Audubon's birds
A continent's birds drawn life-size
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Birds of America is among the most valuable books in existence; complete copies sell for over ten million dollars. Scientifically Audubon was a skilled field observer and an unreliable source — he shot what he painted, embroidered his anecdotes, and several species he described have never been found again. The work nonetheless has a value he could not have foreseen: it documents populations that later collapsed. The passenger pigeon existed in flocks of billions when he painted it, and the last one died in a zoo in 1914.
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John James Audubon travelled across North America painting every bird species he found, at life size. The book had to be so large that the pages were nearly a metre tall. Several of the birds he drew no longer exist — the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet and the ivory-billed woodpecker are gone.
Sources
- Audubon, The Birds of America (1827–1838)
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: passenger pigeon
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