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Audubon's birds
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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