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Is it just me, or are there more Nuttall’s woodpeckers in the Berkeley flatlands than there used to be? Maybe I’d just been missing them—my battered copy of Joseph Grinnell and Margaret Wythe’s Directory to the Bird-Life of the San Francisco Bay Region, published in 1927, lists the species as resident in Berkeley. But there was a time when most of the woodpeckers I saw here were downies, and spotting a Nuttall’s was a rare event. 

Now it’s practically a daily encounter. Almost every woodpecker I hear drumming on a telephone pole in my neighborhood turns out to be a Nuttall’s. (Although telephone poles are not rich in wood-boring insects, this behavior doesn’t represent the triumph of hope over experience. Drumming is a social signal; it’s what woodpeckers do instead of singing). And I’m always hearing their distinctive staccato whinny from the oak behind the parking lot next door, or in the mulberry trees down the street. 

I recognize these birds as Nuttall’s by their characteristic black-and-white-barred backs. Downy and hairy woodpeckers, also crisply patterned in black and white, have a single broad white stripe down the back. The Nuttall’s only real look-alike is the desert-dwelling ladder-backed woodpecker, but their ranges barely overlap. The two are similar enough that they’ve been caught hybridizing. Ornithologists still consider them separate species, though. 

Nuttall’s woodpecker, a bird of oak woodlands, is close to being a California specialty; it occurs from the head of the Sacramento Valley down into northern Baja. While it’s still common in most areas, its dependence on oaks—like that of the acorn woodpecker, the oak titmouse, and the yellow-billed magpie—is cause for concern. If Sudden Oak Death Syndrome spreads, all these habitat specialists will be in trouble. 

It’s ironic that this creature was named for a naturalist who never saw it alive. Having your name attached to a bird, or insect or plant, is an odd kind of honor. Sometimes the naming recognizes a discoverer: Lewis’s woodpecker, Clark’s nutcracker. Or it can be a way of commemorating a friend or colleague. James Bond—the real one, author of Birds of the West Indies—once threatened to name some really unprepossessing bird for Ian Fleming, but, as far as I know, never followed through. 

As it happens, a lot of North American birds bear the names of 19th-century naturalists who worked the frontiers of civilization and science: a mixed bag of geniuses and scoundrels, Army surgeons and drifters. Thomas Nuttall was one of those, a Yorkshireman born during the Revolutionary War who came to the new nation on the cusp of the new century. He was mostly a botanist—William Bartram was one of his early patrons—but, like many of his contemporaries, he had a broad streak of curiosity about the natural world, dabbling in seashells and lizards, fossils and minerals. 

After years of scuffling for a living, Nuttall got a berth at Harvard teaching botany and ornithology while writing the first practical manual of American birds. (Audubon’s elephantine work was not the handiest thing to take into the field.) He hated Cambridge, though; he described his time there as “vegetating among vegetables.” Given the choice, he’d pick wilderness over academia. 

And he saw a fair amount of that wilderness: across the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, up the Missouri and the Yellowstone, into the swamps of the Southeast. Along with the younger naturalist John Kirk Townsend, he went west to the Columbia River in 1834 with a party of fur traders. He had the reputation of a bumbler, an eccentric even in a calling that attracted eccentrics, always wandering off into the prairie and having to be rescued. He wasn’t the marksman that Audubon was, and seems to have used his gun primarily to dig up plant specimens; once, during a tense encounter with hostile Indians, his rifle barrel was found to be clogged with dirt. But somehow he survived the rigors of the trail. After a sojourn in the Sandwich Islands, Nuttall finally made it to California in 1836. 

It was there, on the beach at San Diego, that he bumped into a former Harvard student, Richard Henry Dana, who had dropped out of Massachusetts society to crew the hide-boat Alert around Cape Horn. Nuttall had worked his way down the coast from Monterey aboard the Pilgrim, whose sailors dubbed him “Old Curious.” As Dana recounted in Two Years Before the Mast, they all thought Nuttall was touched in the head: “Why else a rich man should leave a Christian country, and come to such a place as California, to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand.” 

But Nuttall couldn’t stay in this fascinating new world. In 1840 he inherited his uncle Jonas’ estate, with a catch: he had to spend at least 9 months of every year in England. There was no escape clause. Back at Nutgrove, he first learned of his namesake woodpecker in a manuscript by his protégé William Gambel. Gambel had collected the bird near the Pueblo de los Angeles, and later found an active nest in an oak stump at Santa Barbara. 

I suspect very few people, even inveterate birders, would recognize Thomas Nuttall’s name. But it lives on in that woodpecker, and in the Latin names of the yellow-billed magpie (his own discovery) and the common poorwill, a cockle, a dogwood, a sunflower, an evening primrose, and—likely the one he was proudest of—a gorgeous rhododendron that his nephew found in the mountains of Assam. Nuttall lived just long enough to see the specimen he donated to Kew Gardens come into bloom.