Today's bird is a grackle, and my colleague replaced it on the Ugandan calendar with a Rüppell's Starling. I knew right away why. Like the Common Grackle in the US, the Rüppell's Starling is noisy, likes hanging out in flocks, and has iridescent feathers. (I wrote about the Common Grackle here.)
While reading about this bird (which appears on my checklists 360 times), I became interested in the guy who named it after himself, Wilhelm Peter Eduard Simon Rüppell (1794-1884). Rüppell's Wikipedia page lists nineteen plants, animals, and birds named for him. There's even a fish and a butterfly. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see this list.) As the son of a banker, Rüppell had plenty of money to indulge his interests, and he was interested in everything. He traveled widely in Africa and the Middle East and kept detailed notebooks about what he saw. He also brought many objects back to Germany, where they are now on display in museums, including the Junges Museum Frankfurt. That museum has some discussion here about the way Rüppell casually appropriated whatever took his fancy. It's frowned upon today, but when he was doing it, nobody seemed to mind.
The trend these days is away from naming creatures after humans, though in some cases the scientific names may continue to honour these explorers (the Rüppell's Starling has a scientific name that doesn't include any reference to Rüppell). You can start reading about this issue here, if you're interested. So all of these species may not continue to be named for Herr Rüppell forever. I can't help feeling a little bit of affection for the guy. After all, he could have used his money in much worse ways. And while he did treat the world as his own personal possession, at least he shared what he discovered and enriched others with the knowledge. I can't find much about what kind of person Rüppell was (other than adventurous). The Junges Museum site gives some hints: "Rüppell had a close connection to the Senckenberg Research Society,
having donated it many of the objects he had brought with him. He also
became its second director, but was later involved in disputes with the
research society. Rüppell was a very headstrong person, but also very
generous: he gave everything he had collected in his long life to the
Frankfurt museums. Toward the end of his life he expressed the opinion
that 'giving away everything before the end is the best testament.'"
Rüppell's Starling
If you want your name
to live on after you
you could put it on a building
or the front of books you’ve written
or at the bottom of pictures you’ve painted.
You could endow a scholarship
or a library.
You could name a company after yourself
or a business
or a child.
Or
you could travel the world
giving birds, fish, butterflies,
bats, chameleons, and plants
your own human name.
These creatures, after all,
don’t know or care that you’ve done so.
The blue and purple
Rüppell’s Starlings in the yard,
for example,
are raucous and iridescent
whatever you call them.
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
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