[Nhcoll-l] difficult locality label

[Cassidy, Kelly Michela]

I feel your pain. Sometimes, with a lot of creative googling, I can make a pretty good guess, sometimes it’s hopeless.

IF the collector did a lot of collecting, and your collection is already computerized, you can sometimes figure out, or narrow down, the location by looking at his/her entire set of collecting locales. If it’s an old date, and the collector collected something else with a more specific location on the same date, you can reasonably assume he/she couldn’t have traveled very far in one day on bad roads with the transportation options available at the time. Sometimes, you can find mention of the ranch or farm or whatever on a different specimen, but with more specific location data.

One of the early Directors at our museum was W. T. Shaw, who did a lot of collecting in alpine and subalpine areas in Washington. He would sometimes give a collecting location like “Mt Rainier”, or “Mt. Baker” or some other description that could include a lot of territory. I hate to put the georefencing point on the center of a mountain. Like you said, the uncertainty radius is often ignored and it looks like the creature was collected at 14,000 feet on rock and ice. However, if Shaw had collected several other species in the same week, all from the vicinity of the same glacier or creek, it’s probably safe to assume that in 1918, he wasn’t zipping from one side of the mountain to the other and back again in a single day. It can even be helpful to go out on Vernet and look for a collector if he/she was someone who would contribute to multiple museums or some of the collector’s specimens had been traded among museums.

On the other hand, if the collector was a member of the public who contributed a single specimens with a location like “Murphy’s Ranch”, you’re out of luck.

If you

Dr. Kelly M. Cassidy, Curator, Conner Museum
School of Biological Sciences
Box 644236
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-4236
509-335-3515

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Douglas Yanega
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2022 5:03 PM
To: nhcoll <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] difficult locality label


While curating today, I came across a fair-sized series of specimens with one of those locality labels that make you pull out your hair. It typifies most of the worst of this sort of label, in its combination of useless vagueness (the only recognizable place name is the country) and hopeless specificity (it gives the name of a privately-held property, rather than a town or some other place name that would appear on a map).

To wit:

ZAMBIA

“Amorotis Farm"

15.ii.1972, S.C. Cruickshank

Host: on citrus

Don't bother Googling; either the farm name is badly misspelled, or it is no longer extant, and has never been recorded in a document that is on the web. There is also a Mr. S.A. Cruickshank who works with farmers in Zambia, but that's a different person entirely.

It's not crucial for us to know more precisely (for genetic work, just Zambia is probably sufficient), but it seems a shame to have the potential to know exactly where these specimens are from but be compelled to exclude them from georeferencing (a point with an error radius of 700 kilometers is really more likely to confuse people than be helpful, as so few people check error radii when consulting online records).

A disproportionate number of the specimen records of this general nature in our collection are from ranches or farms, from many different countries, and even within the US. They are, not surprisingly, almost impossible to track down once they change hands or go defunct (e.g. "6 mi W Stanton Ranch HQ, Santa Cruz Island", which is not helpful when the ranch was a few miles in diameter and the few buildings were razed or repurposed decades ago), and not always trivial to locate even if still operating.

Asking here is a long shot, but I'd also be curious as to any tricks people might know for this type of locality (ranches and farms), even if it doesn't solve this particular case. I do know, and make frequent use of, the Fuzzy Gazetteer (http://isodp.hof-university.de/fuzzyg/query/<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/isodp.hof-university.de/fuzzyg/query/__;!!JmPEgBY0HMszNaDT!9XlhvRt9rMuqBNnB102Lz0Bhpdp3VoRWiDMkeTykYsLkdNbtXtWWvYUULrVd-8o$>), but that's more useful for mistranscriptions or bad handwritten labels. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a very helpful tool.

Thanks,

--

Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum

Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega

phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)

             https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/faculty.ucr.edu/*heraty/yanega.html__;fg!!JmPEgBY0HMszNaDT!9XlhvRt9rMuqBNnB102Lz0Bhpdp3VoRWiDMkeTykYsLkdNbtXtWWvYUUio0HEVU$>

  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness

        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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