May, 1914 
119 
RESIDENT VERSUS VISITANT 
By WILLIAM LEON DAWSON 
W ITHIN ITS own precinct any science lias a right to define its own 
terms, or to discourse in a fashion understood only hy its votaries. 
But if a science is to become intelligible outside of its own realm, it 
must use, so far as it may, the language of common life ; it must recognize and 
defer to values already assigned. Zoological science, it seems to me, recently 
trespassed in its attempted perversion of the word visitant, and has obscured 
rather than clarified the vision of its own field. 
To be sure there was a real difficulty involved. Human society in its 
earlier evolution recognized only two relations, that of being at home, resi- 
dence, or that of being temporarily away, whether to commune ivith friends, 
to transact a piece of business, or to satisfy curiosity, visiting. The visitor 
ivas always understood to have a home, an abiding place, to which he ivoiild 
be presently returning. But animals, — or, to be specific, let us say birds, — 
viewed in this aspect are of three sorts: those which remain always in one 
locality, the land of their birth, residents, in the strict sense ; those which, hav- 
ing completed the duties of rearing a family, roam about, whether north or 
south or east or west, or up or down, visiting various places in tiirn or casu- 
ally, being here today or gone tomorrow or next week, visitors in the accom- 
modated sense in which an animal, not dependent upon friends nor seeking 
definite goals, may be said to visit. A third class, the class for which we seek 
definition, both resides and visits, having in fact two homes, or definite habit- 
ual ranges, and spending more or less time visiting on the way between them. 
This class has been called, not inappropriately, summer resident or winter 
resident, according to the particular local relation under consideration. Of 
late, however, there has been a great fad for calling this third class sum- 
mer or wdnter “visitants”, thus confusing them hopelessly with the second 
class defined above, from which it is of the utmost importance to distinguish 
them. So defined the Tufted Puffin and the Western Tanager are “summer 
visitants” of the islands along the coast of Washington. But so also are the 
Knot and the Wandering Tattler and the Heermann Gull and the California 
Brown Pelican. Which of these breeds there? The words which might be 
eloquent if they were chosen with understanding and in conformity ivith com- 
mon usage tell you nothing. You require to be told further that the Tufted 
Puffin breeds there, is, in fact, a summer resident. The Western Tanager 
also makes its home on these islands, becomes for the time, and in every sense 
susceptible of definition, a resident in summer. The Knot, while found in 
summer, is evidently away from home; he is on the way, whether north or 
south, a visitor, or better, a “migrant in summer”. The Heermann Gull, — 
what shall we say of him? Well, there is difficulty here in either ease. He 
is away from home (his breeding place being in Mexico) ; hence he is not a 
“summer resident”, if that term connotes a breeding bird. But he is a sum- 
mer resident if you understand by that that he has two homes, one of which 
is in the North. The California Brown Pelican, however, is strictly a summer 
visitor, in that he only occasionally appears, and then briefly, along the coast 
of Washington. 
We shall have some difficulty, confessedly, in naming this third class; but 
we are not without help or guidance, and that in common current usage. 
