what you want and to find what you know is there.</i></p><p><i>People who have never tried to make a collection of natural history objects in such a place as the Ashanti forests little realize the difficulty in a piece of unspoilt jungle. The sweat, labour, discomfort, exhaustion, and the daily disappointment of seeing an unknown creature for the fraction of a second that may not be seen again for a generation. Think what it would mean to find it again, and perhaps get familiar with its life history. No! naturalists have plenty of work ahead of them.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>I have plotted the places visited in the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the two expeditions. The map shows the coverage of the country they achieved.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3sKId_j8lrrZ7uMgMujHfbYdeGBtzg2ESfEZ1cnJTYxs9FhaZNvMf1XmBb9fEKlVyMDnzFiTEXSQIgdZeEFd17sPrm9HchhiKAc0J36ZJA9Yiv0qP1eNPQv6NvZ822RVs5gyBBBH4YEDEVyHSg7NChLFCLa6A4K8pOHHw-uSbuR0fEHDiZDmWxM2QQjA/s3072/Ghana%20Map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2035" data-original-width="3072" height="399" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3sKId_j8lrrZ7uMgMujHfbYdeGBtzg2ESfEZ1cnJTYxs9FhaZNvMf1XmBb9fEKlVyMDnzFiTEXSQIgdZeEFd17sPrm9HchhiKAc0J36ZJA9Yiv0qP1eNPQv6NvZ822RVs5gyBBBH4YEDEVyHSg7NChLFCLa6A4K8pOHHw-uSbuR0fEHDiZDmWxM2QQjA/w603-h399/Ghana%20Map.jpg" width="603" /></a></div><br /><p>Willoughby Lowe and Fannie Waldron spent a few days in Accra with the Governor before their ship left port for home. While there they visited Achimota College, now the University of Ghana. It struck Lowe that ‘the buildings and general lay-out seemed excellent’ but ‘it was all several centuries ahead of the times’. But it was to Achimota College and a tragic death that the story of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus continues. And, as a preview, incidentally it was not Lowe and Waldron who first sent this monkey to the Natural History Museum in London, as they thought to be the case.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTSaWxvoVngt6-JQL7cCYHY0WXxOu6Mm8tnszjrumiJ6nu2yA-ItpYFrnhYCS1Jdvh6Up5xrD4Wr9QS2aYrH8FgkDeKedklW98cWYHJk9atvTJkX-V7vq6icMkKBwEkeS1J7UlZmOYekJ087rHjpTDvTg1SGPSTUKLLbJpA7BpYRQCPhlwHC5EThEBAf0/s1431/M04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1431" data-original-width="797" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTSaWxvoVngt6-JQL7cCYHY0WXxOu6Mm8tnszjrumiJ6nu2yA-ItpYFrnhYCS1Jdvh6Up5xrD4Wr9QS2aYrH8FgkDeKedklW98cWYHJk9atvTJkX-V7vq6icMkKBwEkeS1J7UlZmOYekJ087rHjpTDvTg1SGPSTUKLLbJpA7BpYRQCPhlwHC5EThEBAf0/w357-h640/M04.jpg" width="357" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A photograph of Lowe taken<br />by Fannie Waldron</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-424754527853941912024-02-18T14:53:00.000+00:002024-02-18T14:53:28.538+00:00Showing off in Hong Kong: a male Fork-tailed Sunbird displays his attributes<p>AJP spotted this Fork-tailed Sunbird (<i>Aethopyga christinae</i>) displaying to females and seeing off other males at Tai Po Kau last week.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO7lk7dXBCZYTW3tAS6BqchoP3U63yvBXQtgAPOYC8qwBbaGsBW-OR3EKY4vQY2E_oaFHZEHwBhRY4aLl1NTwhugB_NHTumFGKE7H78MHyTqY9Oo-OPu4M_WbrkT6KY5LrQK4kZjQjg6cI7Ua7NSEQtddTV2dTC4jTKhwL0AX8lDQlcDKaoX37TIfWDs0/s1013/IMG_2842-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1013" height="379" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO7lk7dXBCZYTW3tAS6BqchoP3U63yvBXQtgAPOYC8qwBbaGsBW-OR3EKY4vQY2E_oaFHZEHwBhRY4aLl1NTwhugB_NHTumFGKE7H78MHyTqY9Oo-OPu4M_WbrkT6KY5LrQK4kZjQjg6cI7Ua7NSEQtddTV2dTC4jTKhwL0AX8lDQlcDKaoX37TIfWDs0/w400-h379/IMG_2842-Edit.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cV8cFjIR53QT9xbUPMmLA8kN5nbu8n4kdf8FoNqTMLTz_85BV-1g-4N7OxtNXNFh_oNNBm7Mdl8Rc_jO9W4Byfj9dW-0LqEagVoMiC1ApsII2EHUGwSoeUcOgiKyYPOkzyIpTQrufY0PdOD7RNXnujytobjh88Xi6362CPwnVTSoqe5OXMCRUn4FEhQ/s969/IMG_2853-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="969" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cV8cFjIR53QT9xbUPMmLA8kN5nbu8n4kdf8FoNqTMLTz_85BV-1g-4N7OxtNXNFh_oNNBm7Mdl8Rc_jO9W4Byfj9dW-0LqEagVoMiC1ApsII2EHUGwSoeUcOgiKyYPOkzyIpTQrufY0PdOD7RNXnujytobjh88Xi6362CPwnVTSoqe5OXMCRUn4FEhQ/w396-h400/IMG_2853-Edit.jpg" width="396" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBQVgZwsqlGesEB96tiBbrXAYY0nqkLn_2pY5DNZvSGAQiWimdF1ILhBxZCnSQ9aAxZ32ixVUlVEtpw8rw1tDgZ3ihU-9OJV8oUGRiUqxNIheXwTVicwi1oDOcgKpxjq_3YegAuMocAvsCRniwm4FQ6Yh1c0VY-dkYU1_xjiDceADVTQbpmYGunyJQHE/s968/IMG_2854-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="968" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBQVgZwsqlGesEB96tiBbrXAYY0nqkLn_2pY5DNZvSGAQiWimdF1ILhBxZCnSQ9aAxZ32ixVUlVEtpw8rw1tDgZ3ihU-9OJV8oUGRiUqxNIheXwTVicwi1oDOcgKpxjq_3YegAuMocAvsCRniwm4FQ6Yh1c0VY-dkYU1_xjiDceADVTQbpmYGunyJQHE/w400-h398/IMG_2854-Edit.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>It is difficult to believe that this common and widespread bird in Hong Kong was once uncommon. It was only first recorded in 1959, again at Tai Po Kau, which for years remained its stronghold. We were amazed when returning to Hong Kong on 1997 for the first time in 29 years to find a pair nesting outside our window at Robert Black College in the university compound. </p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-26063460756650909942024-02-12T15:16:00.001+00:002024-02-12T15:16:40.417+00:00Sooty-headed Bulbul in the hills of Hong Kong<p>AJP took this photograph of a Sooty-headed Bulbul (<i>Pycnonotus aurigaster</i>) in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago. This is the third most common bulbul in Hong Kong and noticeably much less common than when we lived there in the 1960s. I think the clue is in its habitat: ‘scrubland and thinly wooded hillsides’. The hills certainly fitted that description in the 1960s following the gathering of anything for firewood during the Japanese occupation but since then the trees have grown considerably, thus reducing the suitability of the hillsides for this species—and also cutting off former familiar views for walkers on Hong Kong island, for example. The common name that used to be used in Hong Kong was Red-vented Bulbul, a name that also applies to another species, <i>P. cafer</i>, largely confined to the Indian subcontinent.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPnBMQECxMuihCBfBRxDJcd5T8Tns_z8QKdStMdlVC0KezrLEX3YlxD_Yru4Z9K8M2Jf5zyekO9IbIX44YJ7SseBIwS-Wq9vyyJ1ImwZyyiP_4WaAc0lGX3Z9I00Md7D8xynOgxfKMu5aHpFnKafeQ95jnTsG6QuyNL44NaFCd5sxsW1cIJwBDj4tXVKI/s1280/IMG_2318-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPnBMQECxMuihCBfBRxDJcd5T8Tns_z8QKdStMdlVC0KezrLEX3YlxD_Yru4Z9K8M2Jf5zyekO9IbIX44YJ7SseBIwS-Wq9vyyJ1ImwZyyiP_4WaAc0lGX3Z9I00Md7D8xynOgxfKMu5aHpFnKafeQ95jnTsG6QuyNL44NaFCd5sxsW1cIJwBDj4tXVKI/w552-h414/IMG_2318-Edit.jpg" width="552" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-87811720630092246302024-02-03T12:48:00.000+00:002024-02-03T12:48:18.476+00:00What happens to moths and butterflies during very cold weather in Hong Kong?<p>AJP was up and about early last week after a very cold night (around 6°C at sea level). The butterflies and moths in the hills of the Tai Po Kau forest were lying on the road either recovering or dying from the overnight cold. This Tropical Swallowtail moth, <i>Lyssa zampa</i>, did not make it.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5TfcSg6LtmrNUtyq82Ti3toSBwLtzNVaxfez79YJ4jsxsKGXlSK3Zyu5A5ggyq7T6BMSg8clW-MAnQ7t8Omn4LZfi7JS_LYfGRLrgFss7Hp5imMabWPMfZMNTBGqNArg9oZANyC9RC77iT-3-5B09xDodKz8paTRhLy5n6WjcTpHyPkUTsflenSaut5M/s2016/IMG_1374.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5TfcSg6LtmrNUtyq82Ti3toSBwLtzNVaxfez79YJ4jsxsKGXlSK3Zyu5A5ggyq7T6BMSg8clW-MAnQ7t8Omn4LZfi7JS_LYfGRLrgFss7Hp5imMabWPMfZMNTBGqNArg9oZANyC9RC77iT-3-5B09xDodKz8paTRhLy5n6WjcTpHyPkUTsflenSaut5M/w300-h400/IMG_1374.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir5Xhyeq5AzGFHQ5jjgg1Gmdz7Wye2AT7Id2NCwsLh1xF-A2McwvqSDziq6DMbiYTmM_z1kbU6AGF4bqtK31yiCUjasV71UZ_sF1y2GglCvoIyYko_Ut3utzHaFSrVUROK6i3Y6SHFdvRduopugPeVkgaAQPp-4uUPOLyNzssDf2kUYEZkwMjMbcBTZM4/s2016/IMG_1376.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="2016" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir5Xhyeq5AzGFHQ5jjgg1Gmdz7Wye2AT7Id2NCwsLh1xF-A2McwvqSDziq6DMbiYTmM_z1kbU6AGF4bqtK31yiCUjasV71UZ_sF1y2GglCvoIyYko_Ut3utzHaFSrVUROK6i3Y6SHFdvRduopugPeVkgaAQPp-4uUPOLyNzssDf2kUYEZkwMjMbcBTZM4/w400-h300/IMG_1376.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>It can be difficult for visitors to imagine Hong Kong being cold if they are there in the summer with temperatures over 30°C and humdity at 90%.</p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-90344095580923006262024-01-31T16:47:00.000+00:002024-01-31T16:47:10.681+00:00Leafbirds in Hong Kong<p>AJP spotted these leafbirds at Tai Po Kau in Hong Kong during their recent cold weather. The species now goes under the name of Greyish-crowned Leafbird (<i>Chloropsis lazulina</i>) but was considered a subspecies of Hardwick's Chloropsis, Leafbird or Fruitsucker, <i>Chloropsis hardwickii melliana</i>. They live in high forests and the cold weather may have brought them down to the hills. They appear to have been taking nectar from the flowers.</p><p>They were once considered to be very rare in Hong Kong. Herklots noted that when he wrote his book in 1953 only one had ever been seen been seen—in Lam Tsuen Valley on 27 January 1934. The species occurs in south-west China down to Vietnam. They now have uncommon resident and winter visitor in the field guide. We have never seen one in Hong Kong either when we lived there in the 1960s or on our visits since.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8vyFggXscG0VyjFJQOLRtUHYJWQVZsKCoeWUeFo58mH5ty36kSEz78j1iiMvnNOKmfAznSbwQJGfrxiap5Ez4gXayR2s8hkW5v3S5RR8hnQ_TRSERGBIXlOoqrVYdn67Lp-f1D8lVwtL7xczh1ZZrHyA4z1oymAGk5pRFoDsPuSt4w3jmJmaIF_Y7Zxo/s3041/IMG_2036-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3041" data-original-width="3041" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8vyFggXscG0VyjFJQOLRtUHYJWQVZsKCoeWUeFo58mH5ty36kSEz78j1iiMvnNOKmfAznSbwQJGfrxiap5Ez4gXayR2s8hkW5v3S5RR8hnQ_TRSERGBIXlOoqrVYdn67Lp-f1D8lVwtL7xczh1ZZrHyA4z1oymAGk5pRFoDsPuSt4w3jmJmaIF_Y7Zxo/w400-h400/IMG_2036-Edit.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuHQMrB4sX7E3g2f0n9i0qg9T1dsZlxTwQvUpFFh3WEXcmOTQbaFpV2V0Ehy2NK82ZBT9OzLri32BoaJayfVbITBY72mEgp1z3_4U_jcu0WET9JPoUxMaJ1uRrPZ7TpWB6bFkQgUx1X7-Gqln-wsfRrnoaNDXihstRmZScWn5S5shVmcUEyhY4nehKi8/s2741/IMG_2037-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; 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text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY7Uu8VaHcQLADaEhzACwUH_9-1mo6nP7s1vzNFniSG7GNp0ruN0Ldy7xE8Mg-wi2hPrvDGHck6CcJJIWeDW1qrkd5CUjSlXWgrYt_K7QCkQqcGKSVTGIji2rCaaXoYOG18yJly_zQx7e1c109CpWVS9W80DkKPvrYzSqjXWjUf6wgpST6_syyeDCTSh0/s2146/IMG_2265-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2146" data-original-width="2146" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY7Uu8VaHcQLADaEhzACwUH_9-1mo6nP7s1vzNFniSG7GNp0ruN0Ldy7xE8Mg-wi2hPrvDGHck6CcJJIWeDW1qrkd5CUjSlXWgrYt_K7QCkQqcGKSVTGIji2rCaaXoYOG18yJly_zQx7e1c109CpWVS9W80DkKPvrYzSqjXWjUf6wgpST6_syyeDCTSh0/w400-h400/IMG_2265-Edit.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-53515158014881310732024-01-30T17:28:00.004+00:002024-01-30T17:41:22.905+00:00Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. Finding Miss Waldron<p>This article started out as a follow-up to a previous one which touched on <a href="https://zoologyweblog.blogspot.com/2023/08/red-tailed-amazon-parrot-colour-plate.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Willoughby Prescott Lowe</a> (1872-1949), a major animal collector for the Natural History Museum in London and others. On looking him up in the <i>Eponym Dictionary of Mammals</i> and in the <i>Eponym Dictionary of Birds</i> I found the following:</p><p></p><blockquote>…He is also notorious for having shot eight specimens of Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus <i>Piliocolobus badius waldroni </i>in Ghana in 1933. Miss Waldron also worked at the museum and accompanied him on this trip. The colobus was already rare and is now thought to be extinct.</blockquote><p></p><p>But who was Miss Waldron. What was she doing in the Gold Coast—as Ghana then was—in the 1930s. In the 2014 edition of the <i>Eponym Dictionary of Birds</i> she was described as:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Miss Fanny Waldron [dates not found] was an employee of the BMNH [British Museum Natural History]. She accompanied W.P. Lowe on his expedition…in 1934-35 when she was well over 60.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Intrigued by the lack of information I then found that others on the online <i>Bird Forum</i> had also failed to find out anything about Miss Waldron and that in one index she has been described as Frances since, presumably, Fanny was sometimes used as an informal derivation from the diminutive ‘Fran’, as in ‘Peggy’ for ‘Margaret’. Since Lowe and senior staff of the Museum used ‘Fanny’ I can only assume the indexer had not realised that an informal name would just not have been used in a formal report or paper in the 1930s.</p><p>I am pleased to say that I have found who Miss Waldron was. Readers will soon realise that much of the information given above is wrong while little is right or even half-right.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Finding Miss Waldron</h4><p>I soon found her by searching through shipping records in ancestry.com and findmypast.com. There she is, along with Willoughby Lowe, on board Elder Dempster Line ships, travelling between England and Gold Coast (now Ghana). Fortunately these records give her age and address in London.</p><p>With that information I was able to widen the search and obtain a fairly comprehensive picture of Miss Waldron. She was indeed a ‘Fanny’ but not ‘Fanny’ with a ‘y’ but ‘Fannie’. Fannie was the name registered at birth and was the one she used when filling in her own forms for a ship’s manifest, for example. However, census enumerators and those writing about her, in the ornithological literature for example, have used ‘Fanny’. It would seem her own family who had to fill in some census forms for themselves also forgot and used ‘Fanny’ on occasion. But her name was simply Fannie Waldron. Even the record of probate after her death notes her name as ‘Fannie otherwise Fanny’.</p><p>I have included some detail of Fannie and her family in the hope that others may have further information or photographs. Current family members are often unaware of what their antecedents got up to, as evidenced by the number of people contacting me to say they had found an article of mine while seeking information on family history.</p><p>FANNIE WALDRON was born on 5 June 1876 in Hungerford, Berkshire. She was the daughter of Walter Brind Waldron (1840-1913) and Marian Wood (1847-1917). The Waldrons came to own large estates in <a href="https://berksfhs.org/sheep-farming-in-patagonia/" target="_blank">Patagonia</a> and in Kenya, as well as farming in England. Walter and Marian had eight children: Mary Elizabeth in 1868, Clara in 1870, Edith in 1871, Walter George in 1872, Ruth Marian in 1874 (named as a contact by Fannie when entering the USA), Fanny in 1876, Hilda in 1878 and Dorothy Brind in 1890.</p><p>In the 1881 Census, Walter in shown as farming 1600 acres and employing 37 men, 10 boys and 8 women. The farm was Poughley Park near Lambourn. It was part of the Hungerford Registration District and it is where Fannie was born.</p><p>By 1891 the family was living in Peasemore House in Berkshire. Fannie was still living with her parents then as well as in 1901 and 1911. By the latter Census, the Waldrons had moved to 15 Portarlington Road, Bournemouth; Walter is described as ‘chairman and director of companies’. That record shows one of the children had died.</p><p>By the time of the 1921 Census, both Fannie’s parents had died. She can be found, as ‘head of household’, at The Broadway, Birkenshaw, Totland on the Isle of Wight. On census day she had three visitors from Bournemouth and a servant.</p><p>In 1924 shipping records show her address as 12 Southwell Gardens, London SW7. From then on, and probably until 1950, she was living at 26 Moore Street in Chelsea, London. Today this address is assessed as ‘a 5 bedroom freehold terraced house spread over 3,283 square feet, making it one of the largest properties here—it is ranked as the 5th most expensive property in SW3 2QW, with a valuation of £5,918,000’.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Travels</h4><p>The following is a list of Fannie Waldron’s international travels from 1899 to 1938. It may be incomplete since only some shipping records can be found online. I have included them all because although I found no collecting activities associated with trips others than the two with Willoughby Lowe in 1933-34 and 1934-35 other records may turn up in the future that could be fitted to the earlier voyages.</p><p><u>1899 Chile</u>. Although only listed as ‘F Waldron’ it seems highly likely this was Fannie since the family had farming interests in Chile and had used Punta Arenas as their base. She arrived in Liverpool on 26 August 1898 from Punta Arenas on board <i>Orissa</i> (Pacific Steam Navigation Company).</p><p><u>1920-21 Hawaii</u>. On 27 October she arrived in Quebec on board Canadian Pacific’s <i>Empress of France</i> having departed from Liverpool on 21 October. She crossed the US border the same day at St Albans, Vermont. Then she can be found arriving in Honolulu on the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand’s ship RMS <i>Niagara</i> on 17 November 1920 from Vancouver. Nearly three months later she left Honolulu for San Francisco on board Matson Line’s <i>Matsonia</i>, arriving on 16 March 1921. For immigration she was described as 5’ 8” with brown hair and grey eyes. She travelled with her maid, Dorothy Wales, aged 22.</p><p><u>1924. Amazon Cruise to Manaus, Brazil</u>. Departed Liverpool on Booth Steamship Company’s <i>Hildebrand</i>. </p><p><u>1926-27 India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)</u>. She departed from London on board P&O’s <i>Rawalpindi</i> on 12 November 1926. The next record is of her leaving Colombo on P&O’s <i>Moldavia</i> which arrived in London on 11 March 1927. She actually disembarked at Plymouth, before the ship sailed on to London.</p><p><i>1930 Trinidad</i>. She left Avonmouth on 11 January 1930 on board the Elders & Fyffes ship <i>Ariguani</i> bound for Trinidad. She returned on the same company’s <i>Camito</i> which arrived at Avonmouth (Bristol) on 27 February.</p><p><u>1933-34 West Africa</u>. Departed Liverpool for Takoradi, Gold Coast (Ghana), on board the Elder & Dempster Line ship <i>Appa</i> on 29 November 1933 with Willoughby Lowe. The return trip was on the same line’s ship, <i>Accra</i>, which arrived in Liverpool on 20 March 1934 from Takoradi.</p><p><u>1934-35 West Africa</u>. Departed Liverpool for Takoradi, Gold Coast (Ghana), on board the Elder & Dempster Line ship<i> Adda </i>on 28 November 1934 with Willoughby. Returned on the same line’s <i>Apapa</i> to arrive in Plymouth on 18 March 1935. Lowe embarked at Accra; Miss Waldron at Takoradi.</p><p><u>1938 West Indies</u>. A cruise from Dover (returning to Plymouth) to Kingston, Puerto Colombia, Curacao, Trinidad, Barbados on board the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company’s <i>Colombia</i>.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Reports of the 1933-34 and 1934-5 Expeditions to West Africa</h4><p>Reports by David Bannerman of the Natural History Museum on the 1933-34 and 1934-35 expeditions appeared in the <i>Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club</i>. David Bannerman (1886-1979) at the time was chairman of the Club and the expert on the birds of West Africa:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Mr. David Bannerman made some remarks on a collection of some 560 birds recently made in Ashanti, Gold Coast, by Mr. Willoughby P. Lowe for the British Museum, and exhibited a specimen of Glaucidium tephronotum tephronotum, the Gold Coast Yellow-legged Owlet, from Mampong. Mr. Bannerman said that no large collection from the forests of the Gold Coast had been made since Governor Ussher had employed Aubinn—a native collector—to obtain birds for him between the years 1867-1872. Although a number of very rare birds were secured in that collection, and finally were presented to the British Museum, none bore any data on the labels, the only locality mentioned being either Denkera (a spot which is not marked on modern maps, but which is situated in lat. 6°15'N., 2°12'W. long., south-west of Kumasi) or "the interior of the Gold Coast." It was imperative, therefore, that we should have confirmation of Ussher’s records, and arrangements were made with Mr. W. P. Lowe, with the aid of the Godman Fund, to spend three months in Ashanti from December 1933 to March of this year. Mr Lowe's collection contains a number of rare species, but a cursory glance has not revealed anything entirely new. By far the greatest prize is a female specimen which had just finished laying of Glaucidium tephronotum tepgronotum Sharpe, which was secured on February 25, 1934, at Mampong, Ashanti</i>…. Volume 54, p 122, 1933-34.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><i>Other rare birds exhibited, of which Mr. Lowe secured specimens, are: The Black Dwarf Hornbill (Lophoceros hartlaubi hartlaubi), a rare species, of which few specimens are known. The Long-tailed Hawk (</i>Urotriorchis macrourus macrourus<i>), three specimens of which were secured at Mampong and Ejura. The Fernando Po or Fraser's Eagle-Owl (</i>Bubo poensis poensis<i>), two adults and an immature one being obtained-the first specimen I have ever seen in immature dress. The Maned Owl (</i>Jubula letti)<i>, the first record from the Gold Coast: previously not known from any locality between Liberia and Cameroons. An account of Mr. Lowe's trip, together with an annotated list of the specimens he secured, will, it is hoped, be published in 'The Ibis' in due course. The passerine birds, which have not yet been named, are likely to prove of considerable interest, and the collection as a whole is a valuable asset to our West African material in the British Museum. </i>Volume 54 p 123, 1933-34.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><i>Mr. Willoughby P. Lowe visited the Gold Coast last winter on behalf of the British Museum, and made collections of birds, fish, and mammals in Ashanti. He is leaving again this month for the same destination.</i> Volume 55, p 35, 1934-35.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Mr. David Bannerman exhibited a selection of birds of many species which had recently been obtained by Mr. Willoughby P. Lowe in Ashanti, and made the following remarks :—</i></p><p><i>I am exhibiting tonight a number of beautiful and interesting birds which Mr. W. P. Lowe and Miss F. Waldron have recently collected from the Gold Coast. It will be remembered that in the winter of 1933-34 the same travellers made a large collection in the forests of Ashanti on behalf of the British Museum. I made some mention of the results of that trip at our April meeting in 1934…</i></p><p><i>This year they again visited the Gold Coast in the hope of adding a number of species to their former collection. In this they have been successful. They have not only secured a number of interesting species which they failed to get the year previously, but have been instrumental in making two or three discoveries of particular interest which I propose to mention to you now.</i></p><p><i>I am pleased to say that Mr. Lowe is present with us this evening and will be glad to answer any questions which may be put to him about his experiences. The birds are exhibited in the cases on the table. I am now engaged in selecting those birds which are required by the British Museum and the remainder will go to the Royal Natural History Museum in Sweden.</i> Volume 55, p 126-126, 1934-35.</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Mr. Bannerman next described a new race of the from the Gold Coast, which he proposed to name</i></p><p>Anthoscopus flavifrons waldroni<i>, subsp. nov.</i></p><p><i>Description (adult male).—Differs from </i>A. flavifrons flavifrons<i> in the brighter, more yellowish-olive plumage of the crown, mantle, back, rump, and wing-coverts, and in the paler underparts, which are more yellow, particularly on the breast, than in the typical species. Eye dark brown, bill black, the base of lower mandible and edges of both mandibles bluish-white.</i></p><p><i>Measurements of type.—Bill 10, wing 55, tail 28, tarsus 13.5 mm. Distribution.—The forests of Ashanti, Gold Coast. Type.—♂︎ adult, Goaso, Ashanti, Dec. 15, 1934. Collectors: W. P. Lowe and Miss F. Waldron. Remarks.—The discovery, after many years, of a race of </i>Anthoscopus flavifrons flavifrons<i> in Upper Guinea is of great interest. The typical species inhabits the Cameroon forests, and no other race of this bird had previously been discovered. I have much pleasure in naming this bird after Miss Fanny Waldron, who accompanied Mr. Lowe to the Gold Coast and who has been instrumental in obtaining many valuable specimens—particularly of fish—for the Zoological Departments of the British Museum. </i>Volume 55, p 131, 1934-35.</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><i>Mr. Bannerman finally exhibited an adult, young, and eggs of the Ahanta Francolin </i>(Francolinus ahantensis ahantensis)<i>, and made the following observations :—Although the Ahanta Francolin has such a wide range in West Africa, Mr. W. P. Lowe is the first collector to secure specimens of the young and at the same time a clutch of eggs</i>…. Volume 55, p 132, 1934-35.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Mr. David Bannerman exhibited a specimen of a rare Cuckoo-Shrike from West Africa, and made some further observations upon Mr. Willoughby Lowe's collection from Ashanti. He said :—</i></p><p><i>I have now completed the examination of the Passerine species in the collection which Mr. W. P. Lowe and Miss Waldron made in Ashanti last winter, and the following are worthy of record</i>…. Volume 55, p 154, 1934-35.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Lowe himself wrote up an account the birds seen and collected in the two expeditions. The report (<i>Report on the Lowe—Waldron Expeditions to the Ashanti Forests and Northern Territories of the Gold Coast</i>) extended over three papers in<i> The Ibis</i> in 1937. The first part details the itinerary and the beginning of the bird list; parts two and three continue the list which includes notes on each species. He ended his acknowledgements with:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Finally, I must express my gratitude to my companion, Miss Fanny Waldron, without whose interest and assistance these natural history collections could never have been made.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>He clearly did not know that her name was actually ‘Fannie’.</p><p>The 1934-35 expedition with Fannie, when he was 64 and Fannie 58 on their return, were Willoughby Lowe’s last. He was said to have been be in a low condition, from which he never fully covered, after his son, aged 21, drowned off Exmouth in 1931.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVOg3OS9iggH_ndcBiY01J5tV941pKO9EWcS5nEGif3JSR-1ZHThfLj8jYr6LTRcYkJ6DqHQV2kokTLP3YrDeoqPzQgoumGyc3qbrJ5W1zG3TgaN-MP0tpRVnFAk1NVGrJQWfsjyp3PMcIwZGD97RFleIvfl2ZDmg2AiqlwnzrKqndyeqkdaBM6RMwyq0/s1763/Views.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1187" data-original-width="1763" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVOg3OS9iggH_ndcBiY01J5tV941pKO9EWcS5nEGif3JSR-1ZHThfLj8jYr6LTRcYkJ6DqHQV2kokTLP3YrDeoqPzQgoumGyc3qbrJ5W1zG3TgaN-MP0tpRVnFAk1NVGrJQWfsjyp3PMcIwZGD97RFleIvfl2ZDmg2AiqlwnzrKqndyeqkdaBM6RMwyq0/w640-h430/Views.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Photographs from Willoughby Lowe's Report on the two expeditions</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">Specimens in the Natural History Museum, London</h4><p>A search of the catalogue shows the specimens collected by Lowe and Waldron in 1933-34 and 1934-35 that have been retained by the museum. In terms of specimens I counted 1 plant, 54 fish, 2 amphibians, 7 reptiles, 5 birds and 90 mammals. Bannerman (see above) and Lowe reported that the majority of birds from the 1934-35 expedition were sent to Sweden.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Eponyms</h4><p>1. Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus</p><p>The most important finding of the two collecting trips was the monkey, now known as Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus (<i>Piliocolobus waldroni</i>, or sometimes as <i>waldronae</i> to reflect, pedantically, the female for whom it is named. It may be extinct but there appears to be some evidence that it may just be hanging on in the Ivory Coast. The first specimen was, I read, shot or obtained by Lowe in December 1933. It was named as a subspecies of what is now <i>Piliocolobus badius waldroni</i> by Robert William Hayman of the Natural History Museum in 1935 (not 1936 as stated in some publications, although the paper may have actually appeared from the printers in 1936, a matter taken into consideration by priority-obsessed taxonomists). I will deal with this species, if indeed it is a species, in a separate article.</p><p>2. <i>Anthoscopus flavifrons waldroni</i></p><p>See Bannerman’s description of the subspecies of the Forest Penduline-tit in the <i>Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club</i> above. Again it sometimes appears as waldronae.</p><p>3. <i>Barbus waldroni</i></p><p>Described by John Roxborough Norman (1898-1944) of the Natural History Museum in 1935. Currently regarded as a subspecies of <i>Labeobarbus bynni</i>, the Niger Barb. </p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Press Coverage</h4><p>Willoughby Lowe appears to have had an eye to publicity. He announced his plans for the 1933-4 trip to the <i>Western Morning News and Daily Gazette</i> of 4 October 1933:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>…In an interview granted to a “Western Morning News” representative, Mr Willoughby Lowe discussed his plans for his latest expedition, on which he expects to be absent from England for three or four months, With a map. spread in front of him, Mr. Lowe indicated that he would land at Takoradi, on the Gold Coast, and, collecting his safarl, would proceed by train to Kumasi, in the interior. Mr. Lowe's party will not be large, and he will be the only white man…</i></p><p><i>Northwards from Kumasi huge forests, through which, owing to the rapid growth of vegetation, travel is painfully slow. "These jungles have never been properly explored, and it Is here that I hope to get some of my best specimens." said Mr. Lowe. I think these jungles ought to hold mammals, birds, and plants that no one has ever seen. In the swamps there should be rare fishes and reptiles. Previously I have only visited the coast of West Africa, but I have always come back with some new specimens….</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>The <i>Western Morning News</i> of 31 March 1934 in a long article gave news of his return:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKjxcGdbgvVoSviWrINEJqOTIbZhBjwE5Irjx0DAa-zQUmpd3bzaIY0XpEvZ3k9DeO0-Dh0D468bmQqjr8lrWXLMF5v6nVqyj7-FHTjwSqQQGu0deS4qlF-geON39XXlNlx_lJAofP5N98TNed0DTtuq_gdeVBiOpR_OiSggtaHt7b61Vk5PS4_AvBSO8/s1041/1934%20Return%20Western.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1041" data-original-width="347" height="739" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKjxcGdbgvVoSviWrINEJqOTIbZhBjwE5Irjx0DAa-zQUmpd3bzaIY0XpEvZ3k9DeO0-Dh0D468bmQqjr8lrWXLMF5v6nVqyj7-FHTjwSqQQGu0deS4qlF-geON39XXlNlx_lJAofP5N98TNed0DTtuq_gdeVBiOpR_OiSggtaHt7b61Vk5PS4_AvBSO8/w247-h739/1934%20Return%20Western.jpg" width="247" /></a></div><br /><p>In neither article does Miss Waldron get a mention. By contrast in the press coverage of the return in 1935, both Lowe and Waldron feature.<i> The Yorkshire Post</i> of 30 March, provides an example:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>At the Natural History Museum South Kensington. I watched to-day a number of fish from West Africa being classified. These have been collected by Miss F. Waldron and Mr. Lowe. and some may prove to be new to science. Miss Waldron and Mr. Lowe have brought back certain mud or lung fish which, during the heat of Summer live in a state of suspended animation completely encased in dry mud. Even should the Summer drought up particularly severe they can survive well over six months.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>The <i>Belfast Telegraph</i>, 18 March 1935:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Several new species were among a collection of 800 birds, reptiles, and monkeys consigned to the British Museum and Zoo which were landed at Plymouth on Sunday. They were brought ashore from the Elder-Dempster liner Apapa by Mr. Willoughby Lowe and Miss F. Waldron, the naturalists, who have travelled 1,000 miles in the interior of West Africa, searching for specimens for the British Museum. One of the most interesting finds was a sleeping fish, which can remain inanimate and apparently dead for months when the rivers dry up. These fish bury themselves in the mud or clay and remain in a comatose condition until the rainy season comes round and floods the dried-up river beds.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>This story made the national press as this article from the <i>News Chronicle</i> (18 March):</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJUGVKwsMNRI42RGYVig_cewitoTe6_5RMaX0wDZzs1GR7GcXdrJt9w6deJ7hpZPIdbHwGp3p7N-C9htzvybwgEZxCg9MNcJ2AxZfhNFfW_foprGm0zTKKXApns8mKz0tU3OvtYJ31ipNcN4je9yjNfn1XPaY3tCA6HWm2wUcCn7hmS4nvNdp-BeeNUM/s1608/News%20Chronicle.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1608" data-original-width="1057" height="692" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJUGVKwsMNRI42RGYVig_cewitoTe6_5RMaX0wDZzs1GR7GcXdrJt9w6deJ7hpZPIdbHwGp3p7N-C9htzvybwgEZxCg9MNcJ2AxZfhNFfW_foprGm0zTKKXApns8mKz0tU3OvtYJ31ipNcN4je9yjNfn1XPaY3tCA6HWm2wUcCn7hmS4nvNdp-BeeNUM/w454-h692/News%20Chronicle.jpg" width="454" /></a></div><br /><p>It would appear that the party had brought some animals for London Zoo. Examination of the ‘day books’ in ZSL’s archives could provide more information. Lowe mentioned in his 1937 report that:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>We caught two [Red-necked Buzzards, </i>Buteo auguralis<i>] alive at Ejura, and intended them for the Zoological Gardens, London, but we were so short of space we could not carry them.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Lungfish certainly made it to the Zoo. as desribed in a syndicated article that reached the <i>Motherwell Times</i> (29 March 1935).</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6YPQVrjGcIij9hdWO3v7UFJiIe5h0wM2yI4g4i0s94-XSLaf25U97jP8Zc-UtgPZl_Ydu-gFKtrG_Bk3o49g5mOH7wV6wR4jcVOeRwZL5JMjcgIIQwuyielkZmqAXsiBxQNxq9kd9c6rqS2lUCZ3LeRUMaMWQUdfA8TwJOuQhHiu2YsjqudVvwAcRwdQ/s870/Motherwell.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="870" data-original-width="668" height="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6YPQVrjGcIij9hdWO3v7UFJiIe5h0wM2yI4g4i0s94-XSLaf25U97jP8Zc-UtgPZl_Ydu-gFKtrG_Bk3o49g5mOH7wV6wR4jcVOeRwZL5JMjcgIIQwuyielkZmqAXsiBxQNxq9kd9c6rqS2lUCZ3LeRUMaMWQUdfA8TwJOuQhHiu2YsjqudVvwAcRwdQ/w383-h498/Motherwell.jpg" width="383" /></a></div><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">The 1933-4 and 1934-5 Expeditions: Unanswered Questions</h4><p>Throughout her life, Fannie Waldron was not employed but ‘living on private means’. She was not, as is has been stated, or inferred, a member of staff of the Natural History Museum; nor was Willoughby Lowe. Collectors were on short-term contracts of some sort but in this case I do not know if Lowe was paid a fixed sum plus expenses, or if payment was based on the number of specimens. Did London Zoo pay Lowe for the animals it received? Was Miss Waldron included in the arrangement with Lowe? I have been unable to find any information on how Willoughby Lowe and Fannie met or planed their first trip. Bannerman mentioned that the Godman Fund had been used to part finance the 1933-34 trip. The charity, now closed was the Godman Exploration Fund set up to support travel on behalf of the museum. I strongly suspect that given the acknowledgement Lowe wrote in his account of the expeditionsI, the fact that Fannie Waldron was a very wealthy woman together with the three eponyms bestowed by museum staff, she may have largely funded the two expeditions. </p><h4 style="text-align: left;">London Circles</h4><p>Perhaps as a result of the collections made in West Africa Fannie Waldron must have become known in the zoological circles of London. She was a guest on two occasions at meetings of the British Aviculturists’ Club (founded in 1946) . The first was on 12 November 1947; the second on 22 June 1948. The latter was a pretty grand affair :</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtZ7F3w9uuNHEEgSg29Nz3O-9A7SeD9JXruKlfUuOxV4UXCb5ejo5Cq_xLFEbBZyE_tWn4CpGAS2WtwSlsZHFQ1p7QFzSCfcAazV4ICp4E-eWaGvvriWoboeNq0Kv7o5tziWiW5GYfQ1aZVwgkOcoMwwR1XK-QcnT3FxxnVyM19BzFmIhfsTmwyk5Bgto/s1701/Avic%20Club.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1701" data-original-width="924" height="710" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtZ7F3w9uuNHEEgSg29Nz3O-9A7SeD9JXruKlfUuOxV4UXCb5ejo5Cq_xLFEbBZyE_tWn4CpGAS2WtwSlsZHFQ1p7QFzSCfcAazV4ICp4E-eWaGvvriWoboeNq0Kv7o5tziWiW5GYfQ1aZVwgkOcoMwwR1XK-QcnT3FxxnVyM19BzFmIhfsTmwyk5Bgto/w386-h710/Avic%20Club.jpg" width="386" /></a></div><br /><p>That is all the information I have found on Fannie until her death. A press report stated that she had moved from London to Goring-by-Sea, near Worthing, on the Sussex coast in 1950. That move would have come when she was 74.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Death</h4><p>The <i>Worthing Herald</i> of Friday 6 November 1959 announced:</p><p></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: center;"><i>DEATH OF MISS F. WALDRON</i></p><p><i>A member of St. John's Guild for the Blind and a well-known supporter of the Church and South American Missionary Societies, Miss Fannie Waldron, of Wayside, Ashurst-drive, Goring, died at a Worthing nursing home last Thursday. She was 85. Miss Waldron came to Worthing from London in 1950 and soon became well known for her regular visits to Gifford House and other homes for disabled and elderly folk. Among the societies she supported were the RSPCA, the Society for Sick Animals and the Putney Home for Incurables. She was also a member of Goring Parish Church. The funeral was at Peasemore Parish Church on Monday.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Peasemore House, Berkshire, had been her family’s house and other members of the family are buried at Peasemore.</p><p>Fannie died on 29 October 1959 in a nursing home at 40 Mill Road, Worthing. The probate record is shown below:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpnutc5HH7zf6urhB7LJPUPUXpfRx8i8KRp5cGxkc7Dcwx2HCJX-MIcaceKCnI0W6mZPH8mNvzcGlasPherQRd4ej4tArubyjiiJMV7X71kxGN-5xhbc6ffkT0VjNpjJwPstcEUftgFHClOrZvgE_DTkRy39V-eUd2A9ZQs8HiO28dl-SsecvQDcRshjE/s655/Probate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="135" data-original-width="655" height="91" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpnutc5HH7zf6urhB7LJPUPUXpfRx8i8KRp5cGxkc7Dcwx2HCJX-MIcaceKCnI0W6mZPH8mNvzcGlasPherQRd4ej4tArubyjiiJMV7X71kxGN-5xhbc6ffkT0VjNpjJwPstcEUftgFHClOrZvgE_DTkRy39V-eUd2A9ZQs8HiO28dl-SsecvQDcRshjE/w442-h91/Probate.jpg" width="442" /></a></div><br /><p>The <i>Worthing Gazette</i> (24 February 1960) later provided some details of her will:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>…Probate has been granted to her nephews, Stephen W. Brown, of Peasemore, near Newbury, Berks.. and Maurice C. Waldron, of 16 Coleman-street, E.C.</i></p><p><i>She left an annuity of £300, a legacy of £300, the proceeds from the sale of her residence and certain effects, to her friend Gertrude Aldridge; £100 to St. John's Guild for the Blind; £50 each to South American Missionary Society and Putney Home for Incurables; £25 each to the Society for the Protection of Animals in North Africa, Peasemore Churchyard Fund, the Society for Sick Animals, and the R.S.P.C.A.</i></p><p><i>Other bequests were. £50 to her friend Irene Wix; £25 each to her friends Mary O'Dea and Teresa Crowley; £25 *as a token of my appreciation for the many kindnesses he has shown to me during my lifetime" to Mr. G. Dixon. of 3 Tennyson-road, Worthing; a few other personal legacies and the</i></p><p><i>remainder specifically to relatives and The Friends of the Poor and Gentlefolk's Help, Wireless for the Bedridden Society, The Church Missionary Society, and Royal London Society for the Blind.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">A Sad Afternote: Pure Fiction</h4><p>A story based on Willoughby Lowe and Fannie Waldron and their expedition to West Africa appeared in the book <i>Animal Crackers</i> by Hannah Tinti in 2004. At the end of the short story the author wrote: ‘Although loosely based on historical fact, all characters and events in this story are fictional’. However, the work of fiction traduces both Lowe and Waldron and has reinforced my utter loathing of historical fiction.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">A Revised Entry for Eponym Lexicographers</h4><p>WALDRON</p><p>Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus <i>Colobus badius waldroni</i> Hayman, 1935 (currently <i>Piliocolobus waldroni</i>)</p><p>Forest Penduline Tit <i>Anthoscopus flavifrons waldroni</i> Bannerman, 1935</p><p><i>Barbus waldroni</i> Norman, 1935 (currently a ssp of the Niger Barb, <i>Labeobarbus bynni</i>)</p><p>Miss Fannie (sometimes Fanny) Waldron (1876-1959) took part in two joint collecting expeditions with Willoughby Prescott Lowe (1872-1949) to the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1933-34 and 1934-35 for the British Museum (Natural History). Some specimens were sent from BMNH to the Royal Natural History Museum in Sweden. Live specimens were received by London Zoo. All three of her eponymous organisms are sometimes shown as <i>waldronae</i>. Lowe wrote: 'Finally, I must express my gratitude to my companion, Miss Fanny Waldron, without whose interest and assistance these natural history collections could never have been made'.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9MnSfwVfQwRWjEXvjJL3d7trMTEbtNUtGy-hDuGII-KKLA8HC_NuJ2MIbQRx6greI4-JXR3a7OjhXPO4Wksfum6Ad6Vjggrd-EhxCRHREspJM378KR-ioqYZ7kHYuzlgy04KNluaq-7L4y64jOoLq_NbFJJ_2CTq9CQAIAJQdCh-5B5AnO5BtQI9rvk4/s1352/Lowe%20Photo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1352" data-original-width="776" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9MnSfwVfQwRWjEXvjJL3d7trMTEbtNUtGy-hDuGII-KKLA8HC_NuJ2MIbQRx6greI4-JXR3a7OjhXPO4Wksfum6Ad6Vjggrd-EhxCRHREspJM378KR-ioqYZ7kHYuzlgy04KNluaq-7L4y64jOoLq_NbFJJ_2CTq9CQAIAJQdCh-5B5AnO5BtQI9rvk4/w269-h468/Lowe%20Photo.png" width="269" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bannerman DR. 1950. Willoughby Prescott Lowe. Vice-President B.O.U. 1943–45 and Union Silver Medallist. Ibis 92, 142–145 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2009. The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Beolens, B, Watkins M, Grayson M. 2014. The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. London: Bloomsbury.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hayman RW. 1935: On a collection of mammals from the Gold Coast. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.1935, 915-937.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lowe WP. 1937a. Report on the Lowe-Waldron Expeditions to the Ashanti Forests and Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.. Ibis 79, 345-368.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lowe WP. 1937b. Report on the Lowe-Waldron Expeditions to the Ashanti Forests and Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.—Part II. Ibis 79, 635-662.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lowe WP. 1937c. Report on the Lowe-Waldron Expeditions to the Ashanti Forests and Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.—Part III. Ibis 79, 830-846.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">McGraw WS. 2005. Update on the Search for Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus Monkey. International Journal of Primatology 26, 605-619. DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-4368-9 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Norman JR. 1935. A collection of fishes from the Ashanti Forest, Gold Coast. Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Series 10) 15, 215-221.</span></p><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-66349331737676308322024-01-18T16:58:00.002+00:002024-01-18T16:59:26.655+00:00George Finlayson (1790-1823) on travel, curiosity and science - plus his eponymous bulbul<p>In a recent article I wrote on<a href="https://zoologyweblog.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-army-surgeons-white-squirrel-of-siam.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> George Finlayson’s eponymous squirrel</a>. Finlayson had written notes before his death on board the ship carrying him from Calcutta to London. Sir Stamford Raffles, who edited Finlayson’s account of his travels in south-east Asia as part of the East India Company’s diplomatic/trade mission in 1821-22, thought the notes were intended for inclusion in a book to be written by Finlayson after his return to Britain. In an introduction Raffles included the following, which, apart from the supervention of Charles Darwin, is an apt a statement today as it was over 200 years ago:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">In a greater or less degree, there is, perhaps, inherent in the minds of most men, a desire to visit foreign countries,—desire which neither storms nor tempests, deserts, wilds, nor precipices, with all their appalling fears, have been able to counteract or to check. Cast naked and helpless on this earth, man has aspired to scan its limits, to ascertain its bounds, and even to scrutinize its nature: he has risen superior to the contending elements, which might seem to have opposed an insuperable barrier to his restless ambition, to his ever-active, never-satisfied curiosity; and even the great globe itself no longer seems to offer a theatre too great or too extensive for the exertion of his activity. </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Insatiable ambition, boundless curiosity, are to be reckoned among the more prominent of the attributes with which man is endowed. To what mighty ends have they not led? If they have brought upon him, and upon the race, unnumbered evils, they have also had their attendant good. His share of peace, perhaps of happiness, had been greater had he indulged these propensities less; but it is not in his power to resist the unalterable impulse, conferred upon him, doubtless, for the best of purposes. The curiosity that is gratified with inquiring into the laws implanted in organized beings, or into the general phenomena which characterize the material world at large, admits of, and is usually attended by gratification as permanent as it is unmixed; every step is attended with unalloyed pleasure, every new acquisition leads and stimulates to further discovery. </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">This disposition of the mind is particularly observable in those who have made nature and natural objects their study. Hence the eagerness with which men engage in them: no one capable of reflection but has at one time or other experienced this laudable curiosity, and wished for the power to gratify it. To this source we must refer the encouragement held forth in the present day to voyagers and travellers, and in general to every one engaged in matters of discovery. It is not extraordinary, therefore, that persons should readily be found eager to enter upon the investigation of new and distant countries, and of the various objects of knowledge which they contain. It is the lot of few to indulge their inclinations this way; and of these few, how scanty is the proportion of individuals qualified for the important task, either by original endowment, by previous pursuits and habits, or by the necessary education, or by a proper train and temper of mind! Fortunately, however, the objects of pursuit are as numerous as the taste of man is various, and something is left even to the most humble intentions. A proper consideration of this matter would lead to the most important acquirements both on the part of the most humbly endowed, and for the benefit of science and knowledge in general. The principle need not be enforced by argument: let us follow it, if possible, with alacrity, and make the most of the opportunities which fall in our way. Let us devote to the task those abilities, however moderate, with which the Almighty has endowed us, and we shall rarely fail altogether of deriving benefit from our exertions. We may rest secure that the labours so bestowed will seldom fail to be duly appreciated; that our observations will be received with candour, and our alignments, if urged with modesty, will rarely fail to be listened to by the circle of our friends and acquaintances, to the approbation of whom no one can be altogether indifferent. It is in this temper of mind that we may hope to avoid a two-fold evil; that of exaggerating the importance of the feeble exertions of an individual on the one hand, and of thinking too meanly of his capacity on the other,—since both are alike hurtful, and alike oppose the acquisition of useful knowledge. </span></i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Since I can find no portrait of Finlayson I include a photograph of his eponymous bird, <i>Pycnonotus finlaysoni</i>, the Stripe-throated Bulbul. He collected it on the mission. Thomas Horsfield, curator of the East India Company’s museum in London and who described Finlayson’s Squirrel, sent the specimen to High Edwin Strickland (1811-1853) who got round to describing it in 1844, over 20 years after Finlayson’s death.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifu3cM2tecr9uPVGBObV8mdCtTgS1x-c2mxx_nOFqYebiwQkeOSM6VeJ6zMsODO0UkQglLI1iWOCeCsoV0Efb-yQQ2BMwxk3Cs2qhFBwrRvO8a5IRgAiG6ohZoCCHqQ_xZn-qEAgOk7eg3aJKwIZzTy6glmwBLfyrQx-kUTEovdJlA_U7OxjI9B3yUwiY/s2400/Pycnonotus_finlaysoni_-_Kaeng_Krachan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1920" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifu3cM2tecr9uPVGBObV8mdCtTgS1x-c2mxx_nOFqYebiwQkeOSM6VeJ6zMsODO0UkQglLI1iWOCeCsoV0Efb-yQQ2BMwxk3Cs2qhFBwrRvO8a5IRgAiG6ohZoCCHqQ_xZn-qEAgOk7eg3aJKwIZzTy6glmwBLfyrQx-kUTEovdJlA_U7OxjI9B3yUwiY/w341-h426/Pycnonotus_finlaysoni_-_Kaeng_Krachan.jpg" width="341" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Streak-throated Bulbul in Thailand<br />Photograph by JJ Harrison*</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Finlayson G. 1826. The Mission to Siam, and Hué the Capital of Cochin China in the Years 1821-2. London: John Murray.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Strickland HE. 1844 Descriptions of several new or imperfectly-defined genera and species of Birds. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 13, 409-415.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*JJ Harrison https://www.jjharrison.com.au/ Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported</span></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-46170127868054304492024-01-13T17:57:00.001+00:002024-01-13T17:57:23.698+00:00Bronze-Winged Mannikins: a colour plate from 1969<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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 16th in the series.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">– – – – – – – – – –</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7BcicYNjJ0CSOFkdynJAMdWeOs6F_cECZUZ09erY2wdIH4e73kXtkLJlFLIem9oxPFX-3fk7Ep8hFRxC0QGvFNkbObCrg9rkWnY8g85GVCI_b7XrNktKL4w1O9WR0B91PuB3yxrlqXACe0M1ulgAw9selAIQnZk4K09qHNZpU_ULLjzU1GPfg5R9zQiw/s1925/M01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1513" data-original-width="1925" height="504" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7BcicYNjJ0CSOFkdynJAMdWeOs6F_cECZUZ09erY2wdIH4e73kXtkLJlFLIem9oxPFX-3fk7Ep8hFRxC0QGvFNkbObCrg9rkWnY8g85GVCI_b7XrNktKL4w1O9WR0B91PuB3yxrlqXACe0M1ulgAw9selAIQnZk4K09qHNZpU_ULLjzU1GPfg5R9zQiw/w640-h504/M01.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>The artist for this plate was Chloe Elizabeth Talbot Kelly (born 1927) who went on to illustrate a number of field guides. Her paintings of birds appear in art sales. She began painting in 1945 at the Natural History Museum in London.</p><p>The article accompanying this plate was written by Colin James Oliver Harrison (1926-2003) who worked for many years at the Natural History Museum’s bird collection at Tring.</p><p>The Bronze-winged or Bronze Mannikin (<i>Spermestes cucullata)</i> occurs in grassland across a large swathe of Africa. Large flocks feed mainly on grass seeds but also take small invertebrates during breeding in the wet season. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Avicultural Magazine Vol 74, 1968</span></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-49457130844037490682024-01-06T17:01:00.001+00:002024-01-06T17:01:36.323+00:00The Army Surgeon’s White Squirrel of Siam<p>This article could begin as part of a quiz: What mammal of unusual coloration connects a mission to Thailand, when it was Siam, and a Scottish doctor to my parents’ garden in the early 1960s?</p><p>The answer is Finlayson’s Squirrel. <i>Callosciurus finlaysonii </i>is unusual for two reasons. The first is that it comes in a wide variety of colour forms in different parts of its range in south-east Asia. The second is that in one of those colour forms the colour of the pelage is entirely white.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaYvXBk_fp38fFWLpPOPxWNYxfuswcGNTUUgs8erL8QQXHRHXvn2Plu6CBe-jpnAP8JATdnjqAzoszz-GvfFNfVwTSKOoN9gmlpe6jatKnpzEEeWIa14oTKU80JqsEh3CN5B83lecoi1HK8f4z4ilwCsEDvTPAvh9-Kza81_A9TBoaPYf7nVKgWHXtX7M/s1200/FS1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaYvXBk_fp38fFWLpPOPxWNYxfuswcGNTUUgs8erL8QQXHRHXvn2Plu6CBe-jpnAP8JATdnjqAzoszz-GvfFNfVwTSKOoN9gmlpe6jatKnpzEEeWIa14oTKU80JqsEh3CN5B83lecoi1HK8f4z4ilwCsEDvTPAvh9-Kza81_A9TBoaPYf7nVKgWHXtX7M/w462-h347/FS1.jpg" width="462" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Finlayson's Squirrel, photographed in Saraburi, Thailand<br />Photograph from the project Noah Website*</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>It was this white form that was seen and collected by George Finlayson in southern Thailand. He was the surgeon and naturalist to a less than successful trade/diplomatic mission from the East India Company to Siam and Cochin China (Vietnam) led by<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crawfurd" target="_blank"> John Crawfurd</a> (1783-1868) and comprising the following members of the Indian Army plus Mrs Crawfurd: Captain Frederick Dangerfield (1789-1828) was assistant head; he had established a name for himself as a surveyor and geologist; Lieutenant Walter Rutherford (1801-1856) was in command of thirty sepoys. As far as I can ascertain all members of the mission—apart from the sepoys—were Scottish or of Scottish descent.</p><p>George Finlayson was born in Thurso in 1790. He became clerk to Dr Somerville, head of the army medical staff in Scotland during the Napoleonic wars. He did so in succession to his elder brother, Donald, who Somerville had moved on to the army medical service, such were his talents. This was a time when clerks served effectively as clinical apprentices. George followed Donald into the army. Donald served in the engagements preceding, and at, the Battle of Waterloo but then came to a sad end. He was assistant-surgeon to the 33rd Regiment of Foot but disappeared as the army marched on to Paris. It was thought Donald had fallen to marauders following in the wake of the retreating French army. George took leave to search for his brother but could find no trace. He was so distraught that the army, at Dr Somerville’s suggestion, moved him to the medical staff about to leave for Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Once there he threw himself into the pursuit of natural history. In 1819, he moved to India as assistant-surgeon to the 8th Light Dragoons then stationed at Meerut.</p><p>In order to stay in India for Crawfurd’s mission, when his regiment sailed back to Britain after its service in India, Finlayson moved to a different regiment.</p><p>After the mission in south-east Asia, George Finlayson quickly succumbed to what he self-diagnosed as phthisis—tuberculosis, as it later became known. He died on the passage from Calcutta to London on the East India Company’s ship,<i> General Hewett</i>, in 1823.</p><p>Finlayson had written an account of the Crawfurd Mission. It was published in 1826 with a ‘Memoir of the Author’ written by Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), founder of modern Singapore and of the Zoological Society of London. Raffles clearly thought very highly of Finlayson.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9yDmx_0KmTGE8mhEA7BOp86LPyR6CK5U_hOVY_wkBy7O7TR_QL5jSLn6VHGVW-MbsOU1JdJ_pa0dvd6P-Du1Xq4_qOYWmmHsOvvjweeuEfVFMMYiBG1paA-smzJYOb5rT0UM67ORSvm_Xb7JntzmuPq_6GNKFQ2iH-7hokw4fN0QdNxTph2Nm2eYo1Eg/s1756/Mission.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1756" data-original-width="1130" height="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9yDmx_0KmTGE8mhEA7BOp86LPyR6CK5U_hOVY_wkBy7O7TR_QL5jSLn6VHGVW-MbsOU1JdJ_pa0dvd6P-Du1Xq4_qOYWmmHsOvvjweeuEfVFMMYiBG1paA-smzJYOb5rT0UM67ORSvm_Xb7JntzmuPq_6GNKFQ2iH-7hokw4fN0QdNxTph2Nm2eYo1Eg/w318-h495/Mission.png" width="318" /></a></div><br /><p>Finlayson had embarked on <i>General Hewett</i> with the specimens he had collected, including a white squirrel, destined for the museum of the East India Company which was in Leadenhall Street in London. The Keeper was another friend of Raffles, Thomas Horsfield (1773-1859). There Horsfield described the squirrel and named it after Finlayson as <i>Sciurus finlaysonii</i>. He began his description with a quotation from Buffon:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>Sc. lacteus dorso flavescente, oculis vibrissis palmis plantisque nigris, cauda pilis nigris raris interspersa.</i></p><p><i>Ecureuil blanc de Siam, Buff. Hist. Nat. VII. p. 256.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>Which translates as: a squirrel, milky with a yellow back; vibrissi, palms, plantar surfaces of feet black, a hairy tail interspersed with rare blacks.</p><p>Horsfield continued:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>This species is dedicated to the memory of Dr. George Finlayson, (of His Majesty's 59th </i>[2nd Nottinghamshire]<i> Regiment </i>[of Foot]<i>,) the naturalist, who accompanied John Crawfurd, Esq. in his mission to Siam and Cochin-China. His health was in a precarious state, from the effects of an Indian climate; and we have to lament that he did not live to return to his native country.</i></p><p><i>This species has hitherto been mentioned by Buffon alone </i>[in 1789]<i>, from the following concise notice in P. Tachard's Travels. “Nous y (at Lonpeen, a village situated in the extensive forests of Siam) vimes aussi des Ecureuils, qui ont le poil parfaitement blanc et la peau tres-noire."—Second Voyage du P. Tachard, Paris, 1689, p. 249.</i></p><p><i>The following description is extracted from Dr. Finlayson's manuscripts:—“The head and body yellowish white; the head round; the cheeks full; the nose large ; the ears large, plain, not tufted; the iris dark brown; the whiskers long and black; the tail bushy, interspersed with black hairs, and tufted; palms of the feet black. This is an elegant, lively, and active species of Squirrel, almost perfectly white. The body is about seven inches in length, and the tail is equal in length to the body. The eyes are black and lively; and the animal, though white, has not the leucæthiopic habit common in the animals of Siam. It frequents large trees, feeds on their bark and fruit, and is generally seen upon a tall species of Aleurites. One of the specimens was shot by Lieut. Rutherford, on the Islands called Sichang, in the Gulf of Siam."</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>The India Museum closed in 1879 and the specimens transferred to what is now the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. And there the type specimen—the one shot by Lieutenant Rutherford on the island now known as Koh Si Chang—can be found, catalogued under its original scientific name of <i>Sciurus finlaysonii</i>. In his journal, Finlayson noted that on the group of islands that includes Koh Si Chang:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>The </i>[squirrel] <i>is rare, about eight inches in length; an active, lively, and handsome animal.</i></p><p><i>On the morning of the 13th [August 1822) we landed on the principal island, in pursuit of white squirrels. </i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>Moving to the 21st century, Finlayson’s Squirrel is now known to vary widely in the coloration of its fur. It varies geographically (the basis of the erection of numerous subspecies, 16 of which are currently recognised). It varies within populations and it varies according to season. Coloration across its range (Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and centred in Thailand) varies widely including, as well as white, black, red and agouti. Intergrades between these forms have also been seen where populations meet. An example of variation within a population is in <i>C. f. bocourti</i>, common in Bangkok parks. Individuals may be dark on the dorsal surfaces of the body and forelimbs or entirely white. Variation with season has been described in a population that is maroon-red at one time of year and white at another. Charles Francis in his book published in 2008 made the point that there is a need for more observations in the field and for molecular genetic studies. A key question, of course, is whether all the Finlayson’s Squirrels currently labelled as such are indeed of a single species and whether other forms currently included in different species should be moved to <i>C. finlaysonii</i>. Possible reasons for the great variation in colour and pattern do not seem to have been explored and one can only speculate on the selective forces at play.</p><p>George Finlayson realised that white squirrels were present in southern Thailand as well as on the island of Si Chang. It just happens that the formal description of the species was from one shot on Koh Si Chang.</p><p>The variations in colour have been shown in several books and papers:</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ab7zFNh8oCN2BGHjQIF13zM3YtBu_EqCCc0wd00PlSpAn8Cc6lQtEGkS3ZihfPw7LxnFwH7YqEAEFUYS6VRJK-TDojvsiDCZ1iY6EQq1pxW_0jISWOsXszgLVzXrScGrhSCcuAEJ56GlWFfdmx22YX4FE7fJ2Lp0sMqBDSt8BzRaBRGG1OfaGOOoXlo/s2646/Variation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2646" data-original-width="1672" height="615" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ab7zFNh8oCN2BGHjQIF13zM3YtBu_EqCCc0wd00PlSpAn8Cc6lQtEGkS3ZihfPw7LxnFwH7YqEAEFUYS6VRJK-TDojvsiDCZ1iY6EQq1pxW_0jISWOsXszgLVzXrScGrhSCcuAEJ56GlWFfdmx22YX4FE7fJ2Lp0sMqBDSt8BzRaBRGG1OfaGOOoXlo/w388-h615/Variation.jpg" width="388" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">From Francis 2008 - see below</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS97olypKVpGwSyE3GbIg9SdYeyXBsjYvBYoVtuVQGIGi1IXPMkRGmwuVK9CU1J0XponTQDRd7E42M1L-59TWdzrEeI-b9IJnRanzG8nHoJ983rTEjrwCPfNCzc2V5hyphenhyphenaWT29OQ_RxxC4f1R2gsAQ2uBvSzR0MZcUU9dFkzeLSg4SiQKJY4YsFcR9W5Zc/s3817/Squirrel%20from%20MofW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2657" data-original-width="3817" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS97olypKVpGwSyE3GbIg9SdYeyXBsjYvBYoVtuVQGIGi1IXPMkRGmwuVK9CU1J0XponTQDRd7E42M1L-59TWdzrEeI-b9IJnRanzG8nHoJ983rTEjrwCPfNCzc2V5hyphenhyphenaWT29OQ_RxxC4f1R2gsAQ2uBvSzR0MZcUU9dFkzeLSg4SiQKJY4YsFcR9W5Zc/w533-h372/Squirrel%20from%20MofW.jpg" width="533" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">From Wilson, Lacher & Mittermeier 2016 - see below</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The coloration of the species varies so much that the name Variable Squirrel has been used and indeed adopted by IUCN for its Red List. Why they should do that when everybody worth knowing has always called it Finlayson’s Squirrel I do not know.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJB0U8Eti60lDoh8VpD9ySGy4O1stbKM3F2AaLOo0O-tRJzoG1sC8sez_i4scCsz4MO3KWAhb3mqcqU5HKCLfGvzSHpwm8ERCdBdZ7rhMVu8lrx7H49eUsF1IW2wXCKPGBOu3m6pueHPwfvr9-CY81lF35RwzC4scdybiBPgy4myKYTJi_eYpf_XU5tI/s1022/Map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="1022" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJB0U8Eti60lDoh8VpD9ySGy4O1stbKM3F2AaLOo0O-tRJzoG1sC8sez_i4scCsz4MO3KWAhb3mqcqU5HKCLfGvzSHpwm8ERCdBdZ7rhMVu8lrx7H49eUsF1IW2wXCKPGBOu3m6pueHPwfvr9-CY81lF35RwzC4scdybiBPgy4myKYTJi_eYpf_XU5tI/w416-h325/Map.jpg" width="416" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Distribution of Finlayson's Squirrel<br />Adapted from the IUCN Red List</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Horsfield’s use of <i>-ii</i> for the genitive of Finlayson in its specific name of <i>finlaysonii</i> is not the preferred form. Most, and certainly modern usage, would be <i>finlaysoni</i>, the single<i> -i</i>. As the latter it has often appeared in scientific papers and books including <i>Walker’s Mammals of the World </i>in at least some of the editions published since 1964. However the rules are such that it is also incorrect to change it to the single <i>-i</i>. <i>C. finlaysonii</i> is the original spelling and therefore retained.</p><p>Unlike the vast majority of animals that I have kept over the past 65 years I cannot recall how I obtained a female Finlayson’s Squirrel in 1960 or 1961. Had I known then what I know now I would not have done so. Variegated Squirrel Bornavirus 1 (VSBV-1) was first reported in 2015 following reports of the three human deaths in Germany between 2011 and 2013 from of a previously unknown encephalitis. The novel virus was isolated from tissues of a Variegated Squirrel, <i>Sciurus variegatoides</i>, native to Central America, owned by one of those who had died. The virus has since been found in other captive squirrels, including <i>C. finlaysonii </i>and Prevost’s Squirrel (<i>Callosciurus prevostii</i>), in collections in Germany, the Netherlands and Croatia. Those who died were breeders of squirrels, were known to each other and belonged to a squirrel breeding association where they met regularly. Another fatal case occurred in a zoo keeper in Germany, with the virus being found in a Prevost’s Squirrel in the collection. The whole history of the appearance and evolution of the virus has been investigated by studying the molecular epidemiology, together with the activities of the individual keepers and the movement of animals between breeders and from the breeders to private keepers and zoos. Current evidence indicates that a Prevost’s Squirrel was responsible for the primary introduction of the virus.</p><p>Prevost’s Squirrels, a beautifully marked species, were commonly available from animal dealers in the 20th century. I have seen them for sale recently in UK and several zoos breed them. I do hope they are all tested, since the fate for those keepers who have caught VSBV-1 has been dire. Fortunately, there have been no cases of human-human infection reported. I do wonder if there have been unreported cases of encephalitis of unknown aetiology from keepers of other species of <i>Callosciurus</i>. For example, In Hong Kong, <i><a href="https://zoologyweblog.blogspot.com/2021/01/pallass-squirrel-in-hong-kong-feral.html" target="_blank">Pallas’s Squirrel</a></i> (<i>C. erythraeus</i>) was a popular pet, kept in small cages in small flats and, therefore, in close proximity to the human inhabitants.</p><p>Since the discovery of VSBV-1 there has been considerable work in Europe to follow-up these findings with surveys of wild squirrels, zoo workers and the wider human population.</p><p>Returning to my Finlayson’s Squirrel of the early 1960s, it was an unsatisfactory addition for the simple reason is that it only appeared from its sleeping box at first light for a short run around its capacious outdoor cage and to eat. Except on rare occasions it stayed in its box for the rest of the day, summer and winter, for years. Only much later did I realise how it could survive on one meal a day. In the wild they are known to eat fruit, seeds, bark, buds, flowers and sap, all of low energy density. I gave the sort of mixture suitable for rabbits or rats: biscuit, wheat, maize, oats, sunflower seed and the like plus fruit like apples and vitamin supplements. All the former have 4-5 times the energy density of tropical fruits. It did not need to emerge for more food and it never or hardly ever did so even in the depths of winter. By contrast, I have seen photographs of tame Finlayson’s Squirrels reared in captivity.</p><p>All I remember from around that time is that the Finlayson’s Squirrels were advertised as white. Only much later did I find that not all Finlayson’s Squirrels are white. My guess is that importers wanted white squirrels and that whoever was exporting them from Thailand sorted them accordingly. </p><p>As far as I can recall Finlayson’s Squirrels were only imported into Britain for a relatively short period from around 1960. However, they have now become naturalised as a result of releases/escapes in Singapore, in two areas of Italy from the 1980s, and the Philippines. Genetic evidence suggests they are also present amongst the introduced squirrels of Japan. In short, there is great concern in those regions that they have become a problem as an ‘invasive species’.</p><p><br /></p><p>* https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/16682018</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cadar D, Allendorf V, Schulze V, Ulrich RG, Schlottau K, Ebinger A, Hoffmann B, Hoffmann D, Rubbenstroth D, Ismer G, Kibbey C, Marthaler A, Rissland J, Leypoldt F, Stangel M, Schmidt-Chanasit J, Conraths FJ, Beer M, Homeier-Bachmann T, Tappe D. 2021. Introduction and spread of variegated squirrel bornavirus 1 (VSBV-1) between exotic squirrels and spill-over infections to humans in Germany. Emerging Microbes & Infections 10 doi: 10.1080/22221751.2021.1902752 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Finlayson G. 1826. The Mission to Siam, and Hué the Capital of Cochin China in the Years 1821-2. London: John Murray.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Francis CM. 2008. A Guide to the Mammals of Southeast Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Horsfield T. 1824. Zoological Researches in Java and the Neighbouring Islands. London.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mazzamuto MV, Wauters LA, Koprowski JL. 2021. Exotic pet trade as a cause of biological Invasions: the case of tree squirrels of the genus Callosciurus. Biolog 10, 1046. doi:10.3390/ biology10101046 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Public Health England. 2019. Human Animal Infections and Risk Surveillance group. Qualitative assessment of the risk that variegated squirrel bornavirus 1 presents to the UK population. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d3976dded915d0d0a3e0e68/Squirrel_Bornavirus_Risk_Assessment.pdf</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Wilson DE, Lacher TE, Mittermeier RA. 2016. Handbook of Mammals of the World. Volume 6. Lagomorphs and Rodents I. Barcelona: Lynx Edicions.</span></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-71301681728784353632024-01-03T16:53:00.000+00:002024-01-03T16:53:26.320+00:00On that Cassowary in Timbuctu<p>I was looking for something else when I came across this letter in <i>The Times</i> of 14 October 1892.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG7SoorwTMw_VgQ6hlhn-_Jq2_b5u0sGEFRjP46AYr6R7nydr8U2piZR4xMlfgtaG5q08ARoJgm8PGZri-fKcMn-5Wp-GSpvz7DZBJzistwOmRHiCK1DjvSiGJFMDlqJnqau99kKB26By-53EHcVCP9iYfNEvb7j__eFeY_zqjmH7dLVEmXFB2caWg5KI/s1524/Screenshot%202024-01-03%20at%2016.42.08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1012" data-original-width="1524" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG7SoorwTMw_VgQ6hlhn-_Jq2_b5u0sGEFRjP46AYr6R7nydr8U2piZR4xMlfgtaG5q08ARoJgm8PGZri-fKcMn-5Wp-GSpvz7DZBJzistwOmRHiCK1DjvSiGJFMDlqJnqau99kKB26By-53EHcVCP9iYfNEvb7j__eFeY_zqjmH7dLVEmXFB2caWg5KI/w424-h281/Screenshot%202024-01-03%20at%2016.42.08.png" width="424" /></a></div><br /><p>It came after several days of correspondence following the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. A relation indicated that Tennyson was the author (with slightly different words) to complement his poem entitled Timbuctu which won him Cambridge’s Chancellor’s Prize in 1829 at the age of 20. Others then wrote in to suggest different words and different authors for the quatrain which had become well known during the reign of Victoria. An account can be found <a href="https://nonsenselit.com/2009/08/22/cassowary-vs-missionary/" target="_blank">here</a>. These days I see the poem is attributed to Samuel Wilberforce but I have seen no actual evidence that he was indeed the author of the zoologically nonsense verse. But how delicious to see Huxley on the topic, given his famous put down of ‘Soapy Sam’ (the ‘unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous’ Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce) in the debate on Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i> at Oxford in 1860.</p><p>And even more entertaining* for me since I was one of many successors to an office once held by both Huxley and Wilberforce.</p><p><br /></p><p>*and yet even more so was a website describing the Oxford debate as between Wilberforce and Aldous Huxley. Oh well, only a couple of generations out.</p><p> </p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-55761346971020895842023-12-19T17:23:00.000+00:002023-12-19T17:23:46.104+00:00Newting in Hong Kong<p>Nearly three weeks ago we had a walk through Tai Po Kau Nature Reserve in Hong Kong. On our usual walk (starting on the Yellow and ending on the Red routes) we were noticing the damage to the paths and rails done by the massive downpour caused by the remnants of Typhoon Haikui in September. Essentially that route goes up one side of a hillstream and down the other. We noticed a side pond off the main stream. A quick look showed a Hong Kong Newt (<i>Paramesotriton hongkongensis</i>) on a submerged branch. And then we realised there were around eight newts in there, clambering in the roots and branches, resting on the gravel or walking across the floor. It is in the winter months that the newts can be seen in the streams and ponds. They breed there, laying their eggs singly on submerged plants, and it may be that is what some of the newts we could see were doing. I fact, is that an egg I can see half-encirciled by the tail in the first photograph?</p><p>Totally hidden was their ventral coloration of orange-red blotches. Previously, including our time in Hong Kong they were collected and sold on roadside goldfish stalls (which is how we obtained the one I photographed in 1966). They are now protected.</p><p>Curious passers by were told what we were doing staring with binoculars into the bottom of pond as the newts went about being newts. Could we have started newting as a trendy fashion?. ‘Birding is soo over’, said AJP, as we carried on and the mixed flocks of birds failed to materialise.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xQUDODbDw2q7Mmh_ir7sOu_Z3fdsDqesjvJqBrWwd96xtNdkL7JAiIW2ULGwPo1MKnqZ8BAMA2MbIax0VXPWOuxLgN1329SIGMRR_-HZCT0LLuLgdJNRSxT1rPUIsXbTd6XbKx93KJM6GVSXQWluPWPy4UwTZFurrENSXZsys8e7JE5x6-EaC4uyljU/s5184/IMG_1241-Edit-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xQUDODbDw2q7Mmh_ir7sOu_Z3fdsDqesjvJqBrWwd96xtNdkL7JAiIW2ULGwPo1MKnqZ8BAMA2MbIax0VXPWOuxLgN1329SIGMRR_-HZCT0LLuLgdJNRSxT1rPUIsXbTd6XbKx93KJM6GVSXQWluPWPy4UwTZFurrENSXZsys8e7JE5x6-EaC4uyljU/w640-h480/IMG_1241-Edit-Edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6ZSCyw-N1D-2Ks1PgEWmNIHUZeflqVdke0SsVdvlLOjELK7xfTOVfNF2hWKFsyo8aANfTvT_wQrN_41OuiKNaPavrv2QLkZ-amZV8lEFnxEqrVIngBI026qWSuqur4gmTiSsC4xZjr8d_dqgtTd5j0MLPg1S-Dd8EHDXnF6PmyXCPsZIHBKRgZsgTBQ/s5184/IMG_1246-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX6ZSCyw-N1D-2Ks1PgEWmNIHUZeflqVdke0SsVdvlLOjELK7xfTOVfNF2hWKFsyo8aANfTvT_wQrN_41OuiKNaPavrv2QLkZ-amZV8lEFnxEqrVIngBI026qWSuqur4gmTiSsC4xZjr8d_dqgtTd5j0MLPg1S-Dd8EHDXnF6PmyXCPsZIHBKRgZsgTBQ/w640-h480/IMG_1246-Edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1iwky5lVaUD-rridEf3HcMM3NvI1hS2un6ZgY4lsMu1trgAn_dvdSi8FXcldDU73ZE02OsqYUx0by0f8YjYpux34Oqdw-6FL8-wzePEuMcFYL7490jZL7QesOWNJGy9z3aTv11eCXfx2_cQTdh9KlXVgagXQaX2yF4_SuRssUkwzS1EMmPVOmZmC7hL4/s5184/IMG_1255-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1iwky5lVaUD-rridEf3HcMM3NvI1hS2un6ZgY4lsMu1trgAn_dvdSi8FXcldDU73ZE02OsqYUx0by0f8YjYpux34Oqdw-6FL8-wzePEuMcFYL7490jZL7QesOWNJGy9z3aTv11eCXfx2_cQTdh9KlXVgagXQaX2yF4_SuRssUkwzS1EMmPVOmZmC7hL4/w640-h480/IMG_1255-Edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzgyBN-Q1RwrTAlDh_SyX8JHM3YkJvYk_MJYvwbY_PeYFLl7FuHXL2_SlCn35j0mCZSZPB0GcUcfk-3ZEZkvOqHfKSzpDdBIZFGMEjQtYimhUmjG8RQYD65Yw6BM_KsNFdjzhR9yBPrJPonmWn8X-mV88_BbtNcRa7jCZziisN5qtCBD8DnnlHIMA7LWI/s5184/IMG_1259-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzgyBN-Q1RwrTAlDh_SyX8JHM3YkJvYk_MJYvwbY_PeYFLl7FuHXL2_SlCn35j0mCZSZPB0GcUcfk-3ZEZkvOqHfKSzpDdBIZFGMEjQtYimhUmjG8RQYD65Yw6BM_KsNFdjzhR9yBPrJPonmWn8X-mV88_BbtNcRa7jCZziisN5qtCBD8DnnlHIMA7LWI/w640-h480/IMG_1259-Edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg73NOYf2QwpzCEkCYtaxr5xAP6wfJaA29bRiHm3mBnoZpDRYUEwjAQXg6bsHoIr6PEtAr2T-LoEoxF-BcAXVsC8FZpF4-Ih0X5Ze5tSoM7f7ZYglXZbmp2RL5XV-u0gHYABVRZoL4rbf4kCIBjYcHnUzEun8NTxGJlqItvQXrDhAuucXKwZKNojNgxYyk/s5184/IMG_1261-Edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3888" data-original-width="5184" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg73NOYf2QwpzCEkCYtaxr5xAP6wfJaA29bRiHm3mBnoZpDRYUEwjAQXg6bsHoIr6PEtAr2T-LoEoxF-BcAXVsC8FZpF4-Ih0X5Ze5tSoM7f7ZYglXZbmp2RL5XV-u0gHYABVRZoL4rbf4kCIBjYcHnUzEun8NTxGJlqItvQXrDhAuucXKwZKNojNgxYyk/w640-h480/IMG_1261-Edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn33nIsN4uIFnlsXr2XXovdh6OTpIqw9qTvuFZJNftB8qk7IHOxWZLMPvDjNa58laL6P-_ow8kmVIMy69v1asmjP_WCcqoRrRIVQrCIpFZ9RijfN6jLtvA9L3ReI_okAVKnU9MSKKk1AbnuN5TwFwtFmfQdArfYTC7596Qk9BcexEC7dyltN7HrwCUEWQ/s2081/IMG_1241-Edit-Edit-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2081" data-original-width="1533" height="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn33nIsN4uIFnlsXr2XXovdh6OTpIqw9qTvuFZJNftB8qk7IHOxWZLMPvDjNa58laL6P-_ow8kmVIMy69v1asmjP_WCcqoRrRIVQrCIpFZ9RijfN6jLtvA9L3ReI_okAVKnU9MSKKk1AbnuN5TwFwtFmfQdArfYTC7596Qk9BcexEC7dyltN7HrwCUEWQ/w388-h526/IMG_1241-Edit-Edit-2.jpg" width="388" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Looks like a newt egg to me</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div>Finally one from 1966 to show the ventral coloration:<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb43SY2ptUb3hDkXa-mcpNaFu05fFQ6zm4iri_WofW1ej1v5lTed3jBsg9MHoc1URfmhI3M2oiPwvlsQk2fSswLAzdEi40FzVaWXIYgnhoNotNi9CcX7Ua1mYe5GrMAwNUICz5Ij7Ot9oW59AxYCD4BiYTV4nzu1TBPRJj02n_InapMMuVcid1QcM9c18/s2048/Peaker%20371.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1457" data-original-width="2048" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb43SY2ptUb3hDkXa-mcpNaFu05fFQ6zm4iri_WofW1ej1v5lTed3jBsg9MHoc1URfmhI3M2oiPwvlsQk2fSswLAzdEi40FzVaWXIYgnhoNotNi9CcX7Ua1mYe5GrMAwNUICz5Ij7Ot9oW59AxYCD4BiYTV4nzu1TBPRJj02n_InapMMuVcid1QcM9c18/w400-h285/Peaker%20371.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><br /><div><br /></div></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-66594029425581121522023-12-17T17:08:00.008+00:002023-12-17T17:18:47.295+00:00Manakins from Ecuador: a colour plate from 1969<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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 15th in the series.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">– – – – – – – – – –</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiPIliQZJDzLdqZD0ZyUmbGqS6rsy4Dir-AnaMlFq-m4moirceUlmTK7mQCajRJu4HNNAMl_R2wM6wLnbOcB9LO-0uNptzxNOSSObNbMHB12kIuyy8i4twA4HieWRuZaR9Ay5vETFGJfWig4teSKwP_H0BYh5KCYYpxXQBCAwvODojhT0y4nwALRFeEuw/s1987/Manakins.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1987" data-original-width="1409" height="632" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiPIliQZJDzLdqZD0ZyUmbGqS6rsy4Dir-AnaMlFq-m4moirceUlmTK7mQCajRJu4HNNAMl_R2wM6wLnbOcB9LO-0uNptzxNOSSObNbMHB12kIuyy8i4twA4HieWRuZaR9Ay5vETFGJfWig4teSKwP_H0BYh5KCYYpxXQBCAwvODojhT0y4nwALRFeEuw/w448-h632/Manakins.jpg" width="448" /></a></div><br /><p>The plate was the work of John Raymond Quinn (1938-2012). He was staff artist at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.</p><p>The article accompanying this plate was written by Jan Roger van Ooosten (1934-2005) who described his efforts to keep the two species of manakin in captivity after trapping them in Ecuador. An amateur aviculturalist he became director of Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle in 1971-1974 after working for Texaco. He developed a particular interest in Amazon parrots.</p><p>The Golden-headed manakin (now <i>Ceratopipra erythrocephala</i>) and Golden-winged Manakin (<i>Masius chrysopterus</i>), like the rest of the family, are known for their displays during lekking. We saw around five males of the former species in Guyana in 2006, making some effort at a display but not the full-blown spectacle.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Avicultural Magazine Vol 75, 1969 </span></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-9706876421032338762023-12-10T16:38:00.000+00:002023-12-10T16:38:39.230+00:00The Sex Ratio at Birth. A new reminder of who described the ‘rarer-sex effect’ in evolutionary biology: John Austin Cobb<p>Everybody knows it was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher" target="_blank">Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher</a> (1890 –1962) who explained the basis of the 1:1 sex ratio at birth. The account came from his book on natural selection written in 1930. If males are produced in excess then females become more desirable; if females are produced in excess then it pays for parents to produce males, all things being equal. Over time the sex ratio must settle at 1:1. What I will not deal with here are circumstances in which all other things are not equal and the sex ratio may be modified in some species between conception and birth.</p><p>Fisher’s explanation of the sex ratio, the ‘rarer-sex effect’ is a famous principle of evolutionary biology. Except it was not Fisher’s. Andy Gardner of the University of St Andrews has recently published reminders that the first person to get the explanation right was John Austin Cobb in 1914. Gardner has also demonstrated that Fisher knew of Cobb’s earlier work and quoted it in another publication but did not name Cobb in his 1930 book. In those days scientific books were far more personal commentaries on the state of play in a particular field rather than the annotated bibliographies that many have become. Fisher wrote his book in the manner of the time, as an advanced textbook, stating his views across the whole field. Cobb was not omitted by design or oversight for the simple reason that there are very few references to the work of others—or to Fisher himself—anywhere in the book.</p><p>That Cobb and not Fisher was responsible for the ‘rarer-sex effect’ was uncovered in the late 1990s by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._W._F._Edwards" target="_blank">A.W.F. Edwards</a> in Cambridge. However, major reviews and books published since then have continued to overlook Cobb, continuing to credit Fisher for the insight.</p><p>In his paper Cobb clearly lays out the argument:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>If we take the sex-ratio at birth it appears at first sight that the numbers of the sexes born will become equal. For if there are more born of one sex, say, the male, a female will have a greater chance of finding a mate than a male. There will be more matings, therefore, among the descendants of mothers of females than amongst the descendant of mothers of males. The mothers of females will therefore be better тергеsented in the third generation, and as their characteristic is assumed to be inherited, there will be a tendency for the sex-ratio to diminish until it reaches equality in numbers between the sexes at birth.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>But who was John Austin Cobb? Cobb was a man in that enviable category of ‘gentleman scientist’. He had sufficient money not to have to work for a living. Edwards and Gardner found something of Cobb and his life, and I have managed to add a little more but we only have an outline of his life and the papers he wrote but little else to explain how he became interested in statistics and the mathematical treatment of evolution and other matters.</p><p>John Austin Cobb was born in the village of Sheldwich, Kent on 27 November 1866, the son of a farmer. He was educated at Haileybury (1879-1884) taking the intermediate examination for admission as a solicitor in 1884. In January 1885 he matriculated in the University of London but there appears to be no indication that he completed his studies, nor of for how long he was a member of the university or the subjects he took. In 1889 he qualified as a solicitor. In 1891 he married Helen Isabel Marrs in Minneapolis. Why he had gone to the USA and what he did while there are not known but the family appeared to move between England and the USA for a time in the 1890s. For example, the first child was born in Surrey in 1892, the second in Minneapolis in 1896 and the third and fourth in Surrey in 1898 and 1899. From Minneapolis in 1896 he published a paper in <i>Nature</i>.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0hJ3xh7TAmud7Q64rScwbPq8x8-nBIJFYc8VrFO7mK3QF9OML77ipXa-FaW4eQ0aaauwy-srXJARaWnY8fq-19wm-hdEQ2shPIcgxnxRPXv7pCzgTWzdGj9Rih-Sbn4jRZ7Ui7qSxohh5XWzWOKDfXu6SRSvfGdL0D4W6fFieTIqsuRfANrcQ98Gh42o/s1264/a00038c8-316f-4288-afa7-d07a49117b94.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1264" data-original-width="752" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0hJ3xh7TAmud7Q64rScwbPq8x8-nBIJFYc8VrFO7mK3QF9OML77ipXa-FaW4eQ0aaauwy-srXJARaWnY8fq-19wm-hdEQ2shPIcgxnxRPXv7pCzgTWzdGj9Rih-Sbn4jRZ7Ui7qSxohh5XWzWOKDfXu6SRSvfGdL0D4W6fFieTIqsuRfANrcQ98Gh42o/w227-h382/a00038c8-316f-4288-afa7-d07a49117b94.jpeg" width="227" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Only photographs of John Austin Cobb<br />as a boy appear to be in circulation.<br />The one shown here taken in 1880<br />at the age of 14 is also in Gardner's paper</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The family lived at 108 Church Road, Richmond, including, in the 1901 Census, Cobb’s American mother-in-law. The house (which can be seen on Google Earth) is a substantial one, now divided into flats and he is shown as employing four domestic servants. He is shown in the 1901 and 1911 censuses as living on ‘private means’ which indicates he was not working for a living in any capacity.</p><p>I do not know whether Cobb ever worked. In the marriage certificate of one daughter he is described as ‘manufacturer (deceased)’ but since that was the occupation of the groom’s father, it is possible there was some confusion. In a translation from the German of his daughter’s death certificate he is described as a ‘barrister’, a misinterpretation of the word for lawyer in German.</p><p>John Austin Cobb died on 23 October 1920, aged 53, at ‘Hotel Messena, 11 Rue Bachaumont, France’ (an address in Paris). His address in London was given as Portland Hotel, Great Portland Street, formerly of Richmond.</p><p>Gardner lists the following publications by Cobb:</p><p>Cobb JA. 1896. Measurement of crabs. <i>Nature</i> 55, 155. doi:10.1038/055155b0 </p><p>Cobb JA. 1905. Halation. <i>Nature</i> 73, 54. doi:10.1038/073054c0 [an exploration of the phenomenon caused by light reflecting back through a film layer onto photographic emulsion, suggesting Cobb had an interest in photography.] </p><p>Cobb JA. 1908. The effect of errors of observation upon the correlation coefficient. <i>Biometrika</i> 6, 109 doi:10.2307/2331561 </p><p>Cobb JA. 1913. Human fertility. <i>Eugenics Review</i> 4, 379–382.</p><p>Cobb JA.. 1914. The problem of the sex-ratio. <i>Eugenics Review</i> 6, 157–163. </p><p>Cobb JA. 1914. Sex ratio. <i>Review of Reviews</i> 50, 128.</p><p>Cobb JA. 1914. The alleged inferiority of the first-born. <i>Eugenics Review</i> 5, 357-359. </p><p>Cobb became well-known in the eugenics world for his paper on differences in fertility (actually fecundity) between classes and its implications for future generations. It all made perfect sense but only if fecundity and intelligence were determined entirely genetically—the downfall of eugenics in most of its many manifestations. Poor Cobb would now have been ‘cancelled’ by the misguided zealots who bathe in wilful ignorance.</p><p>I have been unable to find any publications by Cobb after 1914. He suffered two family disasters around this time. His daughter, Sybil Josephine, died while at school in Dresden, Germany, in 1913, aged 14. His son, John Eldridge, an observer in 21 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, was killed near Ypres in 1917 when his aircraft suffered engine failure on take off.</p><p>Cobb had two other children. Mildred Isabel (1892-1981) married an American lawyer in England and then lived in the U.S.A. They had three daughters. Roland Marrs Cobb (1898-1948) was a Royal Navy officer who served at the Battle of Jutland; he retired as a Commander. He married in 1930 and had a son, Dudley Marrs Cobb in 1931.</p><p>There is a chance that more information on Cobb will emerge and shed light on how he acquired his interests and statistical expertise. In the latter respect, he impressed Karl Pearson, by his note showing how errors in <i>x</i> and <i>y</i> affect the correlation coefficient—a point I heard discussed at a symposium just before covid.</p><p>In conclusion, Andy Gardner writes highly of Cobb’s contributions to the ‘rarer-sex effect’. It is certainly time to recognise the seminal contributions of this unaffiliated gifted amateur of the early 20th century.</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Edwards AWF. 1997. The Galton Lecture: The Eugenics Society and the development of biometry. In Essays in the history of eugenics (ed. RA Peel), pp. 156–172. London: Galton Institute. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Edwards AWF. 1998. Natural selection and the sex ratio: Fisher’s sources. American Naturalist 151, 564–569 doi:10.1086/286141 </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Fisher RA. 1930. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection Oxford: Clarendon Press.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Gardner A. 2023. The rarer-sex effect. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378, 20210500. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0500</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Gardner A. 2023. R.A. Fisher on J.A. Cobb’s The Problem of the Sex Ratio. Notes and Records of the Royal Society doi:10.1098/rsnr.2023.0067 </span></p><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-73509388983150023532023-12-07T12:38:00.000+00:002023-12-07T12:38:02.202+00:00TADPOLE HUNTER by Arnold Cooke<p><i><b>Tadpole Hunter: A Personal History of Amphibian Conservation and Research</b></i> by Arnold Cooke. Lodon: Pelagic Publishing. 2023.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmu30A9pakN4PAmvzSk5AzIlzGqfUqLERPSIT6MCoceWYuqIWPNctEAae4OTTn4Eva9QtTPKLLDnqZjYvHSjjlPQwPR_h9S5OjjWByOc2hLLgqLJEvp6litPcX1yboXYie9QKptcUqtE9h8yRC9736yer_6KjfMzA0dRDSqrQUYZqmy3z8xeZ9Rgn5L0/s2725/M01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2725" data-original-width="1801" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidmu30A9pakN4PAmvzSk5AzIlzGqfUqLERPSIT6MCoceWYuqIWPNctEAae4OTTn4Eva9QtTPKLLDnqZjYvHSjjlPQwPR_h9S5OjjWByOc2hLLgqLJEvp6litPcX1yboXYie9QKptcUqtE9h8yRC9736yer_6KjfMzA0dRDSqrQUYZqmy3z8xeZ9Rgn5L0/w266-h403/M01.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><br /><p>I have enjoyed reading this book. Arnold Cooke describes his own work in studying amphibians and their conservation in the wild over the decades from the late 1960s. In doing so he draws in the people he has met and worked with on the way. He pioneered methods to study local amphibian populations and stuck at it in his spare time as he moved from job to job in Britain’s ever-shifting landscape of official conservation bodies and of his responsibilities for different species. His accounts of studies and their conclusions are well illustrated by graphs, tables, charts, maps and photographs.</p><p>His long-term monitoring, observations and conservation measures were started at a time when amphibian populations were in serious decline and while dealing with species like the Natterjack Toad which have particular requirements, most of his work was on the more common species that inhabit or did inhabit broad swathes of the country. And that is where my enjoyment of the book and admiration for the author was tinged by sadness. He describes ponds and wet areas of eastern England as study sites that have simply disappeared or have become so overgrown and degraded that they no longer support populations of frogs, toads or newts; even habitats established for amphibian conservation and had thriving populations have since been neglected. The pressures of ‘development’ to house an increasing human population, rather than—but in some cases as well as—agricultural practices, are still causing loss of natural habitat. He found that the simple garden pond is an important resource in urban areas.</p><p>It is also clear that we still do not understand the ecophysiological factors that determine whether, for example, a Common Frog will choose to breed in a particular pond and what external factors determine the timing of egg laying. There are some clues in relation to temperature and rainfall but few definitive answers. One personal example is that until local yobs destroyed the lining of the pond in our front garden a few years ago, the healthy population of Common Frogs first produced eggs on or up to 2 days before 15 March for over 20 years despite the vagaries of the weather and possible changes in climate on the Ayrshire coast.</p><p>My reading was also tinged by anger at the changes which destroyed and balkanised institutions involved in understanding and conserving the natural environment. Arnold Cooke started work at Monks Wood Experimental Station in 1968: ‘There was a great deal of freedom afforded to scientists at Monks Wood in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s’. Subsequent reorganisations involving the splitting of research from practical conservation in the field were devastatingly bad for the environment, for science and the scientists involved. Arnold, whom I met while he was involved in research on eggshell thinning by pesticides in 1973, moved over to the Nature Conservancy side, the organisation given the job of practical conservation until further reorganisation, balkanisation and retitling.</p><p>Arnold Cooke touches on some of the difficulties that he observed between the individuals and organisations involved in the conservation of reptiles and amphibians in Britain during the 1970s and 80s. Interest and enthusiasm developed in some cases into zealotry and the personality clashes I saw from a distance while editing the <i>British Journal of Herpetology</i> (now the <i>Herpetological Journal</i>) in the late 1970s. He seems to have sailed through, possibly, as he says, as the only professional and official conservationist in the room, making friends and colleagues in the process.</p><p>The text, divided into case studies for particular species and particular sites, shows how knowledge and practical conservation the field have developed over the past 50-odd years—a valuable and important source for anybody entering the field as a professional or amateur. In addition, the extensive list of references provides a valuable resource for all those interested in the life of amphibians and their conservation.</p><p>Highly recommended.</p><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-246748452299901782023-11-16T15:19:00.003+00:002023-11-16T15:19:53.840+00:00A Daurian Redstart -Winter Visitor in Hong Kong<p>The Daurian Redstart (<i>Phoenicurus auroreus</i>) is a common winter visitor to Hong Kong. AJP photographed this one recenty on the island of Lantau. This is a male.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiom3uaaPjYclbcfgZqWMKo_7KwPcmvMsc3Losm4s4hYBsBkbT7VxvhMmBvgutk6QeYu_tSRrZz0V3gLCQp1ONViwwM7S4-w5s0UClX7-AzGY0QPQqL9Ca0WKaHfwanbDGsW6mezcha6EAvCWjqKz1PkMv7MlE5j6hxHsHGpFV_HSU9qWjEytgpopw4XIk/s960/Daurian.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="874" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiom3uaaPjYclbcfgZqWMKo_7KwPcmvMsc3Losm4s4hYBsBkbT7VxvhMmBvgutk6QeYu_tSRrZz0V3gLCQp1ONViwwM7S4-w5s0UClX7-AzGY0QPQqL9Ca0WKaHfwanbDGsW6mezcha6EAvCWjqKz1PkMv7MlE5j6hxHsHGpFV_HSU9qWjEytgpopw4XIk/w455-h500/Daurian.jpeg" width="455" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-36948020268193137542023-11-14T17:15:00.001+00:002023-11-14T17:15:24.637+00:00The Tawny Rajah in Hong Kong<p>AJP sent these photographs from Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago. The Tawny Rajah (<i>Charaxes bernardus</i>) is a large and fast flying butterfly. Uncommon in Hong Kong, he saw a number flitting around behind Pak Lap Wan beach on High Island. A female actually settled very close for a frame-filling photograph.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWAiRrT6tveK5TX3r7EDBMjuTZIpOocxz3MDZ1e6NxX3FBcPTnA9vZnMt1G5ke-agHF05J1S8fYKs8f4hoOtAiHSexVDzKAdxJ3uhfHz8PwbXWYIGvHqzEX_QSYeyi_Qyie_FDqGxBBAj3IPfLm_dry6Kgwvf1GaGDLiB-gqJaoEIQPm_NgXM2pWXZ1E/s4608/Tawny%20Rajah%201.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="4608" height="365" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLWAiRrT6tveK5TX3r7EDBMjuTZIpOocxz3MDZ1e6NxX3FBcPTnA9vZnMt1G5ke-agHF05J1S8fYKs8f4hoOtAiHSexVDzKAdxJ3uhfHz8PwbXWYIGvHqzEX_QSYeyi_Qyie_FDqGxBBAj3IPfLm_dry6Kgwvf1GaGDLiB-gqJaoEIQPm_NgXM2pWXZ1E/w487-h365/Tawny%20Rajah%201.jpeg" width="487" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphen16JWulsIIKKBRm10F6P13KYZ_kUDrR33GBwxia1xN6AZcK8tdWgx8p-rb4CMzQCVwI0k4Ygll40dqvJAlDEk1f9c9wD_bFOnpBjujbBHbGjK6hL37Uf4rIPr-e8N0SgYCUtkFBVxTmGdFHzsBll7QkHNd-KoaePldMwAzlkJzjqMC3uu5X-5AiMFXg/s3596/Tawny%20Rajah%202.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3213" data-original-width="3596" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphen16JWulsIIKKBRm10F6P13KYZ_kUDrR33GBwxia1xN6AZcK8tdWgx8p-rb4CMzQCVwI0k4Ygll40dqvJAlDEk1f9c9wD_bFOnpBjujbBHbGjK6hL37Uf4rIPr-e8N0SgYCUtkFBVxTmGdFHzsBll7QkHNd-KoaePldMwAzlkJzjqMC3uu5X-5AiMFXg/w486-h434/Tawny%20Rajah%202.JPG" width="486" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8039949873284259213.post-76633478836549106812023-11-13T17:38:00.001+00:002023-11-13T17:38:15.574+00:00Red-necked Keelback. A snake caught in the act of being venomous AND poisonous in Hong Kong<br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHbSXOim0Ihj1aY96yu6VklneYx7CVqiDReVpR9E_tR3oiUZBMKL2HDwfvRO8mlDjPeDYn6VTSfEr1-vpIv4qc575s8RYvksPStdQys7iOB2zZOHq3MkyIZtF3-XXqFCjzKg02oDDygoDiZIeFvdy0r9uWf3TMUWHmqz6oaYtUy_FycyPh6ekDE7iD3ZU/s1500/Red-necked%20Keelback.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1398" data-original-width="1500" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHbSXOim0Ihj1aY96yu6VklneYx7CVqiDReVpR9E_tR3oiUZBMKL2HDwfvRO8mlDjPeDYn6VTSfEr1-vpIv4qc575s8RYvksPStdQys7iOB2zZOHq3MkyIZtF3-XXqFCjzKg02oDDygoDiZIeFvdy0r9uWf3TMUWHmqz6oaYtUy_FycyPh6ekDE7iD3ZU/w422-h392/Red-necked%20Keelback.JPG" width="422" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p>My daughter-in-law and grand-daughter were treated to this sighting in the ladies’ lavatory of an outdoor play centre in the New Territories of Hong Kong last weekend. This a is a Red-necked Keelback, a snake that is both venomous and poisonous, but one which was thought to be neither for decades.</p><p>The species, now <i>Rhabdophis subminiatus</i>, was lumped in with our Grass Snake in the genus <i>Natrix</i> as harmless colubrid snakes. It is now known that it is a rear-fanged, venomous snake. There has been at least one fatality and a number of cases of severe haemorrhage after people have been bitten. Then it was discovered that the snake is not only venomous, it is, like all members of the genus, poisonous too. It accumulates toxins from the toads it eats and stores them in glands in the neck, the nuchal glands. Any attack or approach by a predator is met by the snake adopting one of three defensive posture in which the neck is pointed towards or moved to contact the predator. For example, the mouth is pointed downwards with the neck arched upwards.</p><p>The nuchal glands were discovered in a Japanese species of the genus by Nakamura in 1935. Nakamura also realised the glands, which lie just under the skin, produce something noxious. He was sprayed in the eye with yellow droplets as he decapitated the snake. He could not fail to notice the great pain. Others, previously, had noticed sore eyes after handling these snakes. <a href="https://zoologyweblog.blogspot.com/2020/11/herpetology-in-britain-trio-of-medical.html" target="_blank">Malcolm Smith</a> (1875-1958), after he retired as house physician to the royal household of Siam, studied the nuchal glands in a number of species. They are paired structures which in some species extend the length of the back as well as the neck.</p><p>The glands are unusual in that they have no lumen for secretion to accumulate nor a duct to the exterior. The yellow, foul-smelling secretion is formed by breakdown of the secretory cells and also contains lymphatic and pigment cells. It is easy to see how a predatory bird grasping the snake by the neck break the skin and be confronted, in effect, by toad toxins. However, breaking the skin and damaging the nuchal glands may not be the only way for the secretion to be released.</p><p>In 2011 Kevin Messenger, Daniel Rosenberg, Kevin Caldwell and William Sargent came across a Red-necked Keelback in a hole on the side of a water catchment on Lantau island in Hong Kong. The snake after it had been caught, but not by the neck, arched its neck against a glove and then secretion began to ooze from the region of the nuchal glands. How, without ducts to the exterior this was accomplished is not known. Would contraction of the neck muscles suffice? Is there a myoepithelium surrounding the glands which might contract? Is there a mechanically weak pathway to the exterior for the secretion to reach the surface? What are the mechanisms providing defence against, and transport from the gut to the glands, of toad toxins? Much remains to be discovered about the Red-necked Keelback and others of its genus.</p><p>My grand-daughter was very lucky to see the scenario of killing, feeding and getting hold of defensive toxins. The toad, <i>Duttaphrynus melanostictus</i>, was not so lucky.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Messenger KR, Rosenberg D, Caldwell KK, Sargent WL. 2012. Rhabdophis subminiatus helleri (Red-necked Keelback). Defensive Behavior. Herpetological Review 43, 497.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mori A, Burghardt GM, Savitzky AH, Roberts KA, Hutchinson DA, Goris RC. 2012. Nuchal glands: a novel defensive system in snakes. Chemoecology 22, 187-198 DOI 10.1007/s00049-011-0086-2 </span></p><p> </p>Malcolm Peakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01499093362376605221noreply@blogger.com0