Small enhancement on stilesi (1 Viewer)

Mostly known as F. Gary Stiles as in the key and mentioned as author e.g. here or here I think his full correct name is Frank Garfield (Gary) Stiles as e.g. here and here or here (or maybe today even Frank Garfield Stiles Hurd as here or here). And here as Frank Garfield Stiles III.

Hi Ph. D thesis: Food supply and the annual cycle of the Anna Hummingbird. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles. 239 pp. . 1971

His father was Frank G. Stiles Jr. so he was born as a 'III'. His mother was Aileen Hurd.
https://archive.org/stream/brownalumnimonth373brow/brownalumnimonth373brow_djvu.txt .

Well done, Martin! And Mark.

You guys just saved me some time. :t: I had him, only as "F. Gary Stiles", in my list of forthcoming names to check, a little bit deeper.

Now I suddenly got Frank Garfield "Gary" Stiles (III), commemorated in Stiles's Tapaculo Scytalopus stilesi CUERVO et al. 2005 a k a "stilestapakul" (in Swedish).

Thanks!

Björn

PS. Yet another example of the Spanish tradition of adding (mentioning/explaining) the Mother's name (Hurd), even if never part of his true name (in our way of writing it).

It seems to be not so easy to find his date of birth. We have only his birth year that might be 1942.

Björn wrote:
Now I suddenly got Frank Garfield "Gary" Stiles (III), commemorated in Stiles's Tapaculo Scytalopus stilesi CUERVO et al. 2005 a k a "stilestapakul" (in Swedish).

Well, Björn, of course I have no reason to doubt what you communicate, but it seems rather curious that the name of the Tapaculo's in Swedish should be "tapakul". As you might know, the Spanish name tapaculo stands for: "cover your bottom", referring to the 'shameless' posture of these birds with their mini-tails quite upright, instead of 'decently horizontal'. In fact the word culo is still avoided in some Spanish-speaking countries and I remember I read about a proposal, longer ago, to call these birds tapacola instead ...! (which is ridiculous, of course, because no bird can cover its tail) The bad part is that abbreviating the name to tapakul does not show any knowledge of the origin of the name. The part -kul reminds of the French cul (like in cul-de-sac), but tapar (to cover) is no French. In Portuguese they have the same word as cuo, but children in Brazil are not allowed to use it!
Publication of your manuscript might not have a strong influence on the Swedish nomenclature, but you might give it a note that there is some reasoning behind the choice of exotic group names.

By the way, I am actually working through a list "Index rerum naturalium quae conservantur in Museo Academico Groningano, Groningen, 1822". The natural history collection of this museum was nearly completely destroyed by fire in 1906. Professor Theodore van Swinderen (1784-1851) is commemorated in Agapornis swindernianus (Kuhl, 1820). I got the idea that this list, which is full of errors in spelling, was composed by Kuhl, whose use of Dutch was far from correct; the identification is sometimes unreliable as well, because of clumsy names (sometimes funny by obsolete Dutch) and because there are no type specimens or descriptions. Anyway, there were no tapaculo's in the collection, but there are a few names which were not regarded as decent in later periods (nowadays, in this century of free speech and complete liberty, there are hardly any obstacles left . . .)
In spite of my criticism your "stilestapakul" has a mysterical alliteration and reminds me of "still stay cool".
Cheers and enjoy!
Jan van der Brugge

"It seems to be not so easy to find his date of birth. We have only his birth year that might be 1942."
He was born November 7, 1942 in Portland Maine.
https://www.myheritage.com/research...-no-9-providence?trp=&trn=organic_google&trl= . Now all we need is his social security number and we can open up some credit cards.

janvanderbrugge said:

Publication of your manuscript might not have a strong influence on the Swedish nomenclature, ....

Click to expand...

Jan, my intentions to "influence on the Swedish nomenclature" is none. I´m only trying to explain the background, history on the names we´ve got, however bad or not.

There are loads and loads, hundreds, of names shortened, changed, drifted away from their origins. That´s just the way things are. Of course the explanation of Tapaculo is included in my MS entry for our "bad" (your word) tapakul.

Stay cool!

Seems that he is also a botanist

http://www.ipni.org/ipni/idAuthorSe...&find_species=+colgantea&output_format=normal

It does not seem a great idea to be publishing personal data on living people online - is that not inviting identity fraud? It also implicates birdforum in breaching data protection legislation.

If you want to know about Gary or other active ornithologists, you could contact them directly of course: Gary has published a lot as corresponding author so it should be easy to track that down. This applies to some of the other living, active ornithologists discussed on this part of the site!