Linnaeus' description of the Geese

I was reading about John Vanderpoel's big year effort this year. He recently made a joke on his blog about the Greylag Goose, a bird he's been expending a great effort to see. He says it's so boring it was probably described by Linnaeus himself. So I thought I would look up the original description. Linnaeus did name it, and he didn't seem to write to glowing about this bird any more than John V. did. Linnaeus was incredible stingy with words in his descriptions. You can hardly blame him though, when one is attempting to describe every living on the planet you're bound to want to keep things terse. Unfortunately the byproduct of this and given that everything is in latin makes it really hard to figure out what the heck old Carl was actually describing. Here's a little flavor of that. From his description of the Greylag, Canada Goose and Brant.

This is the description of the Greylag from 1758 from Systema Naturae, 10th edition vol 1, Basically everything that follows excluding my comments of course is translated from latin. This was done by me and somewhat poorly, so I apologize.

"[Anas] Anser A. Beak semicylindrical, the body gray above, pale below, the neck striped."

He goes on to list three subspecies labeled alpha, beta and gamma: Anas Anser Ferus [wild goose], Anas Anser domesticus [domestic goose] and my personal favorite Anser canadensis maculatus [Brown stained canadian goose] which I think is either supposed to be a Brant or a Canada Goose, I'm not really sure since he has descriptions of both of these species on their own.

He describes the brown-stained canadian goose and it gets a little confusing:

Neck striped. Spontaneous white ring below base of bill; migrates (or moves) by phalanges (I'm not sure if he means phalanges to be interpreted as "groups" or the bones in the wing also called phalanges); imprisoned threads, males 1, females 4 (not sure why this is there I guess this is some stripe he's describing on the bird where males have 1 stripe and females have 4); from there wing and feathers wooden, spartan to the right.

He has other geese described including the white-fronted goose, which we now treat as at least two species. He called it Anas erythropus. He describes it: cinereus, fronte alba[Gray, white forehead]. He probably lumped the bean goose (which is itself actually 2 species) in with the White-fronted Goose too. The bean goose wasn't described to science until two years later by Malthurin Jacques Brisson.

He describes the Brant under the name Anas Bernicla "Brown, head neck chest black, white collar. Duck head meets black[...] Dwells in northern Europe; migrates above Sweden"

Linnaeus also lists Anas canadensis [Canada duck] which he provides with the synonym Anser canadensis [Canadian Goose]. This description is much nicer. He describes it in six words fusca capite colloque nigro gula alba [brown, black head meets with white throat]... then some references and then "Dwells in Canada."

So basically the take away from this is that Linnaeus was pretty inconsitent with his descriptions, didn't include a lot of detail, and the result is that it's hard to tell which of our modern species he was actually talking about just by reading the descriptions. Fortunately the quality of descriptions has increased since then along with our much larger number of known bird species. Given the 10,000 species we know today it would be a huge mess to try to rely on this type of description to tell species apart.