Excerpt from History of Montana Ornithology
Here we provide an overview of deceased ornithologists who made significant contributions to
our understanding of birds in Montana. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to write such
a history. Because many of the historical contributions are mentioned in the species accounts,
the content of this chapter is more biographical than ornithological. We focus on naturalists and
ornithologists of European descent, although we fully appreciate that many people who inhabited
the West before Europeans arrived had a detailed knowledge of birdlife. For example,
interviews with tribal elders in the mid-1900s revealed that the Salish and Blackfeet each had
names for about 100 species of birds (Schaeffer 1950, Weisel 1952). They undoubtedly
recognized many more but may not have created unique names for each one, or the names have
been lost. Interestingly, the Salish knew that ducks and Columbian Sharp-tailed Grouse were
much less numerous in the 1900s than in earlier times. Their name for the House Sparrow, a
species that was first documented in Montana in the 1890s, translates to “white man’s bird,”
clearly indicating that it was a recent arrival. Also of interest is the fact that the Blackfeet had a
name for the California Condor and recognized it as a rare visitor from the south that fed on
Bison (Bos bison) remains (Schaeffer 1951). This notion is consistent with the smattering of
19th-century ornithological reports of condors on the plains of Montana and Alberta (Fannin
1897, Snyder and Schmitt 2002).
1805-1812: Montana’s First Explorer-Naturalists
Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) was four months shy of his 31st birthday when the Corps of
Discovery entered what is now Montana in the spring of 1805. Lewis was the expedition’s
official naturalist, and from the details recorded in his journal, one could argue that he qualifies
as the first ornithologist to set foot in the state. William Clark (1770-1838) was a skilled
cartographer and co-leader but had no training as a naturalist; he recorded most of his natural
history observations after he had separated from Lewis for the return trip in 1806.
The chronology of Lewis and Clark’s presence in Montana is well known. After entering
Montana on 27 April 1805 the team continued up the Missouri, arriving at the mouth of the
Marias River (named by Lewis) on 2 June. Traveling ahead of the main party, Lewis saw the
Great Falls of the Missouri on 13 June. By late July, the group reached the Three Forks of the
Missouri, naming them the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers. They worked up the
Jefferson to the Beaverhead River and then traveled overland from the present site of Clark
Canyon Reservoir, crossing the continental divide at Lemhi Pass in mid-August. Heading north
down the Lemhi Valley, they eventually re-entered Montana near Lost Trail Pass and dropped
into the upper Bitterroot Valley, arriving at Traveler’s Rest near the mouth of Lolo Creek on 9
September. They exited Montana at Lolo Pass on 13 September, bound for the mouth of the
Columbia River. The expedition departed their winter home at Fort Clatsop, Oregon, on 23
March 1806, re-entered Montana at Lolo Pass on 29 June, and spent 30 June to 3 July at
Traveler’s Rest. Upon leaving Traveler’s Rest, the group split into two parties. Lewis headed up
the Blackfoot Valley to the continental divide and on to the Great Falls of the Missouri,
eventually retracing his route down the Missouri after a side trip up the Marias River. Clark
headed up the Bitterroot Valley and remained in Montana to reconnect with the Beaverhead
River, retracing his route down the Jefferson River to the Three Forks of the Missouri. From there, he headed east to Bozeman Pass, reaching the Yellowstone River near present-day
Livingston on 15 July. He arrived at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, about 6 km into North
Dakota from Montana, on 3 August. Lewis arrived there four days later and rejoined Clark
farther downriver on the Missouri on 12 August 1806.
Much of what is known about bird observations during the expedition was thoroughly
summarized by Ken Walcheck (1969, 1999), who confirms that Lewis, especially, was a capable
naturalist. For example, Lewis correctly deduced that Greater Sage-Grouse fed primarily on
sagebrush leaves and had a gizzard that was much less muscular than those of other galliforms.
His inspection of a seemingly lifeless Common Poorwill on a subfreezing day in North Dakota during the outward leg of the journey led him to speculate that the bird was “passing into a
dormant state.” Nearly 150 years later, Edmund Jaeger stunned the ornithological world with his
description and photographs of a poorwill hibernating in a rock crevice (Jaeger 1949). No
mention was made of Lewis’s observations, although Jaeger noted that the Hopis and Navajos
were aware that poorwills slept in rocks in winter.
Lewis and Clark identified more than 50 species of birds while in Montana. Six that Lewis
observed in 1805 were new to science, and thus would have been credited with a Montana type
locality, had specimens been obtained and the information published when Lewis returned to
civilization: Greater Sage-Grouse, Dusky [Blue] Grouse, Long-billed Curlew, Lewis’s
Woodpecker, Pinyon Jay, and Western Meadowlark. But alas, Lewis brought back no specimens
of these species from Montana, and the scientific content of his journals was not published until
1904, nearly 100 years after the expedition had returned (Thwaites 1904). The Pinyon Jay is the
only bird observed by Lewis and Clark whose type locality is in Montana, but it was described
by Prince Maximilian on the basis of a specimen he collected in 1833 (see below).
While Lewis and Clark worked their way up the Missouri in 1805, the British fur trader David
Thompson (1770-1857) was exploring the Peace River in what is now northern Alberta. He
crossed the continental divide into present-day British Columbia in 1807, exploring the
headwaters of the Columbia River and establishing a trading post near the source of the Kootenai
River (Thompson 1985). Thompson penetrated northwestern Montana several times between
1808 and 1812, making his first entry along the Kootenai River on 26 April 1808 after spending
the winter at his trading post (Thompson 1985). He also explored along the Flathead and Clark
Fork rivers, traveling as far south as present-day Missoula in 1812. Although not an
ornithologist, Thompson accurately described birds and other wildlife in his journals (Knowles
and Knowles 1995). We include him because he was the first person to record the behavior of
the American Dipper, producing a wonderful description of a bird he observed at Kootenai Falls
on 23 May 1810. Thompson wrote a lengthy narrative of his observations in the 1840s but died
at the age of 86 with the manuscript unpublished. His passage on the dipper went unnoticed until
his rediscovered narrative was published in 1916 (Tyrrell 1916). The American Dipper was
formally described in 1827 from a specimen taken in Mexico the previous year, and Montana
thus lost another type locality for a distinctive western bird.
1830-1843: Two Princes and a “King”
Knowledge about Montana’s birds did not advance in the 25 years after the Lewis and Clark
expedition. At least half a dozen groups of fur traders entered Montana between 1806 and 1825,
but they did not write about birds (Knowles and Knowles 1995). As it turned out, the first
scientist to work in the state also contributed nothing to the outside world about our birds.
Friedrich Paul von Wilhelm (1797-1860), Prince of Württemberg, was “the first bona fide
scientist to set foot in Montana” (Thompson 1985: 28). Prince Paul was well connected: Queen
Victoria was his second cousin, and Tsar Paul I of Russia was his uncle. Trained in botany,
zoology, and anatomy, and with a passion for natural history, he eschewed the life of a crowned
head and became an explorer.
Prince Paul made four expeditions to the United States between 1822 and 1857. He visited
Montana in the summer of 1830, traveling up the Missouri River to Three Forks and then down
the Yellowstone River to reconnect with the Missouri (Thompson 1985). He made vast
collections of plants and animals and took detailed notes on all that he saw. But he never
published the Montana portion of his journals, and his specimens were sold at auction soon after
he died. Prince Paul’s son placed his father’s journals and papers in the Royal State Library at
Stuttgart, where they resided unappreciated until a library archivist chanced upon them in 1928
(Thompson 1985). Still, however, they remained unpublished. The story came to a painful
conclusion when all of the Prince’s material was destroyed in a bombing raid on Stuttgart during
World War II.
The second Prince to explore Montana also was of German ancestry, and also was well trained in
botany and zoology. Maximilian Alexander Philipp (1782-1867), Prince of Wied, traveled up
the Missouri in 1833 accompanied by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer and German hunter and
taxidermist David Dreidoppel. They arrived at Fort Union near the present-day Montana/North
Dakota border on 24 June, departed there on 6 July, and arrived at Fort McKenzie at the mouth
of the Marias River on 9 August. Maximilian was a fervent ethnologist, and he spent
considerable time observing a group of Blackfeet Indians who were encamped around the fort.
Sometime during his stay, however, he managed to collect a Pinyon Jay, a species that Lewis had
observed along the Jefferson River on 1 August 1805. The Prince had originally planned to
continue up the Missouri and spend the winter in the mountains, but trouble with Indians
prompted him to leave Fort McKenzie on 14 September, and his party arrived at Fort Union two
weeks later.
Maximilian left Fort Union on 30 October and spent the winter with the Mandan Indians at Fort
Clark. He left his collection of specimens at Fort Union for later shipment downriver. The
collection was packed on the steamship Assiniboine the next summer, after Maximilian had
returned to Germany. Before the steamer reached St. Louis it caught fire, and Maximilian’s
specimens were destroyed (Thompson 1985). Fortunately, the Prince had taken his journals with
him, and in 1839 he published the first installment of a lengthy narrative entitled Reise in das
Innere Nord-America, which was illustrated with Bodmer’s wonderful aquatint engravings and
reprinted in English in 1843. The formal description of the Pinyon Jay appeared in 1841, and
Montana finally was credited with the type locality some 36 years after Lewis first wrote about
the bird in his journal. Maximilian thought the jay was so distinctive that he placed it in its own
genus, Gymnorhinus (meaning “naked nostrils”), a name that is still in use today. Maximilian
also discovered a new rodent while at Fort Union, the Olive-backed Pocket Mouse (Perognathus
fasciatus). He created the generic name Perognathus for the discovery, which, like the genus he
coined for the Pinyon Jay, remains in use today.
Few would argue with the notion that the most eminent ornithologist to tread on Montana soil
was John James Audubon (1785-1851). Although he saw much less of the terrain that would
become Montana than did his predecessors, his time was well spent, and he participated in the
discovery of several birds that others had overlooked. His colossal four-volume work of
handcolored plates, The Birds of America, appeared from 1827-1838; to this day it ranks among
the most valuable books in the world judging from recent auction prices (a copy sold for $5.6
million in 2005). Audubon’s desire to publish a companion work on mammals led to his
decision to visit the “Upper Missouri” to observe western specialties such as Black-tailed Prairie
Dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), Pronghorns (Antilocapra americana), and Bison, and to search
for new species.
Audubon traveled upriver on the steamer Omega, accompanied by Edward Harris (1799-1863), a
wealthy benefactor from New Jersey who helped fund the expedition; Isaac Sprague (1811-
1895), a painter from Massachusetts who illustrated the backgrounds for many of Audubon’s
mammal plates; John Bell (1812-1889), a famous taxidermist from New York City and a crack
shot; and Lewis Squires, Audubon’s neighbor from New York City who served as his secretary.
They arrived at Fort Union on 12 June 1843 and remained there until 16 August of that year,
making many trips to surrounding locales to hunt bison, explore, and collect specimens of
various animals. Audubon and Sprague spent much of their time at Fort Union sketching and
painting specimens obtained by Bell and Harris, who did the majority of the collecting. On
several occasions, however, Audubon managed to penetrate well into present-day Montana along
the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers (Thompson 1985, Marks and Nordhagen 2005).
Bell and Harris, apparently firing simultaneously, collected the first Sprague’s Pipit known to
science on 19 June. Five days later Sprague found a nest and collected the incubating female.
Both events occurred either within or very close to present-day Montana, but in the absence of
specific details on where the men were at the time, the type locality was assigned to “Old Fort
Union, North Dakota” (AOU 1931), which lies less than 300 m east of the Montana border. On
26 July, Bell discovered the Baird’s Sparrow when he shot three of them during a day of Bison
hunting (Bell 1843). Caught up in the excitement of the hunt, Audubon made no mention of the
birds in his journal (see Audubon 1897: 116), and Harris did not do so until 29 July (McDermott
1951). Like the Sprague’s Pipit, the type locality for Baird’s Sparrow was assigned to North
Dakota by the AOU. By piecing together information in the journals of Audubon, Bell, and
Harris, Marks and Nordhagen (2005) determined that Bell must have been well inside the border
of present-day Montana when he shot the birds on 26 July, and the type locality for Baird’s
Sparrow was revised to “eastern Montana near Old Fort Union.” Also during the expedition, but
well downriver from Fort Union, Bell and Harris collected the first specimens of the following
species that Audubon described after he returned home: Common Poorwill, Bell’s Vireo, Le
Conte’s Sparrow, and Western Meadowlark.
Copyright Notice: © 2008. Jeffrey S. Marks. All Rights Reserved.
For information contact Jeff Marks, Senior Author: 503-774-4783, jeff17_marks@msn.com