Born this date in 1785 was John James Audubon, US naturalist and artist, famous for his book about Birds. 10 facts about him:
He was born in what is now Haiti. He was the illegitimate son of a French naval officer/plantation owner, Jean Audubon, and a chambermaid named Jeanne Rabin, who died soon after he was born. He was given the name Jean Rabin.
In 1791, his father had him and another illegitimate sibling, taken to France so he could formally adopt them. His name was changed to Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon.
At the age of 18, his father sent him to America to avoid being conscripted into Napoleon’s army. He changed his name again to make it sound more English, thus becoming John James Audubon.
He opened a shop in Louisville, Kentucky with a partner, Ferdinand Rozier. One fateful day a famous ornithologist of the time called Alexander Wilson visited the shop looking for funding for his book, American Ornithology. Apparently authors would, at this time, ask members of the public for money in a kind of old-fashioned kind of crowd funding. Wilson showed the shopkeepers his drawings, whereupon Rozier commented, in French, that Audubon could draw much better. Hence, they didn’t invest. Wilson never finished his book, but Audubon was inspired to write and illustrate one himself. He was duly snubbed by Wilson’s fans and supporters, making it impossible for him to publish there, so he turned his attention to Europe.
At first, it didn’t look as if he’d meet much success there either. This time the reason was that Audubon’s paintings were deemed too large to be turned into a book. Measuring about 39.5 x 26.5 inches, he was told the resulting book would be too large to fit on a table. However, he didn’t give up and returned to the bookseller with samples of his drawings, and won him over. The book got published, with 435 engraved and hand-coloured plates. Should you have one of these rare first editions in your attic, it could sell for $10 million.
He was one of the first people to put bands on birds in order to study their migration. He put silver thread on around the legs of Eastern phoebes and found two of the birds returning the following year still sported the threads.
Some of his other experiments started a huge controversy in the birding world. He decided to test out whether Vultures had a keen sense of smell. He’d do things like create a dummy dead animal stuffed with grass and found the birds went for that and not the putrefying carcass he’d hidden close by. Some ornithologists supported him but others didn’t and there was a great schism between “nosarians” who believed vultures used their sense of smell, and “anti-nosarians” who believed they used sight and had no sense of smell to speak of. Even Charles Darwin got involved and conducted experiments of his own.
Audubon is credited with discovering around 25 species and 12 subspecies of American bird, but at the same time, some of his paintings are of birds that don’t seem to exist in nature. There are five: the carbonated swamp warbler, Cuvier’s kinglet, Townsend’s finch (or Townsend’s bunting), small-headed flycatcher, and blue mountain warbler, that have only ever been seen in his drawings. Today’s scientists believe these must have been hybrids or mutants.
The Audubon Society was actually nothing to do with him. It was started after he died, by George Bird Grinnell, who, as a child, had been taught by Audubon’s widow, Lucy. He had great respect for Lucy and named his society and its magazine after her. However, the society folded in around 1889. It was revived a few years later in 1896 by two Boston women, Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her cousin Minna B. Hall. They’d been horrified to learn that birds were routinely killed for the feathers to make ladies’ hats. They pledged never to wear hats with feathers and persuaded others to do so. Similar conservation societies sprang up in other parts of America and eventually combined to become the National Audubon Society in 1940. This society still exists and concentrates on scientific conservation and education to protect birds.
It is somewhat ironic, therefore, when you consider how John James Audubon himself produced his paintings. He would shoot the birds first and prop up the carcasses with wire into natural poses.
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