Early Nature Artists In Florida by Chris Fasolino

Author:Chris Fasolino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2021-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE MYSTERY SOLVED?

There is one unavoidable discrepancy between the description of the painted vulture and the appearance of the king vulture, and that is in the color of the tail. The king vulture has a black tail; Bartram describes the painted vulture as having a white tail merely tipped with black or dark brown. There is no phase in the king vulture’s life when the tail color would match Bartram’s description. However, the rest of the description matches well—even to the most florid colors and their unusual combination. As Sherlock Holmes might say, the odds are enormously against this being a coincidence.

As to the difference in the color of the tail, there are several possible explanations. Perhaps Bartram saw king vultures in Florida and described them with great accuracy, save for one mistake—the color of the tail. This was the view of Francis Harper. On the other hand, perhaps Bartram’s painted vultures were a regional variation of the king vulture with a difference in coloring. This would make the painted vulture a subspecies of the king vulture or perhaps a closely related distinct species. These arguments are made by Fry and Snyder, with their preference being for the latter classification.

All of these theories presuppose that the population of these vultures in Florida became extinct at some point following Bartram’s visit. After all, if you wish to see a king vulture today, you must visit a place like the Brevard Zoo. And since there have been no reported sightings of this bird in Florida by anyone other than Bartram—a fact that has added considerably to the intrigue surrounding his account—the extinction presumably took place much closer to his time than to ours.

It must be remembered Florida was very much a wilderness when Bartram was here and remained so for some time afterward. The next major expedition in Florida (especially in terms of ornithology) was, actually, that of our next artist—John James Audubon. And Audubon came some fifty years after Bartram. That half-century is the likely timeline for the extinction to have taken place; it is absurd to think that Audubon would have missed a bird as large and colorful as the painted vulture.

Why the bird would have become extinct in Florida is unknown, but then again, so is the size of the Florida population to begin with. Bartram describes them as gathering in the vicinity of fires to feed on reptiles that had been unable to escape from the blaze—familiar vulture behavior—but he does not necessarily indicate that the birds were numerous in Florida. The population might always have been small, dwindling and then vanishing sometime between the visits of Bartram and Audubon.

Questions remain, but it does seem clear that Bartram’s lost painted vulture was connected to the still-living king vulture. Whether Bartram was observing a regional variation, a subspecies or a closely related species, his writings provide evidence that the exotic king vulture of Latin America had a counterpart in Florida during the eighteenth century. Thus the “inviting and singular

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.