"I totally called it"

January 18, 2022 5:47 PM

"Obsessed with the ornithologist (Mario Cohn-Haft) who heard a birdsong he didn’t recognize in 1988, predicted that the song was made by a new species of bird, and then spent the next 25 years looking for it before finally discovering evidence for the previously undescribed species in 2013." Proposal (586) to South American Classification Committee. Predicted antwren birdsong and three recordings of other birdsong shared by Cohn-Haft on xeno-canto, "Sharing bird sounds from around the world".
posted by brainwane (5 comments total)

this is a cool story

but i read it as "orthodontist" which would've been a lot weirder
posted by dismas at 7:30 PM on January 18, 2022

That's amazing! I thought these things only happen in particle physics.

Maybe that's why I subconsciously read the bird's name as "antiwren"

^{let's hope they don't collide with any wrens}
posted by a car full of lions at 10:29 PM on January 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

Great timing. Our local science café invited Killian Mullarney to zoom in last night. He shared the stop-start 15 year ! story of getting the definitive Birds of Europe into print. Actually, of course, "definitive" because, as the kit gets better and the patient telescope-hours accumulate, revision of certainty is a constant. Most of the birds you see out there do not have the perfect crisp plumage of top males which appear in bird books - most of the flock are scruffy looking juveniles and less blinged-up females. He does stamps too. Mullarney is one of the leads on The Sound Approach which encourages the use of a final front-ear to assist the eyes in bird ID.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:49 AM on January 19, 2022

Still riffing off my previous joke

The existence of the antiwren was predicted by theoretical biologist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, but it was not until the 60s that experimentalists were able to build a passerine accelerator powerful enough to detect it. The antiwren is unstable, existing only for an instant before decaying into two sparrows and an antifinch.
posted by a car full of lions at 3:58 AM on January 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

I read as antiwren as well
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:26 AM on January 19, 2022