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Discussions and information on all Southern African Birds
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Flutterby
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Burchell

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William John Burchell (23 July 1781 – 23 March 1863)

Burchell's Coucal, Burchell's Courser, Burchell's Sandgrouse, Burchell's Starling

William John Burchell was an English explorer, naturalist, traveller, artist, and author. His thousands of plant specimens, as well as field journals from his South American expedition, are held by Kew Gardens, and his insect collection by the Oxford University Museum. He was born in Fulham, London, the son of Matthew Burchell, botanist and owner of Fulham Nursery, and his wife. His father owned nine and a half acres of land adjacent to the gardens of Fulham Palace. Burchell served a botanical apprenticeship at Kew and was elected F.L.S. (Fellow of the Linnaen Society) in 1803. At about this time, he fell in love with Lucia Green of Fulham, but faced strong disapproval from his parents when he broached the idea of an engagement.

On 7 August 1805, aged 24, Burchell set sail for St. Helena aboard the East Indiaman Northumberland intending to set up there as a merchant with a partner from London, William Balcombe (1779-1829). After a year of trading, Burchell did not want to continue and dissolved the partnership. Three months later he accepted a position as schoolmaster on the island and later as official botanist.

In 1810 he sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa on the recommendation of Gen. J.W. Janssens to explore and to add to his botanical collection. Burchell's intended wife had jilted him for the captain of the boat taking her to St. Helena to join him.

He landed at Table Bay on 26 November 1810, after stormy weather had prevented a landing for 13 days. Burchell set about planning an expedition into the interior and he left Cape Town in June 1811. Burchell travelled in South Africa between 1811 through 1815, collecting over 50,000 specimens, and covering more than 7000 km, much over unexplored terrain. He described his journey in Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, a two-volume work appearing in 1822 and 1824. (It was reprinted in 1967 by C. Struik of Cape Town.) He is believed to have planned a third volume, since the second ends long before he completed his journey. On 25 August 1815 he sailed from Cape Town with 48 crates of specimens aboard the vessel Kate, calling at St. Helena and reaching Fulham on 11 November 1815. Given his experience and knowledge of South Africa, in 1819 Burchell was closely questioned by a select committee of the British House of Commons about the suitability of the area for emigration. The 1820 Settlers left from England a year later.

He spent time cataloguing and processing his specimens, and raising funds for his next expedition. Burchell travelled in Brazil between 1825 and 1830, again collecting a large number of specimens, including more than 20,000 insects. The journals covering his Brazil expedition are missing, as are his diaries relating to his later travels. His field note books, detailing his plant collections, are held in the collection of Kew Gardens. Historians have used them to reconstruct the latter part of his trip.

Burchell's extensive African collections included plants, animal skins, skeletons, insects, seeds, bulbs and fish. After his death, his plant specimens, drawings and manuscripts, both South African and Brazilian, were presented by his sister, Anna Burchell, to Kew and the insects to Oxford University Museum. He is known for the copious and accurate notes he made to accompany every collected specimen, detailing habit and habitat, as well as the numerous drawings and paintings of landscapes, portraits, costumes, people, animals and plants.

Burchell died in Fulham in 1863, ending his own life by hanging himself in a small outhouse in his garden, after an unsuccessful suicide by shooting. He is buried near his home at All Saints Church, Fulham.

Other species:
Burchell's zebra, Eciton burchellii (army ant), Burchellia bubalina (pomegranate), Burchell's Sand Lizard, White rhinoceros (for which Burchell was the first to give a scientific name and is also known, although less-commonly, as Burchell's rhinoceros).

Sources:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/201 ... -john.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_John_Burchell


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Verreaux

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Jules Pierre Verreaux (24 August 1807 – 7 September 1873)

Verreaux's Eagle-Owl, Verreaux's Eagle

Jules Verreaux was a French botanist and ornithologist and a professional collector of and trader in natural history specimens. He was the brother of Edouard Verreaux and nephew of Pierre Antoine Delalande.

Verreaux worked for the family business, Maison Verreaux, established in 1803 by his father, Jacques Philippe Verreaux, which was the earliest known company that dealt in objects of natural history. The company funded collection expeditions to various parts of the world. Maison Verreaux sold many specimens to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle to add to its collections.

He began his training in the family business at just 11 years of age, when he accompanied his uncle, naturalist Pierre Delalande, to the South African Cape. They stayed there exploring and collecting from 1818-1820. Among their achievements was the first hippopotamus skeleton acquired for the Paris Museum of Natural History. The animal was among a collection of more than 13,000 items, mostly plants, brought back by Delalande and his nephew. Back in Paris, Verreaux attended anatomy classes under zoologist Georges Cuvier, and began to show an aptitude for taxidermy.

Verreaux returned to South Africa in 1825, where he helped with the establishment of the South African Museum in Cape Town and made further collections. Finding that the bountiful specimens offered by the country were more than he could deal with by himself, he sent for his younger brother, Edouard, who came out to join him in 1830. Jules Verreaux was reputed to have set out on the trail of various already extinct and mythical creatures in the Cape, including the unicorn (with no success). The most notorious collection he made was the corpse of a native African, which was stolen from its grave and stuffed for display in the Verreaux shop. The body was later bought by a Spanish vet and taxidermist, Francesc Darder, in the 1880s, and remained on show at the Darder Museum until 1997. It was repatriated and buried in Gabarone, Botswana, in 2000. No stranger to scandal in his lifetime, while in South Africa Jules Verreaux was summoned to court after a woman claimed to have borne his illegitimate son. Verreaux had previously asked Elisabeth Greef to marry him, but revoked the proposal. The young mother then brought a suit against him, but lost the case as Verreaux was still a minor at the time of the proposal in 1827.

After Edouard delivered a consignment of collections back to Paris in 1831, he returned to South Africa with the third Verreaux brother, Alexis, in 1832. Alexis remained in South Africa for the rest of his life, while the course of Edouard and Jules' lives over the next decade is somewhat confused. Some sources say that both Edouard and Jules travelled to China and the Philippines and remained there until 1837, but it is also possible that Jules stayed in South Africa during this time. He seems to have returned to Paris in 1838, in which year a large number of his collections were lost in a shipwreck while being transported back to Paris.

Verreaux travelled to Australia in 1842 to collect plants and returned to France in 1851 with a natural history collection reported to contain 15,000 items. Back in Paris he concentrated on naming and arranging bird specimens and from 1862 was employed as assistant naturalist at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Around this time he created the diorama 'Arab Courier attacked by Lions', which won an award at the Exposition Universelle in 1869 and remains on display at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. The scene features stuffed Barbary lions (now extinct in the wild) and an Arab mannequin on a stuffed camel. Verreaux left France in 1870 at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, seeking refuge in England. He remained there for the remaining three years of his life.

Other species:
Verreaux's coua (cuckoo), Verreaux's sifaka (primate), Leptotila verreauxi (dove), Paradoxornis verreauxi (parrot), Verreaux's skink, Gekko verreauxi (gecko)

Sources:
http://plants.jstor.org/stable/10.5555/ ... m000055303
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verreaux


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Levaillant

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François Levaillant (6 August 1753 – 22 November 1824)

Levaillant's Cisticola, Levaillant's Cuckoo

François Levaillant (known later in life as Le Vaillant, "The Valiant") was a French author, explorer, naturalist, zoological collector, and noted ornithologist. He described many new species of birds based on a collection he made in Africa and several birds are named after him. He was among the first to use colour plates for illustrating birds and opposed the use of binomial nomenclature introduced by Linnaeus, preferring instead to use descriptive French names such as the bateleur (meaning "tight-rope walker") for the distinctive African eagle.

He was born in Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Guiana (Surinam), the son of a wealthy French merchant from Metz who had taken up a position as the French Consul. Growing up amid forests, he took an interest in the local fauna, shooting birds. When his father returned to Europe, in 1763, he studied natural history at Metz. He spent about two years in Germany and seven years in the Lorraine region. In 1777, a visit to Paris allowed him to examine cabinets of natural history and his interest in ornithology was greatly increased.

He was sent by Jacob Temminck through the Dutch East India Company to the Cape Province of South Africa in 1780, and collected specimens there until July 1784 when he made his way back to Holland. He made three journeys, one around Cape Town and Saldanha Bay (April to August 1781), one eastwards from the Cape (December 1781 to c. October 1782) and the third north of the Orange River and into Great Namaqualand (June 1783 to c. May 1784). During the first expedition his ship was attacked and sunk by the English leaving him with little more than a collecting gun and some money.

On his return to Europe he published Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique (1790, 2 vols.), and Second voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique (1796, 3 vols.), both of which were translated into several languages. He also published Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique (1796–1808, 6 vols.) with drawings by Jacques Barraband, Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis (1801–06), Histoire naturelle des cotingas et des todiers (1804) and Histoire naturelle des calaos (1804). Levaillant’s illustrations often influenced scientific names given by, among others, Vieillot, Stephens and Wilkes.

He was in Paris during the time of the French Revolution and was taken prisoner in 1793. He was however released after the overthrow of Robespierre after which he retired to an estate at La Noue, near Sézanne. Levaillant died in poverty in La Noue, near Sézanne (Marne). He married three times and had ten children, three of whom were illegitimate. He was a grand uncle of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Over 2,000 bird skins were sent to Jacob Temminck, who had financed the expedition, and these were later studied by his son Coenraad Jacob Temminck and included in the collection of the museum at Leiden. Other specimens were kept in the cabinet of Joan Raye. This collection was bought by the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in the late 1820s, which is now the Naturalis in Leiden.

As a traveller in Africa, Levaillant tended to describe the African people without prejudice. He shared Rousseau's idea of the "Noble savage" and condemnation of civilization. He described the beauty of Narina, a name that he used for a Khoekhoe woman in Gonaqua, after a flower, a somewhat unusual relationship that would become less socially acceptable in the later colonial period. He was infatuated with Narina, and she stopped painting her body with ochre and charcoal and lived with Levaillant for many days. When he left, he gave her many presents but she was said to have sunk into deep melancholia. He named the Narina trogon after her. She was a precursor to Sarah Baartman the Hottentot venus. He also perceived Dutch settlers in a negative way. A brave experimenter, he allowed a Hottentot medicine man to diagnose him when he fell ill and wrote of the successful treatment and cure. By travelling around southern Africa, observing the wild and reflecting upon himself and mankind, it has been claimed that Levaillant was the pioneer of a genre of travel writing while also inventing the idea of a wildlife "safari" although he did not use that word of Arabian origin.

Levaillant was opposed to the systematic nomenclature introduced by Carl Linnaeus and only gave French names to the species that he discovered. Some of these are still in use as common names, such as bateleur, the French word for tightrope walker, for the way the bird moves its wing. Other naturalists were left to assign binomial names to his new discoveries. He was among the first to consider the use of coloured plates of birds in his descriptions. He mounted his bird specimens, preserved with arsenic soap, in lifelike positions and the illustrators showed them in near realistic poses. He ensured that the fiscal shrike was shown along with an insect impaled on thorn. His descriptions of bird behaviour were also considered to be pioneering. He called the African fish eagle Vocifer for its distinctive and loud yelping calls made while throwing back its head. He was also the first to use musical annotation to describe bird song. A very careful observer of behaviour, he was among the first to notice that the rosy-faced lovebird (Agapornis roseicollis) nested within the nests of the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius). It has been suggested that he may well have been a major influence in the style and art of John James Audubon.

An analysis of Le Vaillant's collections made by Carl Sundevall in 1857 identified ten birds that could not be assigned definitely to any species, ten that were fabricated from multiple species and fifty species that could not have come from the Cape region as claimed.

Other species:
Levaillant's barbet, Levaillant's parrot, Levaillant's tchagra, Levaillant's woodpecker

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Levaillant


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Lilian

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Lilian Elizabeth Lutley Sclater (1875-1957)

Lilian's Lovebird

This colourful lovebird was first described in 1864. They were at first thought to be a Peach-faced sub-species and only in 1894 were they classified by Shelley as a distinct species. He named them Agapornis lilianae in favour of Miss Lilian Sclater. Not much is known about Lilian, other than she was a British naturalist and traveller in East Africa who accompanied her brother, William Lutley Sclater (a famous ornithologist), on an expedition to Nyasaland (now Malawi) were they collected specimens of the lovebird.

Sources:
http://www.birdstampsociety.org/features/l2/l2.html
http://birdingecotours.com/bird-of-the- ... -lovebird/
https://www.agapornidenclub.be/eng/?page_id=56


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Rudd

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Charles Dunell Rudd (1844 - 1916)

Rudd's Apalis, Rudd's Long-clawed Lark

Charles Rudd was an associate of Cecil John Rhodes, who obtained the concession in 1883 for Rhodes to go into Mashonaland to establish mining. In 1888 he co-founded the De Beers mining company with Rhodes. Rudd financed C.H.B. Grant to collect zoological specimens in southern Africa. In the first decade of the 20th century, publications of the Zoological Society of London carry many references to the Rudd's exploration of South Africa and descriptions of new species discovered by Captain Grant.

Rudd's African Molerat was named after Charles' wife, Corrie.

Sources:
https://books.google.co.za/books?id=I-k ... ds&f=false


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Hartlaub

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Karel Johan Gustav Hartlaub (8 November 1814 – 29 November 1900)

Hartlaub's Babbler, Hartlaub's Gull, Hartlaub's Spurfowl

Hartlaub was a German physician and ornithologist. He was born in Bremen, and studied at Bonn and Berlin before graduating in medicine at Göttingen. In 1840, he began to study and collect exotic birds, which he donated to the Bremen Natural History Museum. He described some of these species for the first time. In 1852, he set up a new journal with Jean Cabanis, the Journal für Ornithologie. With Otto Finsch, he wrote Beitrag zur Fauna Centralpolynesiens: Ornithologie der Viti-, Samoa und Tonga- Inseln. This 1867 work which has handcoloured lithographs was based on bird specimens collected by Eduard Heinrich Graeffe for Museum Godeffroy. A number of birds were named for him, including Hartlaub's bustard, Hartlaub's duck, and Hartlaub's gull.

Other species:
Hartlaub's bustard, Hartlaub's duck, Hartlaub's turaco

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Hartlaub


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Eleonora

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Eleonora d'Arborea (1347 – 1404)

Eleonora's Falcon

Eleonora d'Arborea was the juyghissa or judikessa ("female judge" or Queen in Sardinian language) of the Sardinian Kingdom of Arborea from 1383 to her death. She was one of the last, most powerful and significant Sardinian judges, as well as the island's most renowned heroine.

Born at Molins de Rei, Catalonia, she was the daughter of Marianus IV of Arborea and his wife Timbora de Rocabertí. The house of Arborea, whose power extended over about one third of Sardinia, was the only independent part of the island at that point in history. During her childhood, she was raised with a natural tendency towards war and weapons.

Marianus died in 1376 and was succeeded by his son Hugh III. In March 1383, there was a republican uprising in Arborea and Hugh was murdered. Eleonora defeated the rebels and became regent to her infant son Frederick, who as next male heir became the official monarch of Arborea. For the next four years Arborea was at war with the Crown of Aragon, which claimed the island. Under Eleonora, Arborea obtained almost all of the island during this war. After rallying Sardinian forces, Eleonora was able to negotiate a favourable treaty. Her eldest son Frederick died during this war and was succeeded by her younger son, Marianus V. An alliance was formed with Genoa which sustained Arborea's independence for another generation. She died in Oristano, Sardinia, in 1404.

Eleanor composed the Carta de Logu, a body of laws which came into force in April 1395. They were considered to be far in advance of the laws of other countries, the penalty for most crimes being a fine, and the property rights of women being preserved. These laws remained in force in Sardinia until the code issued by king Charles Felix in 1827.

Eleanor was particularly interested in ornithology. As a friend of birds, she was the first to legislate protection to a certain species of bird - the falcon. Based on this, the Eleonora's falcon (Falco eleonorae) was named after her.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Arborea


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Dickinson

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John Dickinson (1832 - 1863)

Dickinson's Kestrel

John Dickinson was a surgeon and naturalist associated with the Zambezi Expedition (1857–1864) under the leadership of Dr David Livingstone. He was credited with the discovery of a number of new species’ of birds. A raptor, Falco dickinsoni, is named after him.

Dickinson, born in the north east of England, trained in medicine in Newcastle upon Tyne. He volunteered to join the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and arrived as part of a second group to join Bishop Frederick Mackenzie, then attempting to build a Mission in Magomero, on the Shire Mountain Plateau in modern Malawi. Livingstone and Mackenzie had sown the seeds of disaster for the first UMCA venture while Dickinson was on his way to Central Africa, and his one meeting with Livingstone was trigger to a chain of events that threatened the whole expedition. Shortly after Dickinson’s arrival in Magomero, Bishop Mackenzie and a fellow traveller, Reverend Henry de Wint Burrup, died. Magomero was abandoned and the remaining missionaries retrenched in Chibisa’s Village on the River Shire. There, where Dickinson did most of his bird collecting, on 17 March 1863, he died of blackwater fever. Livingstone and Kirk were present at the burial. A marble cross at Chikwawa in Malawi is marker to the event that occurred on the day of Dr John Dickinson’s 32nd birthday.

Source:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... lCode=jmba


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Buller

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Walter Buller (9 October 1838 – 19 July 1906)

Buller's Albatross

Sir Walter Lawry Buller was a New Zealand lawyer, naturalist, and dominated in the field of New Zealand ornithology. His book, A History of the Birds of New Zealand, first published in 1873, was published as an enlarged version in 1888 and became a New Zealand classic.

Buller was born at the Wesleyan mission, Newark at Pakanae in the Hokianga, the son of a Cornish missionary, Rev. James Buller, who had helped convert the people of Tonga to Methodism. He was educated at Wesley College in Auckland. In 1854, he moved to Wellington with his parents, where he was befriended by the naturalist William John Swainson. In 1859 he was made Native Commissioner for the Southern Provinces. In 1871 he travelled to England and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. Three years later he returned to Wellington and practised law.

Buller was the author of A History of the Birds of New Zealand (1872–1873, 2nd ed. 1887–1888), with illustrations by John Gerrard Keulemans and Henrik Grönvold. In 1882 he produced the Manual of the Birds of New Zealand as a cheaper, popular alternative. In 1905, he published a two-volume Supplement to the History of the Birds of New Zealand, which brought the work up to date.

Buller was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George in 1875. In November 1886, he was promoted to Knight Commander. Buller helped establish the scientific display in the New Zealand Court at the World's Fair in Paris and was decorated with the Officer of the Legion of Honour by the President of France in November 1889.

He emigrated to England and died at Fleet in Hampshire on 19 July 1906.

Wellington playwright Nick Blake authored a play on Buller's life, Dr Buller's Birds, which had its debut at the 2006 NZ International Arts Festival.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Buller


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