Since these literally deathless lines were written I’ve seen many thousands of Audubon warblers and there is no need to remind myself that they have yellow throats. Yet the warbler ditty is so strongly fixed in my mind that whenever I hear the word Audubon, I silently and automatically add “a yellow.”
Will I, in the next thirty or forty years, be freed from “Audubon a yellow?” It seems unlikely. Getting rid of a mnemonic device requires much more ingenuity than acquiring it — more, in fact, than I have currently in stock. The sight of an egret, a bittern or a heron may inspire other people to compose works of art or to commune with nature, but I find myself repeating the words branded on my cortex:
On the theory that sharing a load lightens it, I would like to pass this couplet along to all new birdwatchers to help them remember that bitterns have naturally short necks, egrets and herons fly with their necks folded, and, by inference of omission, ibises and cranes fly with their necks extended.
Sharing may well be the only answer to my problem. What I need is a dozen or so people going around muttering to themselves:
“It’s Nutty to have a dirty neck.” Or perhaps, “It is common to be half-bald, but poor Forster is all bald.” Or, “Wred wrump, wrock wren.”
The last is self-explanatory. The first refers to the fact that the Nuttall woodpecker has a greater expanse of black around the neck than has his almost-twin, the ladder-backed woodpecker. The second applies to terns in fall plumage when the common tern loses half his black head covering and the Forster’s tern all of it. It helps to remember this if you know, as I do, a man called Forster who is as bald as a tern egg.
“Black-capped Hutton rang his solitary bell.” That sentence could be the beginning of a somber English mystery that takes place in an isolated country house. Actually it’s a list of the vireos which have wing bars, the black-capped, Hutton, solitary and Bell.
I find this an easy way to distinguish the downy from the hairy woodpecker when I don’t want to put my trust in the difference in size.
is not going to help you identify a cuckoo, but you might use it as a conversational gambit some day when you’re desperate. Another along the same line goes:
With this tucked in a corner of your mind, if you should ever find yourself on an uninhabited sea island and detect the odor of musk, you’ll be able to deduce that there must be a shearwater, fulmar or petrel somewhere upwind. Conversely, if you don’t know what musk smells like and want to find out, go look for an uninhabited island with shearwaters, fulmars, or petrels on it. In either case you are prepared. If you’d rather just forget the whole thing, do so. I can’t.
The preceding memory aids were based on rhyme, alliteration, plays on words and allusions. Once in a while I’ve managed to use a combination of methods, as in:
This is just another way of saying that Gambel’s is the only North American quail which has a black belly button, a piece of information not eagerly sought after, perhaps, but useful to a new birder caught in quail country without a field guide — possibly the same birder who goes to the uninhabited sea island to locate a shearwater, fulmar or petrel in order to find out what musk smells like.
For the sake of the rhyme it would naturally be much better if white-tailed ptarmigans sounded like dogs or hogs. But they don’t, so this has to stand as an example of a mnemonic device, or mnemo, that works because of its defect: it has no rhyme where one is expected.
Sometimes I must resort to a mnemo when, in spite of repeated studying, I find it impossible to distinguish between two birds of similar appearance. This was the case when Ken and I decided to take a trip to southern Arizona in May of 1965. Our plans were along the same lines as those of other birding trips but a little more elaborate. All available books were consulted, checklists were sent for, and Mary Hyland lent me the journal she kept when she and Tom covered the area. From these various sources I made a list divided into two sections: birds I’d see simply by keeping my eyes open, and birds I’d be likely to find only with patience, luck and good weather.
In the latter group were two species of sparrow, Cassin’s and Botteri’s, found in the same arid habitat and almost identical in appearance. The situation demanded a mnemo. I hereby share it with any reader who might find himself confronted by two look-alike sparrows in a patch of sacaton grass in the southwestern desert:
While most of my mnemos are applied to birds, I’ve also used them on birdwatchers. I recall my initial meeting, at a Western Audubon Conference at Asilomar, with that delightful pair of birders, Captain Elgin B. Hurlbert, U.S.N. Ret., and his wife. The name, which was uncommon enough, was complicated by the fact that Captain Hurlbert was called by a most unusual nickname. Drastic measures were called for. I wrote on my mnemo pad: “If the ox whinnies, hurl it, Bert.” The picture of the great beast flying through the air is so vivid in my mind that I know I’ll never be able to avoid seeing it every time I meet Oxy Hurlbert and his wife, Wini.
Mnemos are of special importance in the case of pelagic birds because the watcher is already at a disadvantage trying to focus on a moving object from a moving object. If he has to stop and look up a picture in a field guide, he is doubling the disadvantage. It is much easier to use a mnemo, one that will call your attention immediately to that aspect of the bird which distinguishes him from all others.
The murrelets are a case in point. Three species are seen in local waters in the winter, Xantus’, the marbled and the ancient. They appear mainly in pairs or small groups, floating in the furrows between waves or skimming along the surface or diving into the water in alarm at the sight of a boat. All are towhee-sized and colored dark above and white below. I had no trouble with the first two species: