John James Audubon

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John James Audubon

April 26, 1785-January 27, 1851

Birds. How exasperating they are! Even when I lift my camera to shoot them through the window, they scatter. Light, vulnerable and deft, they hide in the branches until the frightening woman with the black box vanishes. They must think my camera shoots bullets instead of photographs.

I told you about my single attempt to photograph birds in the meadow in winter. None appeared though I sat for an hour and a half and froze my tush, never to embark out again this season.

Not so Mr. Audubon. From the time he was a baby he felt an intimacy with birds bordering on frenzy. He spent most of his life chronicling them, often in harrowing conditions. (See field notes from his journals, below.)

The portrait, above (now where Sasha and Malia can see it daily on the west wall of the Red Room in the White House), of Audubon by John Syme shows him as he must have looked in the years 1820-1824 when he explored Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the start of his attempt to paint all the birds of North America. One of the treasured books I inherited from my parents is Audubon's Birds of America, the greatest picture book of all time. It has 435 watercolor plates of birds painted by John, well my edition has photographs of the plates. In all, the field work and paintings took 14 years to complete for the book. Yes, the gun there means he shot birds in order to draw them. At the time of the painting of this portrait in Edinburgh by the Scottish Syme, Audubon was in the British Isles looking for a publisher for the book.

mourning doves

He intended to include paintings of eggs in his book, but they didn't make it into the final copy. (In my 1966 edition, Marshall B. Davidson included Audubon's eggs in his Introduction.) Eggs are more docile subjects, no need to shoot them. But at first glance at his drawings at the right I thought the pen scratches under them were feet!

The book has 435 hand-colored prints of over 700 North American bird species. He tried unsuccessfully to get it published in the U.S. Eventually in England it cost more than $100,000 at the time to print (over $2 million in today's money). Copper plates had to be carved, and the original edition was hand tinted and printed with the aquatint process.

cardinals

It seemed to us as if we were approaching the end of the world. The country was perfectly flat, and, so far as we could survey it, presented the same wild and scraggy aspect. . . We now and then passed through muddy pools, which reached the saddle-girths of our horses.

- from Audubon and His Journals, chapter "Spring Garden"

scrub (or Florida jay), Stellar's jay, yellow-billed magpie, Clark's nutcracker

In the morning when I arose, the country was still covered in thick fogs, so that although I could hear the plain notes of birds on shore, not an object could I see beyond the bowsprit, and the air was as close and sultry as the previous evening.

- from the chapter St. John's River, Audubon and His Journals

purple finches

The National Audubon Society was of course named after John James Audubon.