JOHN JAMES AUDUBON
By W. F. Markwick and W. A. Smith
Our birds and our trees are often honored together on a Bird and Arbor Day. The names of many naturalists might be selected, whose biographies could fittingly be read on such an occasion; but none could be more appropriately chosen than that of John James Audubon, the American pioneer among the scientist lovers of both birds and trees.
In 1828 a wonderful book, The Birds of America, by John
James Audubon, was issued. It is a good illustration
of what has been accomplished by beginning in one's youth
to use the powers of observation. Audubon loved and
studied birds. Even in his infancy, lying under the orange5
trees on his father's plantation in Louisiana, he listened to
the mocking-bird's song, watching and observing every
motion as it flitted from bough to bough. When he was
older he began to sketch every bird that he saw, and soon
showed so much talent that he was taken to France to be 10
educated.
He entered cheerfully and earnestly upon his studies,
and more than a year was devoted to mathematics; but
whenever it was possible he rambled about the country,
using his eyes and fingers, collecting more specimens, and 15
sketching with such assiduity that when he left France,
only seventeen years old, he had finished two hundred
drawings of French birds. At this period he tells us that
"it was not the desire of fame which prompted to this
devotion; it was simply the enjoyment of nature." 20
A story is told of his lying on his back in the woods with
some moss for his pillow and looking through a telescopic
microscope day after day, to watch a pair of little birds
while they made their nest. Their peculiar gray plumage
harmonized with the color of the bark of the tree, so that it 5
was impossible to see the birds except by the most careful
observation. After three weeks of such patient labor,
he felt that he had been amply rewarded for the toil and
sacrifice by the results he had obtained.
His power of observation gave him great happiness, from 10
the time he rambled as a boy in the country in search of
treasures of natural history, till, in his old age, he rose with
the sun and went straightway to the woods near his home,
enjoying still the beauties and wonders of nature. His
strength of purpose and unwearied energy, combined with 15
his pure enthusiasm, made him successful in his work as a
naturalist; but it was all dependent on the habit formed
in his boyhood—this habit of close and careful observation;
and he not only had this habit of using his eyes but
he looked at and studied things worth seeing, worth 20
remembering.
This brief sketch of Audubon's boyhood shows the predominant
traits of his character—his power of observation,
the training of the eye and hand—that made him in manhood
"the most distinguished of American ornithologists," 25
with so much scientific ardor and perseverance that no expedition
seemed dangerous or solitude inaccessible when
he was engaged in his favorite study.
He has left behind him, as the result of his labors, his
great book, The Birds of America, in ten volumes, and 30
illustrated with four hundred and forty-eight colored plates
of over one thousand species of birds, all drawn by his own
hand, and each bird represented in its natural size; also a
Biography of American Birds, in five large volumes, in
which he describes their habits and customs. He was
associated with Dr. Bachman, of Philadelphia, in the preparation
of a work on The Quadrupeds of America, in six 5
large volumes, the drawings for which were made by his
two sons; and later on he published his Biography of American
Quadrupeds, a work similar to the Biography of American
Birds. He died at what is known as Audubon Park,
on the Hudson, now within the limits of New York city, in10
1851, at the age of seventy.
—The True Citizen.