The Undying Error
The Undying Error.
No more typical example of the persistence of error could he selected than that furnished by the publication and subsequent citation of the alleged nesting of the Black Cloud Swift (Cypseloides niger borealis) at Seattle. An ardent amateur, Mr. Matt H. Gormley, a member of a now defunct organization then known as "The Young Naturalists", found a bulky nest containing five white eggs in a warehouse on the Seattle waterfront, and reported it, with due pomp and circumstantiality, as the nest of the long-sought Black Swift. Appearing as it did in the venerated columns of the Auk (vol. v, 1888, pp. 424-425), the report met with ready acceptance and was copied far and wide.
Of course those whose natures are tinged with a wholesome skepticism soon made out that the nest in question belonged, not to the dashing tyrant of the skies, but to the more prosaic Purple Martin (Progne subis). So far as its author was concerned the mistake, albeit somewhat jejune, was a not altogether unnatural one, because the Martin as a resident of Washington was then very little known. Mr. Gormley at length discovered his own error and was so bored by it, and by the chaffing to which it subjected him, that the subiect became tabu among his friends; but so far as known to the writer, he never took the trouble to make a public correction.
Major Bendire correctly diagnosed the case, upon a visit to Seattle in May, 1894, and published his opinion in the authoritative "Life Histories" (vol. II, 1895, p. 177). Yet here we have it in Mrs. Bailey’s "Handbook of Birds of the Western United States" (Second Edition, Revised, 1904, p. 229): "Nest.-On cliffs or about buildings. One described by M. H. Gormley on the cornice of a building made of straws, chips, and horsehair, lined with green leaves and paper. Eggs: 5, white." Davie admits the record to his "Nests and Eggs of North American Birds", 3rd and 4th editions, but throws it out of the final 5th edition. Coues avoids the trap, as also does Reed in "North American Birds’ Eggs"; but miserabile dictu! we find this in Ridgway’s masterpiece ("Birds of North and Middle America", Part v, p. 703), under the generic heading Nephoecetes: "Nidification.-Nest in recesses among rocks or about buildings, composed of straw, feathers, leaves, bits of paper, etc., loosely put together and not held together by salivary secretion"--the pitiful undying error of the Gormley tradition.
One even suspects that this ancient virus has poisoned so classical a fount as the Cambridge Natural History. In Volume IX, "Birds",. by A. H. Evans, page 423, we find the following (abridged) paragraph: "In Cypseloides * * * C. niger of North America * * * C. rutilus and C. brunneitorques. The genus ranges to Peru and Brazil. The nest, placed in holes in houses and so forth, is made of stmw, leaves and rubbish; the eggs are four or five". But Ridgway expressly says of Cypseloides (from which he has separated our Black Swift under the name Nephoecetes) : “Nest of C. brunneitorques composed of moss, shallow and compact, placed in dark culverts, near water (probably in rocky banks or cliffs also." No; the animus of the Evans paragraph is Gormley (op. cit. ad. naus.). We shall never see the last of it!
