Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
When you think about exciting history, the history of Ornithology,
the study of birds doesn't necessarily come first to mind but passion is a wonderful
thing and brings an excitement of its own. As poet Maya Angelou once said,
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song”. John J. Audubon
had such a song. This is a story of a man's passion, of one of the world's most valuable
books and of a magnificent lost bird, and it is a story that deserves to be remembered.
Audubon’s story started, as all great stories do, with being captured by pirates. I'm actually not
joking, John J. Audubon's father was a sea captain and a privateer and at one point, he was actually
captured by pirates, and it's not really relevant to the story, but I just couldn't leave that part
out. John J. Audubon was born in Haiti and he moved as a child with his family to France, and
eventually he emigrated to the United States where he tried to make a business on some land that his
father had bought there. He worked his hand at a number of businesses with varying success, but his
true love was the combination of art and nature, and while other pursuits, and the need to feed
his family kept him from pursuing his dream as much as he wished, at the age of 35 he decided to
undertake an extraordinary project. To document, by painting, every species of bird in America.
Audubon traveled the American West in the first half of the 19th century,
hunting birds and paying other hunters to bring him specimens. It was a time when the
backwoods of America were not just dangerous and wild, but when the birds were so plentiful,
that a single flock of the now extinct passenger pigeon could take three days to pass overhead,
and might have included tens of billions of birds. It's a time when the forests
were endless and settlers, especially European ones, were few and far between.
Audubon was trained in both art and taxidermy. He developed innovative methods of using wire
and string to mount taxidermy birds in natural poses, and he would mount his specimens on a grid,
so that he could accurately represent their proportions. He eschewed oil painting which was
the most common type of painting in the day, and instead preferred a mix of watercolours, charcoal,
and pastels. He engaged talented landscape artists who would paint the landscapes and the plants
that are in many of his pictures, and unlike most works of Natural Science in their time,
he posed the birds in natural poses, against natural settings, engaging in natural activities.
It was not an easy task and it didn't pay particularly well. At times to make ends meet
he had to take artistic commissions, or take work teaching art. But his 12 year opus work is nothing
short of astounding. First published in 1827, The Birds of America identified 25 new species,
and twelve new subspecies of birds, and included prints of at least six species of birds that are
now extinct. It is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever produced.
The four volume work was reproduced using both copper plated etching and engraving,
and each of the prints was then hand colored using watercolors. Audubon paid
for this expensive printing process by selling subscriptions. Subscribers would pay as they go,
for prints that were produced each month. Among his subscribers were King Charles the
tenth of France, Adelaide the Queen consort of England, and famous American politicians Henry
Clay and Daniel Webster. It's estimated that there were only about 200 original copies of
this extraordinary work, and of those only around 120 are known to still exist today.
And in that work there is an enduring mystery, Falco Washingtonii, or Washington's Eagle.
Audubon named the species, which he presumed to be newly discovered, after George Washington. It
was an exceptional bird, a uniformly red brown sea eagle, over three and a half feet tall,
with a ten-foot wingspan. That was more than 25% larger than the other
two species of known American Eagles, the Bald Eagle, and the Golden Eagle.
Audubon noted sighting the bird just five times in his extensive travels and claimed
to have shot one for taxidermy, which he used to document it's astounding dimensions,
and many characteristics that distinguished it from other known eagle species. But the problem
is that modern ornithologists don't agree that the bird exists, or in fact, ever existed. There
were other ornithologists who claimed to have had sightings, and there were a few specimens
that people claimed were collected, but none of those specimens can be found today. They've all
been lost, sold into private collections without record, destroyed by fire. In museum records but
the sample cannot be found, and there has not been one confirmed sighting in the modern era.
Ornithologist generally considered to be a misidentification, either of an exceptionally
large Golden Eagle, or of a juvenile Bald Eagle who at different times in the development have
brown, rather than white heads. But neither of these explanations fit. First of all the bird
was known to catch fish, making it clearly a sea eagle as opposed to the Golden Eagle,
which is a true eagle. And it lacked the distinctive extended leg feathers that
distinguish Golden Eagles. It was described as having uniformly brown feathers, and bald eagles
even in those stages where their heads are not white, would have modeled colors with some white
feathers mixed. And it had distinguishing factors in terms of the color of its beak,
and the scaling of its legs, as well as in behaviors like nesting on the ground
on cliffs eyes instead of up in trees, that simply do not fit the other two eagle species.
And Audubon was not the only one who claimed to have seen them, other ornithologists claimed
to at least have sightings of the bird. And of course this is John J. Audubon,
who would have witnessed hundreds of eagles and been quite familiar with the other two species.
But if it's a real species how did it just disappear? Well maybe it didn't,
it was always known to be an extremely rare species, and its habitat is not heavily
populated. As we've seen it can be confused for Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles, and its sheer size
means that when someone did see one, that sighting might have been written off as an exaggeration.
In the end the man who had trouble feeding his family did okay for himself. The Birds
of America earned him enough money that he could buy a 20 acre estate in New York. He continued
his scientific endeavors, he documented 36 species of birds on a trip to Newfoundland
and Labrador in 1833. In 1848, he started showing signs of Alzheimer's disease, and
he passed away in 1851. His contribution to our understanding of bird anatomy and bird behavior
was far-reaching. His book was quoted three times in Charles Darwin's, The Origin of Species. He
won numerous awards and honors, including election to the prestigious Royal Society,
which would have been the highest honor for a scientist of his day. And there are several parks,
preserves, museums, galleries, schools, and even a thirteen thousand two hundred twenty six foot
tall mountain peak in Colorado, named after John J. Audubon. His seminal work The Birds of America,
has become one of the most valued books in the world. Of the hundred and twenty copies
known to exist, only about 13 or in private hands. One sold at auction in London in 2010,
for eleven and a half million dollars. According to economist magazine,
five of the top ten highest prices ever paid for a book at auction, were copies of The Birds
of America. But don't fret, many of the other copies that are institutionally owned are in
universities in the United States and Europe, where they are frequently put on display. And
the University of Michigan has put all 425 plates onto their website where you can view them today.
Today Audubon's name is nearly synonymous with bird conservation. In 1895,
a fan of his used his name when he created a society dedicated to bird conservation,
and today the National Audubon Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of
birds and their habitats, has more than 500 local chapters.
Ornithologists have still not agreed to the existence of Falco Washingtonii, but there have
been a few amateur sightings in recent years, and there are some scientists that are still making
the bird's case. I for one truly want to believe, I look out my window every day hoping to see
Washington's Eagle sitting in a tree. I hope that because it's such a good story, it is a symbol
of a man and his passion, of a lost frontier, of a time in history when the flocks of birds
were so big that they blocked out the Sun. And I want to believe that all good stories are true.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history, five to ten minutes long. If you did enjoy it, please
go ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on your left. If you have any questions or
comments or would like to make a suggestion for another topic for the History Guy feel
free to write that in the comment section and I will be happy to respond. And if you'd like
five minutes more of forgotten history, all you need to do is click subscribe.