attacking them for acting brutally against indigenous people. A brave experimenter, he allowed a Hottentot medicine man to diagnose him when he fell ill and wrote of the successful treatment and cure. By travelling around southern Africa, observing the wild and reflecting upon himself and mankind, it has been claimed that Le Vaillant was the pioneer of a genre of travel writing while also inventing the idea of a wildlife "safari" although he did not use that word of Arabian origin. Ornithology Le Vaillant was opposed to the systematic nomenclature introduced by Carl Linnaeus and only gave French names to the species that he discovered. Some of these are still in use as common names, such as bateleur, the French word for tumbler, for the way the bird playfully falls in flight. Other naturalists were left to assign binomial names to his new discoveries, some of these commemorate his name: Crested barbet (Trachyphonus vaillantii) Ranzani, 1821 Levaillant's cisticola (Cisticola tinniens) (Lichtenstein, 1842) Levaillant's cuckoo (Clamator levaillantii) (Swainson, 1829) Levaillant's parrot also known as the Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus) (Gmelin, 1788) Levaillant's tchagra (Tchagra tchagra) (Vieillot, 1816) Levaillant's woodpecker (Picus vaillantii) Malherbe, 1847 Le Vaillant was among the first to consider the use of coloured plates of birds in his descriptions. He mounted his bird specimens, preserved with arsenic soap, in lifelike positions and the illustrators showed them in near realistic poses. He ensured that the fiscal shrike was shown along with an insect impaled on thorn. His descriptions of bird behaviour were also considered to be pioneering. He called the African fish eagle Vocifer for its distinctive and loud yelping calls made while throwing back its head. He was also the first to use musical annotation to describe bird song. A very careful observer of behaviour, he was among the first to notice that the rosy-faced lovebird (Agapornis roseicollis) nested within the nests of the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius). It has been suggested that he may well have been a major influence in the style and art of John James Audubon. An analysis of Le Vaillant's collections made by Carl Sundevall in 1857 identified ten birds that could not be assigned definitely to any species, ten that were fabricated from multiple species and fifty species that could not have come from the Cape region as claimed. Legacy The South American fish Brachyplatystoma vaillantii is named after him. Works in two