When Thomas Jefferson was building his beloved Monticello home near Charlottesville, Virginia in the late 1700s, in the Southeastern Mixed Forests Ecoregion (NA0413), he perhaps did not think of his environs in quite those terms. We were still 250 years out from the concept itself of an ecoregion and even well before the founding of ecology as a science.
But I think he would have been delighted to discuss the idea – he was a man of science and intensely interested in nature and curious about why some plants and animals occurred in one place, and not in another. He was constantly experimenting with new plants at Monticello – more often than not an interesting vegetable or exotic tree failing to thrive.
An amazing and complex man in every respect. A polymath and interested in every subject of his day, and able to converse intelligently on all of them. A man who recognized slavery was wrong and on the losing end of history and who proposed abolition legislation in the Virginian assembly – to defeat of course, incurring the wrath of his fellow Virginian plantation owners. But a man who owned hundreds of slaves himself all his life, many of whom were sold off on his death as part of his estate. A man who fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, with whom he had a long relationship he never publicly acknowledged, and who was the black half-sister of his first deceased white wife! And oh yes, he was President of the United States too, writing an enormously important document – the Declaration of Independence.
But this blog is supposed to be about birds! Well, Thomas Jefferson was very interested in the birds of his ecoregion. His favorite was apparently the “mock bird”, the Northern Mockingbird, which France and I fittingly and fleetingly saw around Monticello during our visit there October 11, 2014 (we also live in this same ecoregion, but on its northern fringe in Maryland). But when it came to the merits of the fauna of his new country, Jefferson had a noted adversary – the Compte de Buffon. Buffon was publishing his incredible 44 volume treatise, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (1749-1809), essentially the state of knowledge at that time of the entire natural world. I grew up leafing through these amazing books – my father owned a complete original set, an extremely valuable set of books, since donated to Lakehead University.
Buffon and many of his contemporaries believed that the New World fauna was degenerate and impoverished, compared to that of Europe. Jefferson clashed with him in person when he lived in Paris. Back in the US, to counter these blasphemous beliefs, he eventually published Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) which recounted what was then known of the natural history of Virginia, among many other subjects. This was the only book he would ever write, surprising for such a prolific writer. His goal was scientific but political also – he was establishing the importance of his young country. He listed 87 bird species in this publication, mostly species he would have known from Monticello, and so arguably one of the earliest ecoregion lists we could find for North America! Today’s bird list for his ecoregion would have a couple of hundred species but he included the most common and characteristic species.
A final delicious anecdote. Not only was Jefferson making long lists of species to show the richness of the fauna, he was obsessed with showing that America had the biggest and the baddest species, to put the Europeans to shame. He commissioned a dig at Big Bone Lick in Ohio where they came up with the skull of an animal Jefferson believed to be the most fearsome cat predator of all time, with huge scary claws. He wrote a scientific paper describing the bones. At one time he had them all spread out on the floor of the East Room of the White House as he described and catalogued them. Can you imagine any other President, on his hands and knees in the White House in pursuit of pure science?! Unfortunately for Jefferson, his Megalonyx jeffersoni, the mother of all predators, turned out later to be quite the opposite – a Giant Ground Sloth!
