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Birds of Upper Canada
Introduction
Birds of Upper Canada has been transcribed and assembled from the known unpublished hand-written manuscripts of Charles Fothergill (1782-1840). Fothergill was born in Yorkshire, England. He emigrated to Canada in 1816. After a brief stay in Lower Canada (Quebec) he moved to Upper Canada (Ontario) in 1817 where he lived until his death in 1840.
Fothergill was a well-educated man with a strong interest in natural history. His great uncle was the well-known English medical doctor and botanical collector, John Fothergill (1712-80). John Fothergill had many contacts with American naturalists and maintained a major botanical garden at Upton Park, London. Charles had a passionate interest in birds from an early age. Unlike his American contemporaries, Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, Fothergill had an excellent knowledge of European birds. He brought to Canada his personal copy of Thomas Bewick's Two Volume British Birds with spines removed and blank pages added. There he wrote his own comments on each British species as well as those of other ornithologists. In a few cases Fothergill wrote comments about Canadian birds, also found in England, in his copy of Bewick.
Despite wealth and privilege, and holding important positions in his adopted country, Fothergill achieved mixed success in Upper Canada. Like many birders today his passion for birds was to dominate his life. Much has been written by others about Fothergill the businessman and political figure. This includes a PhD thesis by Paul Romney which barely mentions his interest in birds and natural history. Here I leave his writings on Canadian birds to speak to his impressive talent as a taxonomist and an ornithologist.
All known Fothergill bird descriptions and comments have been transcribed and assembled from the Charles Fothergill Manuscript Collection MS#140 housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. Fothergill planned to write an ambitious four-volume natural history of the British Empire. He prepared considerable artwork for these publications. These works have been largely lost. It is hoped that some day additional Fothergill manuscripts and his artwork it will be rediscovered. I am heartened by the recent discovery of the unpublished final two volumes of Louis Pierre Vieillot's hugely important North American ornithological work Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux de l'Amerique septentrionale. What little Fothergill natural history artwork that has been located can be found in the Fisher Library. Bird artwork found in this paper includes watercolours of Canadian birds found in his manuscripts, some European birds found in Canada that Fothergill likely painted in England, as well as a few hand-coloured woodblock images of North American birds found in his personal copy of Bewick.
The discovery of the unpublished Fothergill papers is largely due to the outstanding detective work of the late James Baillie, formerly Assistant Curator of Birds at the Royal Ontario Museum. Baillie understood the importance of Fothergill's legacy. Baillie's account of finding the Fothergill manuscripts can be found in the Canadian Historical Review 25:376-96. Baillie also wrote a manuscript on the life of Charles Fothergill. This work was never published. It can be found in the Baillie Manuscript Collection at the Fisher Library.
I am greatly indebted to my wife, Victoria Dickenson, who obtained a copy of Fothergill's McGillivray Manuscript while researching for her PhD in Canadian history at Carleton University in the early 1990s. On reading the McGillivray Manuscript in 1995, I, like Baillie, immediately realized its importance. Since that day I set out to transcribe the McGillivray Manuscript, and eventually all Fothergill's extensive bird and mammal writings.
Indeed, by 1998, with the McGillivray Manuscript transcribed, I took it to one of Canada's best known ornithologists, Earl Godfrey, former Curator of Ornithology at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Expecting encouragement my expectations were quickly dashed by his lack of interest. Earl Godfrey, author of Birds of Canada, expressed the view that all Fothergill's birds were well-known and now described better and in more detail. He saw little value in the historical context of Fothergill's writings. Clearly Dr Godfrey was a scientist with little interest in Canadian history. Initially discouraged, I dropped my research for over a year. Eventually, thinking of Jim Baillie's singular commitment to Fothergill, and Fothergill's importance to early Canadian ornithology, I knew I had to complete what I had started.
With the bird transcriptions mostly completed it became evident to me in those early days that I had no idea of assessing how important Fothergill's work was, or could have been, to early Canadian ornithology. Over the last two two decades I have attempted to find out. Along the way I came to understand that the field of early Canadian ornithology has been largely untouched by scholars. It is a field with great potential for future scientific and historical ornithological research.
I must confess, that as a Canadian birder, collector of historical bird artwork, and having read many books published about Wilson, Lewis and Clark and Audubon, I find the lack of published material on early Canadian ornithology an embarrassment. I am hoping that this work, and other papers that I have written and intend to write on Fothergill, and the other early pioneers of Canadian ornithology, will stimulate some genuine interest and research into our ornithological history.
The unpublished Fothergill manuscripts referenced in the text, on which Birds of Upper Canada is based, are as follows:
- M = McGillivray Manuscript
- C = Clendenan Manuscript
- B1 = Fothergill's margin comments in his copy of Thomas Bewick's British Birds, Volume 1
- B2: = Fothergill's margin comments in his copy of Thomas Bewick's British Birds, Volume 2
- SK: = Sketches Manuscript
- NHN = Natural History Notes Manuscript
For more details on these manuscripts and other reference material used in this paper please see the Bibliography.
Fothergill had a habit of writing long passages with minimal punctuation. For clarity I have taken the liberty of inserting paragraphs but otherwise the transcriptions are verbatim.
I have placed Fothergill's writings in the order of the AOU Checklist of North American Birds (7th Edition 1998) with 59th (2018) Supplement. Since 1995 there have been seemingly endless changes to the arrangement of families, and species within families. This has caused me considerable consternation and extra work over the last 20 years in arranging and re-arranging species in current AOU Checklist order. I can only hope that the past will not repeat itself!
Writings on each species have been assembled together with manuscript references and page numbers. I have made no attempt to edit this material. Unfortunately some of Fothergill's writings are not entirely legible, or using my print-outs at the time, too faint to read and transcribe. In such cases I have inserted what appears to be the words used or more often question marks. In places readers will see obvious errors. Where passages were too faint to read I have also inserted question marks to connect the text. For this I make no apology. As readers will soon,learn he volume of Fothergill's writings is immense, and what I have transcribed has taken more time than I care to remember!
A Table of Contents and a Taxonomic Index will provide easy access to the species accounts.
I have identified species and added scientific names and first describers. Numerous Fothergill descriptions were firsts for Canada, many more for Ontario, and in the singular case of the Philadelphia Vireo (Vireo philadelphicus) precedes the AOU attribution to John Cassin. While I understand that unpublished descriptions without type specimens do not merit consideration for first descriptions, I believe it is important for the historical record to find a way to honour Fothergill's place and importance in early Canadian, indeed early North American ornithological history. I humbly offer that a worthy recognition would be to change “philadelphicus” to “fothergillii”.
At the end of each species account I have included Canadian historical information on early descriptions of the species. Since research in early Canadian ornithology is virtually non-existent, I understand that the accuracy of this information is open to question. To provide a context for this I have examined all known ornithological material published and unpublished from Newfoundland to British Columbia and north to the arctic from Jacques Cartier (1534) to Confederation (1867).
Canada has a particularly rich ornithological history. Over the next few years I intend to edit the many papers I have already written and add them to the website on Fothergill, the early French naturalists, including Louis Pierre Vieillot, who visited Nova Scotia numerous times, as well as Joseph Banks, Thomas McCulloch, Audubon, Sir John Richardson, Archibald Hall, Thomas Wright Blakiston and many others.
Despite Fothergill's detailed descriptions, there were many difficult identifications in his bird manuscripts. By 2005, I had completed and assembled them in AOU Checklist order. For assistance I sought and received very helpful advice from Michel Gosselin of the Canadian Museum of Nature. These instances are noted. In my research I discovered that all of the original Fothergill bird descriptions were reviewed in the 1930s and 1940s by James Baillie of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). The Baillie Fothergill identifications and references appear in a 2,000 page manuscript, entitled “Ontario Ornithology” which Baillie and Snyder prepared for L.L. Snyder's Ontario Birds published in 1951. Baillie's identifications of Fothergill descriptions led to the addition of a few new species which I had misidentified. These instances are noted.
When the manuscript was finally assembled, and my research on early Canadian ornithology to Confederation mostly complete, I once more asked Michel Gosselin to review all the Fothergill descriptions to ensure overall accuracy. He has made many useful comments, including some questions about Baillie identifications, all of which I have noted in the text. I am profoundly grateful for his assistance.
While every effort has been made to provide accurate identifications, the sheer volume and detailed descriptions involved has probably still resulted in a few mis-identifications. I am entirely responsible for any factual errors.
Finally I must mention Fothergill's mammal writings which I have assembled in two separate documents entitled Quadrupeds of North America 1830 and Mammals of Canada 1840. One will see in Quadrupeds a strong organizational and scientific rigour missing in Fothergill's journal writings on birds. In Mammals one cannot help reaffirm Fothergill's strong interest in taxonomy as well as extensive interesting notes of species behavior in many of his observations. This is particularly interesting because, while there is occasionally important ecological information in Fothergill's bird writings, for the most part species behavior is largely absent.
No doubt the sheer volume of new bird species that Fothergill encountered, many which he thought at the time new to science, and his busy multi-faceted life, greatly limited his ability to spend the hours that Wilson and Audubon were able to devote to field study. It is evident to me that had Fothergill prepared a manuscript such as Birds of Upper Canada for publication one would have seen a similar approach and content evident in Quadrupeds. In the circumstances I feel that, if I did not add in the proper scientific information in Birds, it would discredit his legacy.
In closing there is no doubt in my mind that Fothergill's contribution to 19th century is unique in Canadian ornithology because of its variety and depth of detail. I also think that Birds of upper Canada is a unique piece of early 19th century Canadiana. Ornithologically it is second in importance only to Sir John Richardson's Canadian masterwork, his volume on Birds in Fauna Boreali Americana.