William Swainson Remembered

COURTESY OF YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
When a bird bears a person’s name, I am always curious about who that person was. It is never the person who named the bird. Rather, it is a convention among scientists to name a new species for a colleague whom they respect. This is how birds in North America receive the names of people who never visited North America. Such is the case with William John Swainson (1789-1855), an Englishman who traveled to Brazil and emigrated to New Zealand, but never visited this continent. In his honor, we have Swainson’s hawk, Swainson’s thrush, and Swainson’s warbler.

Swainson was born in London into a family with roots in Lancashire, best known to Americans as the county that includes Liverpool. His father was John Timothy Swainson II, an amateur naturalist from a well-to-do family who married into even more money. Elizabeth Waldby of Yorkshire was a part of the extended Strickland family. Their eldest son had a speech impediment, which led to his leaving school at 14. He worked first in the customs service—which also employed his father and his father before him—then joined the British army and traveled to Malta and Sicily as part of the commissariat, which provided food and supplies to the troops. Like so many Brits, he contracted a chronic disease while abroad, and retired from the army at age 26.

The next year, 1816, he traveled to Brazil with Henry Koster, a Portugal-born Englishman who was even younger than Swainson. Like Swainson, Koster came from a family of customs careerists. He spent most of his short life in Pernambuco in northeast Brazil. Swainson did not spend much time ashore, as he found himself in the middle of separatist insurrection. But he did an impressive amount of natural history collecting and returned to England with, among other items, 760 bird skins.

Before traveling to Brazil, he joined the Linnean Society. Founded in 1788, it is the oldest extant learned society in Great Britain and dedicated to the study of natural history and classification. These subjects would be Swainson’s passion for the rest of his life. Unfortunately for his reputation, he became a prominent proponent of a rather mystical idea called the Quinarian system of biological classification. Largely devised by William Sharp McLeay (1792-1865), it suggested that all life forms could be arranged in circular groups of five circles each containing five subgroups (and so on). Swainson explained the importance of circles in classification as an attempt to find similar forms of order in different parts of

nature. He pointed to the circular procession of the planets around the sun as an argument for “the circular development of the variation of forms in the animal and the vegetable creation.”

According to Robert O’Hara of the Smithsonian Institution in a paper published in 1991:

Quinarian systematists believed that two sorts of relationship—affinity and analogy—obtained among taxa, that taxa existed in natural groups of five, that circular chains of affinity connected taxa within each group of five, and that relationships of analogy obtained among taxa occupying corresponding positions in different circles of affinity.

McLeay’s system was a rebellion against the prevailing tendency for classification systems to be represented as linear, which he considered to be artificial.

While Swainson made a misstep in his choice of allegiances in the theoretical realm, he was also a gifted artist. Between 1820 and 1839 he produced several of volumes describing and illustrating flora and fauna. He was a pioneer in the use of lithography for this purpose.

The technique was invented in 1796 in Germany and color lithography was developed by the early 19th century. An image was drawn on limestone (later metal) with a water-repellent substance and then the rest of the surface was treated with acid that made it attractive to water but repelled printer’s ink. When ink was applied to the stone it covered only the image. When paper was laid on the stone and sent through a press, the image was transferred to the paper.

Swainson collaborated with Scottish naturalist and explorer John Richardson (1787-1865) to produce Fauna Boreali-Americana (1829-1837). Richardson traveled throughout northern Canada on collecting expeditions. These and other volumes were distributed to subscribers in installments, which kept a steady flow of payments coming in.

In spite of his good reputation as natural history illustrator, his devotion to the Quinarian system ruined him as a scientist. As it happened, it was the geographical system of Hugh Edwin Strickland, a distant cousin of his on his mother’s side, that discredited the quinarian system and went on to serve as the basis for modern classification based on evolution. Both McLeay and Swainson left England under a cloud, McLeay emigrating to Australia. In New Zealand, Swainson became active in the natural history circles but his attempts at plant classification there were not accepted. He tended to be an excessive splitter, for example, finding 1520 species and varieties of eucalyptus alone.

John Richardson collected the first Swainson’s hawk in Saskatchewan in 1827. Swainson illustrated it and named it Buteo vulgaris, thinking it was the same species as the common buzzard of Europe. In 1838

Lucien Bonaparte realized it was a different species and renamed it Buteo swainsoni for its first illustrator. Nonetheless, he based his description of the type specimen on a painting by John James Audubon.

Swainson’s thrush was originally put in Turdus (with the robins), but in 1840 was reassigned to Catharus by Thomas Nuttall. The “olive-backed” group of subspecies includes C. ustulatus swainsoni.

Swainson’s warbler (Limnothlypis swainsonii) was first described in South Carolina by Audubon in 1835 from a specimen collected by John Bachman the previous year.

William Swainson died, aged 66, at Fern Grove in the Hutt, across the bay from Wellington, his reputation as a plant classifier very low, but still well regarded for his artwork.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot. Contact him at [email protected].