5:59 a.m. 55 degrees, wind W 0 mph. Sky: mostly fog occluded; here and there a hint of clouds, windrows like Jones Beach sand, cotton balls, and striations; colorless sunrise. Sisaphyan mist rolls up the valley softening the crest of the woodland but goes nowhere, arrested by a ridge. A seemingly endless run of vapor. A dream state, soft and safe, the perfect complement to a quiet Sunday morning. Except for the mechanical songs of crickets and katydids and the splashing of pines down through the maple leaves, I'm reminded of last April's soundscape, quarantined silence. Everybody's at home; engines turned off. A 6:30 churchbell punctuates the stillness. After a hundred days of near-endless repetition, even red-eyed vireos have nothing to say. Permanent streams: I need a stethoscope to hear the upper; lower, a discarded shell of a stream. A recently metamorphosed pickerel frog—an inch long, spotted, a champion hopper—visited my garden yesterday, just an egg in the fast, cold lower stream last May, a froglet that fortunately transformed before the summer drought. Wetlands: visibility less than a hundred yards; a shallow bowl of fog that spills over the rim; oozes up the valley; crosses the road. Pond: socked in; north end erased.
Birds: three pewees whistle summer away; young red-breasted nuthatches tuning up; blue jays out there . . . somewhere. A solitary chickadee, here a dee, there a dee. Most of the visible bird action in the front yard: four song sparrows in the garden, gluttons for coriander; a trio of hummingbirds; mourning doves under the feeders, goldfinches on top. A yellow-billed cuckoo, a knocking series of ku, ku, ku, refuses to swallow its voice; hopefully, it's consuming webworms, whose tenements hang like laundry on the black walnut.
The taxonomic or scientific name of a species (aka binomial nomenclature) reveals evolutionary relationships within the great family of life. Animals (or plants) included within the same genus are closely related, derived from the same common ancestor. For example, the winter wren (Troglodytes hiemalis) and the house wren (T. aedon) are more closely related to each other than to the Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus). A wide-ranging bird like the red-tailed hawk may divide into several subspecies, or distinct races, and include a third identifying name (Buteo jamaicensis costaricensis). Thus, the Costa Rican redtail differs somewhat from the redtail found in Vermont (B. j. borealis).
Sometimes, a scientific name reveals something in addition to evolutionary affinity. In 1984, James (Skip) Lazelle Jr identified a new subspecies of the marsh rabbit on Lower Florida Keys. Lazelle named the rabbit Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, in honor of Hugh Hefner, in recognition of the generous support of his research by the Playboy Corporation. Barak Obama's name graces no less than fourteen organisms. Among them: a diving beetle, two fish; a bee; and a bird (Nystalus obamai), the western striated puffbird, a small but heavy-billed insect pirate from sweltering Western Amazonia.
Recently, an unconfirmed species of caecilian, a primitive, legless amphibian, was discovered in the jungles of Panama. The wormlike amphibian, four inches long, shiny and slippery, uses tentacles to find food and has an edible skin, which young caecilians peel off and eat. To fund future conservation projects, the Rainforest Trust auctioned off the naming rights, purchased by EnviroBuild, a Tampa contractor, for $25,000.
The new name: Dermophis donaldtrumpi.