Black Tinamou background story

Abstract

In a recent issue of The Auk: Ornithological Advances, four South American researchers reported new ecological information, including video and sound recordings, for the northern subspecies of Black Tinamou (Tinamus osgoodi hershkovitzi), an elusive bird with a disjunct range on the lower montane slopes of the eastern Andes (Negret et al. 2015). As one of the editors of The Book of Eggs (Hauber 2014), this new article jumped out at me for a couple of reasons. First, although the book included images of the egg of the Black Tinamou, we reported that almost nothing was known about the breeding and reproductive behavior of the species; in a perfect example of a sudden shift in scientific data, this has now changed. Second, I became curious about the subspecies’ name, since I had worked for mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in the early 1980s. The Book of Eggs features eggs primarily from the collection of the Field Museum. As far as we know, the Black Tinamou eggs photographed for the book are the only set in any museum. They were collected in the early 1950s from the Marcapata Valley near Cuzco, Peru, by Celestino Kalinowski (Traylor 1952), a Peruvian naturalist and taxidermist who had a long association with the museum. But the Field Museum has other strong links with this tinamou species, and they read like a Who’s Who of zoology department history. Tinamus osgoodi was described in 1949 by H. Boardman Conover (Conover 1949) from specimens also collected by Kalinowski. An engineer turned ornithologist, Conover was associated with the museum from 1920 until his death in 1950. He specialized in ‘‘game birds’’ (defined by him to include Tinamiformes, Anseriformes, Galliformes, Gruiformes, Charadriiformes, and Columbiformes); his collection of more than 18,000 specimens is now housed at the Field Museum. He named the new tinamou species T. osgoodi after his late friend and mentor Wilfred H. Osgood, for many years chief curator of the museum’s department of zoology. In 1951, Phil Hershkovitz, a Field Museum assistant curator of mammals (and my former colleague), collected three specimens of tinamou from the eastern Andes in Colombia. Phil doesn’t mention the birds in his field notes, which focus on mice and primates; he may have shot them for dinner, since he tended to stay out in the field for months or even years at a time. The specimens were brought back to Chicago, where they were described by associate bird curator Emmet R. Blake as a new race of T. osgoodi and given the subspecific epithet hershkovitzi. Sightings of T. o. hershkovitzi have increased recently in Colombia and Ecuador (Gomes and Kirwan 2014), but the Field Museum collection still may contain the largest number of specimens of the species, including what appear at this time to be the only three museum specimens of T. o. hershkovitzi. The Peruvian locale from which the eggs were collected indicates that they are the southern subspecies T. o. osgoodi. The Ecuadoran sightings may indicate that the range of the Black Tinamou is more extensive than has been thought. But a recent analysis suggests that the two subspecies may deserve to be treated as different species (Negret and Laverde-R. 2015).