Book Review: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Title: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Author: Roger Tory Peterson

Date: (?) 1978

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: 0-517-53545-9

Length: 160

Illustrations: color prints of John James Audubon’s paintings

Quote: “Audubon...was the first to take birds out of the glass case and give them the simulation of life.”

Before photographs were invented, wildlife artists worked from dead specimens. John James Audubon (born 1785), like Alexander Wilson, Mark Catesby, and John Bachman, shot the birds they “studied.” They were fascinated by how easy it was to kill birds without making a noticeable dent in local populations. “Besotted” might be a better word. Though Audubon was amused by the behavior of birds he was able to catch alive, he didn’t mind eating birds he;d shot or selling them for meat, either, and might kill three dozen birds while preparing to paint two.

In Audubon’s time the Carolina Parakeet, which is now extinct, was a noisy, messy pest, and Audubon wrote that while the birds were “plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain,” a farmer could “commit great slaughter...All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds...return to be shot at until few remain alive. I have seen hundreds destroyed in...a few hours.” Passenger pigeons and prairie chickens were also slaughtered whether or not anyone could eat them. In pigeon season the poorest had fresh pigeon pie.

Egrets, whose “breeding plume” feathers were especially popular as hat trimmings, were slaughtered in their breeding season, so the orphaned baby egrets died shortly after their parents. Peterson’s comment on “the stench...heavy over every colony” socks it to the imaginations of readers who can remember all too easily that a healthy colony of any kind of herons always has a sufficiently strong odor.

Audubon observed closely the positions in which the birds he shot for his own use had flown, perched, sung, scolded, or threatened him. While painting he nailed and wired his specimens into similar positions. Big birds, like pelicans, great herons, and Canada geese, were posed with their heads down so they could be painted at life size, or close to it, on a 26x39” page. Some of his specimens seem to have stiffened into grotesque positions. Birds’ necks naturally form curves and angles that look uncomfortable to humans; a living heron is as good an argument as a giraffe is for the claim that the Creator must have a sense of humor, but some of Audubon’s herons were hard to believe. I have never seen mockingbirds try to fly in the position one of Audubon’s mockingbirds seems to be flying in, either.

Audubon's language could be flowery, and his article on Bachman's Warblers raises the question whether these birds ever were a true, distinct species. Marylanders who wanted to believe they had a rare, endangered, vanishing, and finally agreed to be extinct, species have paid dearly to protect the habitat of what may have been merely a variety, all along. In the name of preserving Bachman's Warblers cats have been forbidden to hunt in otherwise pleasant parts of Maryland, allowing rats to reach the top of the food chain. 

Even Audubon's observations were imperfect. Mostly they are reliable even today, but we've learned more about typical bird behavior, especially the number of eggs laid in the average nest. Recent editions of Birds of America have footnotes correcting Audubon's average-brood-size counts. Audubon also through herons were solitary; they are of course solitary when fishing, which means most of the day, but they roost in great loud messy flocks. When fish are abundant, as when ponds have been stocked, I have seen a half-dozen herons fishing side by side on one sandbar, and when the shadow of a passing human did not disturb the fish it did not noticeably disturb the herons either. Most conspicuously of all, of course, Audubon mistook the young bald eagle for a separate species he called The Bird of Freedom.

Nevertheless, Audubon's paintings were magnificent, his stories about the birds he studied were often entertaining, his descriptions were precise, and with just a few explanatory footnotes his Birds of America is still a valuable reference work. More recent birdwatchers have dreamed of writing something like Birds of America for themselves, using their own observations and stories. 

Today a claim might be made that David Sibley's Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, taken together with his Field Guides, have reached that goal. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, no one was better qualified to emulate Birds of America than Roger Tory Peterson, already famous as the author and illustrator of Peterson's Field Guides to the Eastern and Western North American birds and founder of the series. He probably knew most of Bird of America by heart, with its few necessary corrections, and he had stories to tell of his and his friends' observations of these birds, "hunting" with cameras rather than guns, worthy to set beside Audubon's. So he was asked to write 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America, and he wrote it. It is of course shorter than Audubon's masterpiece, and was printed in a much smaller size, as if to say "Of course this book is only a successor,--no one would try to compete with Birds of America!" 

Here, anyhow, are 102 updated "biographies" to accompany smaller prints of Audubon's paintings--a modest, affordable, coffee-table book that explains, accurately, how young bald eagles have dark coats all over, and white feathers grow in on their heads after the first few molts, when the birds are four or five years old. And many other fun facts, many quoted directly from Audubon and some of Peterson's very own.

If you like watching the birds around your house and garden, or even at the local park, and you live in an Eastern State, this book will probably meet your reference needs for several years. The birds most people most often see are here. This book does not go into the details of how experts identify the other warblers of which Bachman's might have been a mutant or crossbred form, but does provide fun facts about palmated and piping plovers, herring gulls and sooty terns, red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks, sparrows and wrens and all the other favorites. 

Peterson was a cautious scientific observer. Over time, the works of cautious scientific observers seldom need to be changed--only added to.