Africa Wild

Pomarine

Pomarine Jaeger

The specific Pomatorhinus is from Ancient Greek poma, pomatos, "lid" and rhis, rhinos, "nostrils". This refers to the cere, which the pomarine jaeger shares with the other skuas. The name of this species is unrelated to the Baltic Sea region of Pomerania.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomarine_jaeger

Barlow

Barlow's Lark

The common name and scientific name commemorate the South African businessman and conservationist Charles Sydney Barlow.

Charles Sydney "Punch" Barlow was the eldest son of BarlowWorld founder Major Ernest "Billy" Barlow. In 1927 Charles signed an official agreement with Caterpillar in the U.S. The conclusion of the historic deal brought the Caterpillar brand to South Africa.

Barlow was a keen conservationist and sponsored Austin Roberts’s book on birds.

South Africa’s most fascinating collection of books is housed in the unlikely location of an old wine cellar at the Somerset West wine estate, Vergelegen. The eclectic collection of more than 4 500 books was that of mining magnate, politician and philanthropist Sir Lionel Phillips, who acquired Vergelegen in 1917. The winery building was then in disrepair and his wife Lady Florence, a passionate supporter of art, architecture and craft, oversaw its conversion into a library.

Upon the death of Lady Phillips in 1940 the estate passed once more into caring hands when in early 1941 it was purchased by Mr Charles “Punch” Barlow. In the years prior to “Florrie’s” death, the estate had begun to decline and the Barlow’s needed to do a great deal of work to restore the gardens, grounds and the homestead. Mrs Cynthia Barlow undertook this task with the help of the gardener Hanson, who was again persuaded to return to Vergelegen and the garden became a showpiece once more.

Few alterations were carried out to the house and, as well as furnishing the house with many pieces purchased from the Phillips sale, Mrs Barlow added her own collection of art and silver.

The Barlows also resumed farming operations at Vergelegen and began planting vines on a small scale, the last of which were pulled out in 1962. After their prize Jersey herd was all but wiped out by eating poisoned dairy meal, the Barlows concentrated on fruit farming.

“Punch” Barlow’s son, Tom, took over the running of the farm in 1966. He replaced the Jersey herd with Frieslands, which provided milk for distribution in the Hottentots Holland area.

Sources:
https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/o ... g-11000021
https://www.iol.co.za/weekend-argus/a-f ... ks-2013478

John Edward Gray, (12 February 1800 – 7 March 1875)

Gray's Lark

John Edward Gray was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of zoologist George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray (1766–1828).

Gray was Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum in London from 1840 until Christmas 1874, before the Natural History holdings were split off to the Natural History Museum. He published several catalogues of the museum collections that included comprehensive discussions of animal groups as well as descriptions of new species. He improved the zoological collections to make them amongst the best in the world.

Gray was born in Walsall, but his family soon moved to London, where Gray studied medicine. He assisted his father in writing The Natural Arrangement of British Plants (1821). After being blackballed by the Linnean Society he turned his interest from botany to zoology. He began his zoological career by volunteering to collect insects for the British Museum at age 15. He officially joined the Zoological Department in 1824 to help John George Children catalog the reptile collection. In 1840 he took over from Children as Keeper of Zoology, which he continued for 35 years, publishing well over 1000 papers. He named many cetacean species, genera, subfamilies, and families.

During this period he collaborated with Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the noted natural history artist, in producing Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley. Knowsley Park, near Liverpool, had been founded by Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby and was one of the largest private menageries in Victorian England.

Gray married Maria Emma Smith in 1826. She helped him with his scientific work, especially with her drawings. In 1833, he was a founder of what became the Royal Entomological Society of London.

Gray was also interested in postage stamps and on 1 May 1840, the day the Penny Black first went on sale, he purchased several with the intent to save them, thus making him the world's first known stamp collector.

During his fifty years employed at the British Museum Gray wrote nearly 500 papers, including many descriptions of species new to science. These had been presented to the Museum by collectors from around the world, and included all branches of zoology, although Gray usually left the descriptions of new birds to his younger brother and colleague George. He was also active in malacology, the study of molluscs.

Gray was one of the most prolific taxonomists in the history of zoology. He described more than 300 species and subspecies of reptiles, only surpassed by his successors at the British Museum, George A. Boulenger and Albert Günther and American zoologist Edward D. Cope.

Genera named in his honour include:
The snake genus Grayia Günther 1858:

Species named in his honour include:
The Indian pond heron (Ardeola grayii)
Gray's beaked whale (Mesoplodon grayi)
Luzon shrew (Crocidura grayi)
Ablepharus grayanus
Delma grayii
Microlophus grayii
Naultinus grayii
Tropidophorus grayi
Trachemys grayi

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward_Gray

Philip Lutley Sclater (4 November 1829 – 27 June 1913)

Sclater's Lark

Philip Sclater was an English lawyer and zoologist. In zoology, he was an expert ornithologist, and identified the main zoogeographic regions of the world. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London for 42 years, from 1860–1902.

Philip grew up at Hoddington House where he took an early interest in birds. He was educated in school at Twyford and at thirteen went to Winchester College and later Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he studied scientific ornithology under Hugh Edwin Strickland.

In 1851 he began to study law and was admitted a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. In 1856 he travelled to America and visited Lake Superior and the upper St. Croix River, canoeing down it to the Mississippi. In Philadelphia he met Spencer Baird, John Cassin and Joseph Leidy at the Academy of Natural Sciences. After returning to England, he practised law for several years and attended meetings of the Zoological Society of London.

In 1858, Sclater published a paper in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, setting up six zoological regions which he called the Palaearctic, Aethiopian, Indian, Australasian, Nearctic and Neotropical. These zoogeographic regions are still in use. He also developed the theory of Lemuria during 1864 to explain zoological coincidences relating Madagascar to India.

In 1874 he became private secretary to his brother George Sclater-Booth, MP (later Lord Basing). He was offered a permanent position in civil service but he declined. In 1875, he became President of the Biological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which he joined in 1847 as a member.

Sclater was the founder and editor of The Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists' Union. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1860 to 1902. He was briefly succeeded by his son, before the Council of the Society made a long-term appointment.

In 1901 he described the okapi to western scientists although he never saw one alive. His office at 11 Hanover Square became a meeting place for all naturalists in London. Travellers and residents shared notes with him and he corresponded with thousands.

His collection of birds grew to nine thousand and these he transferred to the British Museum in 1886. At around the same time the museum was augmented by the collections of Gould, Salvin and Godman, Hume, and others to become the largest in the world. Among Sclater's more important books were Exotic Ornithology (1866–69) and Nomenclator Avium (1873), both with Osbert Salvin; Argentine Ornithology (1888–89), with W.H. Hudson; and The Book of Antelopes (1894–1900) with Oldfield Thomas.

His sister was Lilian Sclater, for whom Lilian's Lovebird was named.

In June 1901 he received an honorary doctorate of Science (D.Sc.) from the University of Oxford.

Animals named after Sclater:
Sclater's lemur (Eulemur flavifrons)
Dusky-billed parrotlet (Psittacula sclateri)
Sclater's monal (Lopophorus sclateri)
Erect-crested penguin (Eudyptes sclater )
Ecuadorian cacique (Cacicus sclater )
Mexican chickadee (Poecile sclateri)
Bay-vented cotinga (Doliornis sclateri)
Sclater's antwren (Myrmotherula sclateri)
Sclater's cassowary (Casuarius sclateri)
Colombian longtail snake (Enuliophis sclateri )

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sclater

Arthur Cowell Stark (27 November 1846 – 18 November 1899)

Stark's lark

Arthur Stark was a medical doctor and naturalist. He emigrated from Torquay, England to Cape Town, South Africa in 1892. He lived in (the British colonies of) South Africa during the last 7 years of his life and died during the Siege of Ladysmith at the age of 53. He is best known for initiating an ornithological work, The Birds of South Africa.

He was born in Torquay as the eldest of three sons of John and Anne Stark and was educated at Blundell's School and Clifton College. He worked as ironmonger up to the age of 26, when he married his distant cousin Rosa Cox. For a time they lived in Weston-super-Mare, before Arthur started his medical studies at Edinburgh University at age 30.

After the death of Rosa in 1892, he settled in Cape Town, while his daughters remained in England. Besides practicing as a medical doctor he travelled regularly to collect animal specimens for the South African Museum and made sketches and extensive notes of his observations.

His travels up to 1898 included forays into the inland regions of the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal, while he consulted the major specimen collections of the time, at the South African Museum, Albany Museum in Grahamstown and the Durban Museum. Besides his personal notes, he accumulated bird eggs, bird nests and butterfly specimens, some of which were added to his personal collection.

He moved from Cape Town to Durban shortly before the outbreak of the Boer War and travelled to England in 1899 to oversee the printing of the first volume of his ornithological work, The Birds of South Africa. The completed series was meant to form part of a wider project under the editorship of William Sclater, director of the South African Museum, describing the fauna of southern Africa. Dr Stark returned to the Colony of Natal in September, 1899, where he volunteered as medical officer for the British forces when the Boer War broke out.

During the siege of Ladysmith he was resident in the Royal Hotel, but spent the days in shell-proof dugouts along the Klip River, or fishing, while the town was being shelled by Boer forces. Dr Stark had just returned and was standing on the hotel's veranda on the evening of 18 November 1899, when at 19:30 the Long Tom cannon stationed on Pepworth Hill fired two shots at the hotel. These were aimed at important persons who may have assembled there, probably Dr. Jameson and Colonel Rhodes who were known to be in town. Dr Stark's legs were mangled by the second shell and he died shortly afterwards on the operating table. Dr Stark was buried in Ladysmith. H.W. Nevinson who was present records the irony of him being a strong opponent of the Chamberlain policy, and a vigorous denouncer of the war's injustice.

Dr Stark's field notes were afterwards recovered from Ladysmith and his Durban home. His executors entrusted these to William Sclater, director of the South African Museum, to be prepared for the second volume of The Birds of South Africa. This volume appeared in 1902 as part of Sclater's series The Fauna of South Africa.

William Sclater named Laniarius starki for him in 1901, and Captain George Shelley followed by naming Stark's lark, Spizocorys starki, in Dr Stark's honour in 1902. William Sclater, Dr Stark's co-author of The Birds of South Africa, died in 1944 from injuries sustained from a V-1 flying bomb dropped in London.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stark

Dr Bernhard Meyer (24 August 1767 – 1 January 1836)

Meyer's Parrot

Meyer was a German physician and naturalist.

He was the joint author, with Philipp Gottfried Gaertner (1754–1825) and Johannes Scherbius (1769–1813) of Oekonomisch-technische Flora der Wetterau (1799), which was the source of the scientific name of many plants. He was also the joint author, with Johann Wolf, of Naturgeschichte der Vögel Deutschlands (1805) and Taschenbuch der deutschen Vögelkunde (1810–22).

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Meyer

Macaroni

Macaroni Penguin

The Macaroni Penguin was described from the Falkland Islands in 1837 by German naturalist Johann Friedrich von Brandt.

The common name was recorded from the early 19th century in the Falkland Islands. English sailors apparently named the species for its conspicuous yellow crest. Maccaronism was a term for a particular style in 18th-century England marked by flamboyant or excessive ornamentation. A person who adopted this fashion was labelled a "maccaroni" or "macaroni", as in the song "Yankee Doodle".

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_penguin

Gentoo

Gentoo Penguin

The first scientific description of the Gentoo Penguin was made in 1781 by Johann Reinhold Forster with a reference point of the Falkland Islands.

The application of gentoo to the penguin is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that Gentoo used to be an Anglo-Indian term used as early as 1638 to distinguish Hindus in India from Muslims. The English term may have originated from the Portuguese gentil (compare "gentile").

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_penguin

Armand Barau (1921 - 1989)

Barau's Petrel

Armand Barau was an agronomist, landowner and amateur ornithologist in the French territory of Reunion. He was co-author, with Nicholas Barre and Christian H. Jouanin, of Oiseaux de la Reunion (1982), the first serious study of birds in the region. Jouanin encouraged him to look for the Mascarene Black Petrel that had not been collected since the 19th century (it was not rediscovered until 1970).

Source:
https://books.google.co.za/books?id=En4 ... au&f=false

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus, is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use today (with many changes). His ideas on classification have influenced generations of biologists during and after his own lifetime, even those opposed to the philosophical and theological roots of his work.

He was born on May 23, 1707, at Stenbrohult, in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. His father, Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus, was both an avid gardener and a Lutheran pastor, and Carl showed a deep love of plants and a fascination with their names from a very early age. Carl disappointed his parents by showing neither aptitude nor desire for the priesthood, but his family was somewhat consoled when Linnaeus entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine. A year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden. However, its medical facilities had been neglected and had fallen into disrepair. Most of Linaeus's time at Uppsala was spent collecting and studying plants, his true love. At the time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum, for every doctor had to prepare and prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants. Despite being in hard financial straits, Linnaeus mounted a botanical and ethnographical expedition to Lapland in 1731 (the portrait above shows Linnaeus as a young man, wearing a version of the traditional Lapp costume and holding a shaman's drum). In 1734 he mounted another expedition to central Sweden.
Linnaeus went to the Netherlands in 1735, promptly finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk, and then enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies. That same year, he published the first edition of his classification of living things, the Systema Naturae. During these years, he met or corresponded with Europe's great botanists, and continued to develop his classification scheme. Returning to Sweden in 1738, he practiced medicine (specializing in the treatment of syphilis) and lectured in Stockholm before being awarded a professorship at Uppsala in 1741. At Uppsala, he restored the University's botanical garden (arranging the plants according to his system of classification), made three more expeditions to various parts of Sweden, and inspired a generation of students. He was instrumental in arranging to have his students sent out on trade and exploration voyages to all parts of the world: nineteen of Linnaeus's students went out on these voyages of discovery. Perhaps his most famous student, Daniel Solander, was the naturalist on Captain James Cook's first round-the-world voyage, and brought back the first plant collections from Australia and the South Pacific to Europe. Anders Sparrman, another of Linnaeus's students, was a botanist on Cook's second voyage. Another student, Pehr Kalm, traveled in the northeastern American colonies for three years studying American plants. Yet another, Carl Peter Thunberg, was the first Western naturalist to visit Japan in over a century; he not only studied the flora of Japan, but taught Western medicine to Japanese practicioners. Still others of his students traveled to South America, southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Many died on their travels.

Linnaeus continued to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a multivolume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal specimens were sent to him from every corner of the globe. (The image at right shows his scientific description of the human species from the ninth edition of Systema Naturae. At the time he referred to humanity as Homo diurnis, or "man of the day". Click on the image to see an enlargement.) Linnaeus was also deeply involved with ways to make the Swedish economy more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign trade, either by acclimatizing valuable plants to grow in Sweden, or by finding native substitutes. Unfortunately, Linnaeus's attempts to grow cacao, coffee, tea, bananas, rice, and mulberries proved unsuccessful in Sweden's cold climate. His attempts to boost the economy (and to prevent the famines that still struck Sweden at the time) by finding native Swedish plants that could be used as tea, coffee, flour, and fodder were also not generally successful. He still found time to practice medicine, eventually becoming personal physician to the Swedish royal family. In 1758 he bought the manor estate of Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal collections. In 1761 he was granted nobility, and became Carl von Linné. His later years were marked by increasing depression and pessimism. Lingering on for several years after suffering what was probably a series of mild strokes in 1774, he died in 1778. His son, also named Carl, succeeded to his professorship at Uppsala, but never was noteworthy as a botanist. When Carl the Younger died five years later with no heirs, his mother and sisters sold the elder Linnaeus's library, manuscripts, and natural history collections to the English natural historian Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society of London to take care of them.

Source: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html