7 – Flash money

“In January 2018, 21-year-old Rodolfo Correa Peña was on his way to church in his hometown of San Pedro de los Milagros, a town of about 28 000 residents. Correa Peña was in college, commuting about two hours each day on a rickety bus into Medellín to complete his degree in agricultural engineering. He was new to birding, but even he had heard about the fabled Antioquia brush finch (which was collected in 1971 but not seen since).

That day, as usual, he walked on the dirt road into town, with high banks topped with trees. But it was not a usual day—Correa Peña spotted the glint of a rust-colored head. “The Virgin has emerged,” he recalled thinking.

The “discovery was particularly surprising given where it happened: in a highly developed area skirted by dairy farms, with few trees. It’s incredible—we spent so much time walking around [looking for the bird], and it was right there in the vegetable plot,” Chaparro Herrera said at one of several annual get-togethers of Colombia’s birders.

That excerpt is from To save a nearly extinct bird, Columbians are rethinking one of their biggest economic engines by Alexandra Ossola, writing in the online news site Quartz. As she points out, the Columbian avifauna contains over 2,000 species. In the Western Palearctic we have 1,200 but what if there are species here hiding in plain sight, down in the vegetable plot?

Sometimes over a glass of beer someone says, “If you were reincarnated what you want to come back as?”

“Me? A resident of Hokkaido in the far north of Japan please.”

Seeing the locals nip out onto the frozen lake first thing in the morning on a skidoo, cut a hole in the ice and fish out breakfast seemed so very civilised. Homes that were perfectly warm and comfortable but very simple… that’s when you realise that you haven’t quite got things right yourself. Then there are the eagles.

I went there with Dick Forsman… As fully grown men we were not supposed to get giddy with excitement but the thought of seeing White-tailed Haliaeetus albicilla and Steller’s Sea Eagles H pelagicus had totally inebriated us. The beauty of the monochrome trees behind the ice-covered lake, snow drifting down, and a White-tailed Eagle passing by is beyond my skill as a writer to convey. Fortunately, Dick’s photographs captured this beautifully.

This article isn’t about eagles. It’s about owls. Nor is it about beauty but the science of taxonomy, classifying birds into families, and exciting stuff like discovering and naming new birds to science. Taxonomists are the people that are charged with that task.

Some European taxonomists are attached to state museums or universities but bird taxonomy, it seems to me, has always been the preserve of the semi-amateur ornithologist and keen birder and most would agree that the number of professional taxonomists has declined.

Few are paid to study bird taxonomy and often they will receive a grant to study and classify insects or snails for four days a week and then spend a day a week looking at birds. Some can be looking at the genetics of cancer during the week and then fitting in their bird research into spare time. I don’t understand how they get grants. I do know however that often there isn’t even enough money to cover the basic lab fees and that I have helped out here and there.

After all, that’s how we work too. Mo and I co-founded Lush and run it with the other founders, a dedicated group of passionate individuals. We make money, pay our tax and then help out and pay ‘citizen funding’ where appropriate.

Arnoud is a taxonomist, trained by the eminent Karel Voous. Before coming under his influence, we were building a data set of Western Palearctic birds and now he has slowly guided the Sound Approach towards analysis of sounds in search for species previously missed.

Perhaps I have not noticed a golden age of publicly funded taxonomic bird research. I certainly thought that British amateur ornithologists who funded others to travel the world looking for new species of bird had died out during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Years ago, when Arnoud and I started writing together he made it clear that there were to be “no revs and lords”. From that instruction I took it that he didn’t want long rambling stories about Reverends Bruce, Bulwer or Lady Amhurst. That’s all very well but returning to the theme of reincarnation it now appears that I am probably just a reiteration of Victorian philanthropist and naturalist Henry Seebohm, and Arnoud is responsible for these traits emerging.

Seebohm and I were both born in July (my birthday is 21^st of July if you would like to make a note)… he manufactured steel in Sheffield… I manufacture cosmetics in Poole. Seebohm visited Holland, Greece, Asia Minor, Scandinavia, Germany and Siberia to carry out ornithological study, and subsequently published his findings. I have managed to visit most of these regions, North America and Japan. But when it comes to other scarier places I sent others… Ah, so did he. The eponymous Seebohm’s Wheatear Oenanthe seebohmi, was found by Charles Dixon in the province of Constantine, Algeria. Charles, who is better known for describing the St Kilda Wren Nannus troglodytes hirtensis and writing the first proper theoretical book on the migration of birds, named the bird after Seebohm, who had sent him there for collecting purposes.

OK, as I have mentioned before (but perhaps not in this detail), I share Seebohm’s collecting bug. With my Sound Approach colleagues, Magnus, Arnoud, Killian and Dick, we have collected 72,341 sound recordings fully documented in a database, the fourth largest collection of wild bird recordings in the world (all digital and nearly all stereo) with 58,267 originals readily available on hard disk (‘rough cuts’), at least 6,000 edited and ready for publication, and 18,168 recordings made with SASS (Stereo Ambient Sampling System or binaural ‘as-if-you-were-there’ stereo). That’s 1,457 bird ‘species’ in the collection, c1,885 bird ‘taxa’ in archive (including subspecies & vocal types), and 1000s of photographs from Sound Approach trips. Seebohm’s huge collection of bird skins and eggs, especially waders, thrushes and Phylloscopus warblers, was donated to the Natural History Museum at Tring, England.

There is one part of him that I don’t have in me. In his book The Birds of Siberia he describes: “We stopped for an hour at Churvinski Ostroff and had a short stroll on shore armed with walking stick guns. My companion shot a Tree Sparrow and I a small spotted woodpecker out of its hole in a tree. We also started a Three-toed Woodpecker out of its hole in a tree. I shot it when immediately the female came in and I secured her also. We whistled for our boatman who by our orders cut down the tree.”. That last action was to get the young and nest. When I came across a Three-toed Woodpecker myself, I sat silently on a stool sound-recording it until it flew in.

Killian had remembered that bloodthirsty episode from when he read Seebohm’s book on birds of Siberia. Being Irish, he also remembered: “Poland is evidently the Ireland of Russia. Both the Irish and the Poles seem crazy on the subject of home rule and in many other points show a similarity of temperament. They are both hot-blooded races endowed with a wonderful sense of humour, and an intolerable tolerance of dirt, disorder and management generally.“

Sometimes, I find things aren’t as I thought, or my efforts seem confounded. It was the same for Seebohm. In 1875, in Pechora, Komi, Russia, he collected and thought he had discovered Pechora Pipit Anthus gustavi but then found out that it had previously been described. He also named Radde’s Warbler Phylloscopus schwarzi after Gustav Radde who collected it in a vegetable patch (yes, really) in Tarrie Noir in the middle Amur. Confusingly Radde himself had already named it after Ludwig Schwarz, an astronomer and leader of his expedition, which is why half of Europe calls it Schwarz’s Warbler.

The strangest story connected to Seebohm is the one I read in Tim Birkhead’s The Wisdom of Birds, that in a paper on waders, Seebohm’s “perception” led him to suggest that “light was the evolutionary cause of migration rather than the cue that initiated it”. This in turn may have inspired the secret that in the age of caged birds led to canary Serinus breeder Reich manipulating the breeding cycle of nightingales Luscinia by keeping the birds at low light levels for an artificially extended winter so that they sung two months later. In this way he synchronised the nightingales’ song to the period when a young canary learns its song, producing canaries that sang all year like nightingales.

According to Barbara and Richard Mearns’ Biographies for Birdwatchers (1988), Seebohm’s “hard business-like character often antagonised other ornithologists”. Hmmm. I think that was probably a reference to an argument in Britain about the Latin names for birds. Michael Walters in his Concise History of Ornithology (2003) said “Curiously enough it was the steel manufacturer Henry Seebohm who managed to bring a breath of sanity to the warring bird men. With wealth behind him he devoted himself to his obsession Palearctic ornithology.” And Michael went on to say that “His most important contribution to ornithology may have been his forceful arguments in favour of the American trinominal system made in The Geographical Distribution of The Family Charadriidae (Seebohm 1887)”.

While we are talking about wealth: during our visit to Hokkaido, the northernmost large island of Japan, Blakiston’s Fish Owl Bubo blakistoni was being featured on Japanese bank notes. Henry Seebohm named this, the world’s largest and most majestic owl, after the English naturalist Thomas Blakiston, who collected the type specimen in Hakodate on Hokkaido in 1883 while working for him. Seebohm had a great interest in Japan and went on to write and publish The Birds of the Japanese Empire in 1890, a milestone in Japanese ornithology.

Recording sounds of all the owl species in the Western Palearctic for Undiscovered owls (2015), we found the first-ever ‘Brown’ Fish Owl Bubo (zeylonensis) semenowi nesting site in Turkey. At the time, in late spring 2009, only a handful of fish owl sightings were known for Turkey and, before we found the species, it was feared extinct. In the next couple of years, we recorded fish owl sounds not only in Turkey but also in Goa, India, gathering other people’s recordings from elsewhere in southern Asia as well. In our sound analysis the pale Turkish subspecies, semenowi, which has a patchy relict distribution in Turkey and Iran, was sufficiently different to the sounds from birds in the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia, to call it a species in its own right. In Undiscovered owls, we explained our conclusions with a little map of southern Asia, showing which taxa were likely to be species based on sounds. As this conclusion didn’t gain a lot of traction amongst the taxonomic community, we hoped for ‘genetics’ to back it up.

In the past 15 years, the field of genetics has been developing at an incredible pace, due at least in part to massive improvements in DNA sequencing technology. As an illustration, it cost 10s of millions and 12 years to sequence the first human genome. Today we can sequence one for $600 in a week.

DNA analyses are now readily used to discover hidden species. Before we found the owls, getting a DNA sample needed ‘fresh tissue’, like a drop of blood. But by the 2000s, technology had so much advanced that a feather would be enough. Bringing a bunch of feathers from near the Turkish nest, we expected to hear the verdict soon. That was too optimistic. Dutch scientist Peter de Knijff spent a lot of energy and time in his DNA lab but it was all too complicated as the genetic reference material was unreliable, coming mainly from ‘brown fish owls’ in zoos, i.e., birds of uncertain provenance.

Then, technology advanced further, at an amazing speed really, and it became possible routinely to collect DNA out of long-dead owl specimens in the Leiden museum and Tring. A huge step forward, as most specimens in these collections have labels with reliable information on where, when and by whom the bird was shot. Again, this needed some additional ground-breaking technology because all museum specimens of fish owls are so old that their DNA is tricky to extract, and it’s not taken from their feathers but from their toe-pads.

Lately, we have worked with taxonomist Martin Collinson, professor in genetics at Aberdeen University and our British bird DNA guru. Martin’s ‘day job’ is looking at how genetics work with eyes – trying to understand the gene defects that can lead to blindness. On his Twitter profile he describes himself as a mild-mannered scientist by day and crime fighting superhero at night. Martin has explained that he doesn’t do all the bird DNA work at night, although the sequence results do seem to come in overnight. However, his lab did sort out the 2016 Scilly Pale-legged Leaf Warbler P tenellipes at 2 am.

In my opinion Martin’s main superpower is with words as, in a review of my writing, he used the words “necessarily superficial” which wasn’t only an accurate description of the work but also of me… I am thinking it should go on my gravestone.

Dreaming about the possibility of finding species hiding in vegetable plots, Martin used his powers suggesting that such birds need the new acronym, SHIPS…Species Hiding In Plain Sight.

The Sound Approach and University of Aberdeen started to work together in 2017 to see what could be done when we combined investigation into a bird’s vocalisations and DNA. To help with the work we funded PhD student Thom Shannon.

In the end, Martin and Thom got a grip on it, testing most of the ‘brown fish owl’ specimens from southern Asia. A real challenge, as the age of the specimens indeed turned out to be a problem. They also found that DNA preserves better in smaller birds and suspect it’s because they dry faster after collection.

The results are shocking for anyone interested in owls. Not only is our fish owl taxonomy based on sounds confirmed, supporting species status for Turkish Fish Owl B semenowi, but they are also starting to assemble a totally different picture of each taxon’s distribution.

Investigating ‘Brown Fish Owl’ systematics has led to some surprising findings, for example that the genotype of Turkish Fish Owl Bubo semenowi is also found in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas, much further east than expected.

There is nothing in my research on Seebohm that tells me how much of his flash money was spent sponsoring his obsession. Perhaps, for the same money, Mo and I could have bought a new ‘Predator’ yacht from my local boat builders and moored it in Monaco… but that’s not really the kind of SHIPS we are looking for.