Sotilicairene Pickiness. Jackass or Black-footed Penguin, Spheniscus demersus, Amsterdam Zoo ARTIS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
This morning in ARTIS I was amused a while by this couple of African Penguins grooming each other for fleas or lice or mites. All was quiet, but I'd heard Our Birds bray like donkeys before - hence their name in English: Jackass Penguin.
If you search the internet you'll find at some point that in Europe these African Penguins were once called 'otilicarios', and the authors using that word go out of their way to explain it, e.g. as something to do with spectacles. Picky, sceptical me... So of course I had to get to the bottom of this.
To that end I went to the 'journal' written by Álvaro Velho and João de Sá of the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama around the world 1497-1499. That's where you find the first European mention of Penguins on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope (March 3, 1499). A nicely readable edition of the text - also online - was made by Diego Kopke and Antonio da Costa Paiva in 1838 (a new online text was uploaded by Mateus Parreiras). They call Penguins 'Sotilicairos' (somehow transformed by later writers to that curious 'otilicarios'). Looking a bit further, I found that Joseph Christian Hamel (1788-1862) - connected closely to the technical history of photography - remarks on the derivation of that word 'Sotilicairos' (1845). He points to the History of the Reign of King Emmanuel by the humanist-bishop of Silves (Algarve) Jerónimo Osório (1506-1580). That work contains a précis of Kopke and Costa Paiva's journal. In the 'Penguin Passage', expanding on the Journal's 'they are called', Osório claims that 'Sotilicairos' is a word derived from the language of the 'incolae', the natives of that coastal area, today's Khoisan.
Sotilicairene Pickiness. Jackass or Black-footed Penguin, Spheniscus demersus, Amsterdam Zoo ARTIS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
This morning in ARTIS I was amused a while by this couple of African Penguins grooming each other for fleas or lice or mites. All was quiet, but I'd heard Our Birds bray like donkeys before - hence their name in English: Jackass Penguin.
If you search the internet you'll find at some point that in Europe these African Penguins were once called 'otilicarios', and the authors using that word go out of their way to explain it, e.g. as something to do with spectacles. Picky, sceptical me... So of course I had to get to the bottom of this.
To that end I went to the 'journal' written by Álvaro Velho and João de Sá of the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama around the world 1497-1499. That's where you find the first European mention of Penguins on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope (March 3, 1499). A nicely readable edition of the text - also online - was made by Diego Kopke and Antonio da Costa Paiva in 1838 (a new online text was uploaded by Mateus Parreiras). They call Penguins 'Sotilicairos' (somehow transformed by later writers to that curious 'otilicarios'). Looking a bit further, I found that Joseph Christian Hamel (1788-1862) - connected closely to the technical history of photography - remarks on the derivation of that word 'Sotilicairos' (1845). He points to the History of the Reign of King Emmanuel by the humanist-bishop of Silves (Algarve) Jerónimo Osório (1506-1580). That work contains a précis of Kopke and Costa Paiva's journal. In the 'Penguin Passage', expanding on the Journal's 'they are called', Osório claims that 'Sotilicairos' is a word derived from the language of the 'incolae', the natives of that coastal area, today's Khoisan.