746 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part 2 



November friendship developed. This episode marked the first faint 

 glimmering of what Coues (1903) called the "Bairdian Epoch." 



Three years later, on July 21, 1843, John G. Bell, a member of 

 Audubon's western exploring party, shot a male and female of a 

 strange sparrow near the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone 

 rivers. When Audubon (1844) described it, he named the species 

 "Baird's bunting" (Emberiza bairdii), in honor of his young friend. 



In her biography of her illustrious grandfather, Maria R. Audubon 

 (1897) includes a footnote by Elliott Coues which states: "Special 

 interest attaches to this case; for the bird was not only the first one 

 ever dedicated to Baird, but the last one named, described, and figured 

 by Audubon; and the plate of it completes the series of exactly 500 

 plates which the octavo edition of the 'Birds of America' contains." 



The strange history of Baird's sparrow for the 30 years following its 

 discovery is admirably traced in a monograph by three Winnipeg, 

 Manitoba, field naturalists, Bertram W. Cartwright, Terence M. 

 Shortt, and Robert D. Harris (1937). Their authoritative study of the 

 species is quoted often in this history, beginning with the account of 

 the rediscovery of Baird's bunting: 



Twenty-nine years elapsed before the species was again encountered by orni- 

 thologists and when it was re-discovered by Aiken, 11 miles east of Fontaine, El 

 Paso Co., Col., on October 9, 1872, he thought he had a new species. Ridgway 

 shared his views and named the bird Cenironyx ochrocephalus, the type specimen 

 being No. 162696 in the United States National Museum. It was later shown that 

 the difference between Audubon's Emberiza bairdii and Ridgeway's Centronyx 

 ochrocephalus was due to seasonal plumage changes. The following year Coues 

 found them breeding abundantly in North Dakota, collected about 75 specimens, 

 secured young birds and made many field observations. Coues supplied the 

 principal museums with specimens for the first time and in the fall of that year, 

 1873, Henshaw encountered them in great abundance in Arizona and also secured 

 many specimens. We see, then, that following a hiatus of nearly thirty years, in 

 one year — October, 1872, to October, 1873 — the breeding range, migration routes, 

 winter quarters, nest and eggs, plumage changes and juvenal plumage were all 

 more or less established. 



The above account gives no actual data on the nest and eggs of the 

 species, and credit for the first nesting record goes to Joel Asaph Allen 

 (1874), who found a nest with four eggs at Big Muddy Creek, N. Dak., 

 July 1, 1873. 



During its 29-year hiatus, A. bairdii may have been out of sight, 

 but it was certainly not out of mind, for at one time or other during 

 that period, ornithologists gave the bird four different generic or 

 subgeneric names. From Emberiza the name was changed to Cotur- 

 niculus in 1850, to Centronyx in 1858, and to its present name, Am- 

 modramus, in 1872. The British naturalist Sharpe referred to it as 

 Passerculus in 1888. In 1903 Coues gave the species two vernacular 

 names: "grass sparrow" and "Baird's savannah sparrow." 



