American birds: Audubon was not the first

Many people believe that John James Audubon was the first American ornithologist, but in reality it was Alexander Wilson who was first, and probably gave Audubon the idea for his Birds of America. Because Audubon produced a much larger book, the double elephant folio, with larger and more artistic plates, he tends to get the credit. Yet it was really Wilson who started it all. In 1800, most books on American birds were based on static descriptions of dead or preserved specimens. Wilson’s great contribution was to base his drawings and observations on living birds. Without modern binoculars, this was no easy task! Yet, when I looked at Wilson’s Birds of America, I was impressed with the detail of Wilson’s illustrations together with the descriptions of behavior, plumage, reproduction and ecology of each species. Other than a rather charmingly verbose presentation, including occasional verses, it might well have been a modern bird book.In their book, Burtt and Davis begin with a summary of the major themes of Wilson’s life. These include topics like: “understanding God through nature,” “preservation amid abundance,” and “order out of chaos,” among others. The next section is a biography, followed by a section entitled “Illustrating American Ornithology,” which describes in considerable detail many of the details of the illustrations and the source material from which the formal plates were derived. This chapter then goes through bird by bird, showing the original sketches and Wilson’s comments on the bird and its behavior. It is by far the longest (216 pages) section of the book.A chapter entitled “On the frontier of ornithology” follows this. It repeats and amplifies some of the themes from the first chapter and from Wilson’s biography. For example, to unravel the confusion about oriole plumage, Wilson kept some birds in captivity, and observed them through several molts. There is also an account of Wilson with a wounded ivory-billed woodpecker that made a giant hole in the wall of a boarding house and then, when tethered to a table, managed to cut off the table leg. Or of a tame Carolina parakeet that Wilson would keep in his pocket and feed on cockleburs from his lips — sadly the bird was lost overboard when Wilson sailed home to Philadelphia.Wilson spent 6 years, visited 15 out of the 18 states, spent 19 months traveling over 12,000 miles by rowboat, ship, horseback and on foot so that he could personally observe most of the birds he depicted and described. Furthermore, Wilson was the first American ornithologist to use the Linnaean system of names and to apply it to the species he described. Finally, there is a fuller description of Wilson’s relationship to Audubon. When Wilson met him, Audubon was a storekeeper who painted portraits and gave drawing lessons for cash. When he saw Wilson’s first two volumes, a career opened before him and three months after Wilson’s visit, Audubon closed his shop and embarked on a career of painting birds. The final chapter describes Wilson’s legacy. But what was Wilson’s background and how did he become interested in birds?Alexander Wilson grew up in Scotland. His father was a silk weaver and a smuggler of fine whiskey. Wilson attended school until the age of 10 and then, when his mother died, after three years tending cows, was apprenticed to his brother-in-law as a weaver. During that time he read, composed poetry, hiked the countryside and acquired a gun to poach game for the family table. After his apprenticeship, he took a job at a weaver’s shop in Lochwinnoch, where his fellow weavers noticed his fondness for books and ease in writing verses.During this time Wilson was writing poems — his first book was published in 1790 and a second in 1791. They did not sell very many copies, but a poem he published anonymously “Watty and Meg”, sold more than 100,000 copies and was a huge success. In 1792 Wilson wrote a poem “The Shark; or Long Mills Detected”. The mill owner, W. Sharp had Wilson arrested and the court fined him 5 pounds and sentenced him to burn the offending poems on the courthouse steps. Finally, in 1794 Wilson was put in jail for circulating an advertisement for a meeting. At this point, Wilson decided to leave Scotland for America and so, at the end of May in 1794, he set sail, landing near Wilmington, Delaware.View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint SlideWilson spent his first years in America as an engraver, weaver and peddler. He taught school in several different places, learned how to survey to supplement his income and finally moved to the Union School of Kingsessing, outside Philadelphia. There he lived near the house of William Bartram, who was widely recognized as America’s foremost naturalist. By 1803 Wilson wrote to a friend back in Paisley, “I am now about to make a collection of all our finest birds.” This idea was largely due to Bartram’s encouragement; Wilson had begun to draw birds and to send the drawings to Bartram for suggestions. Wilson also had access to Bartram’s library as well as the scholarly libraries in Philadelphia.In the fall of 1804 Wilson made a journey to Niagara Falls. He left Philadelphia in early October and walked to Ovid, New York and then on to the falls. Returning home, he was running a little behind schedule so he walked 47 miles in one day! On the trip, Wilson collected two birds and sent paintings of them to Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States, who had published a list of the birds of Virginia and was known to be interested in birds. In 1806 Wilson wrote to the president again describing a proposal for a new ornithology of the United States with 100 drawings completed and two folio plates already engraved. Later that year, Wilson took a job as assistant editor at Bradford and Inskeep, one of the foremost American publishers. Wilson wasted no time in approaching the owner, Samuel Bradford, about his birds of America. Bradford agreed to publish it if Wilson could sell 200 subscriptions.In April 1807 a prospectus was printed and Bradford sent Wilson to New York on company business and to solicit subscriptions for the Birds of America. He sold a few subscriptions, but many booksellers wanted to see the first volume before committing. On returning to Philadelphia, Wilson was greatly cheered to find a letter from Jefferson requesting a subscription. So, in 1808 the first volume of American Ornithology was published in 250 copies. Now that Bradford had fulfilled his part of the bargain, it was up to Wilson to find more subscriptions. In September 1808 Wilson traveled to New York and then through New England. While he received lots of compliments, he garnered only 41 subscriptions. But he did enlist ‘correspondents’ who would help him gather information on the birds in their areas. But he needed more subscriptions, so in December of 1808 Wilson traveled to Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. Arriving in Washington, DC on the 17th of December, Wilson knocked on the door of the White House and, after some negotiation with assistants, spent the afternoon with President Jefferson and personally gave him the first volume of his subscription. The trip was a financial success with 250 subscriptions sold.Returning to Philadelphia, volume 2 was completed in 1810 and Wilson then left, walking to Pittsburgh where he bought a rowboat. He then rowed to Louisville, Kentucky some 720 miles downstream. With the first two volumes of his book in hand, Wilson visited local merchants, including the shop of John James Audubon. Audubon did not buy a subscription, but he showed Wilson some of his bird paintings. Wilson complimented Audubon on the quality of his paintings, but was surprised to learn that Audubon had no plans to publish them. Wilson and Audubon spent two days hunting together, and then Wilson went on to Nashville, Tennessee and finally New Orleans, from where he sailed for New York.Great heron. From the archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University.View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint SlideWilson now had 450 subscriptions and could afford to devote all his time to American Ornithology. This time also marked the beginning of Wilson’s friendship with George Ord, a wealthy ship chandler whose undiplomatic defense of Wilson eventually alienated Audubon. By February of 1811 Wilson had completed volumes 3, 4, and 5 and volume 6 was well advanced by the Spring of 1812. But now Wilson faced a ‘cash flow’ problem. He made a trip to New England to raise money, but, on returning to Philadelphia, he found that all the colorists had quit. Their resignation left Wilson with some 4,050 plates to hand color for volume 7 and he managed to do that himself as well as to write the text and to oversee publication. In July, 1813 the 8th volume was in press but in August, Wilson became very ill and died in August of 1813. It was left to George Ord to complete volume 9.Overall, this is a very interesting and well-written book. I found the organization somewhat curious in that the same subjects are treated in several different chapters in varying detail. This organization leads to considerable repetition, but at the same time, each chapter treats Wilson’s work from a different perspective. Overall, Burtt and Davis give a vivid portrait of a remarkable person who had quite modern ideas about how to describe birds, their behavior and their habitats.