An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it.)

John James Audubon was the 18-year-old illegitimate son of a French plantation owner when he arrived in America in the first years of the nineteenth century with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a difficult childhood now became his primary obsession. He set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person” — the first comprehensive guide to the continent’s birds, many of them never before described.)

Prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring.)

The minimal lessons in portraiture he had received as a boy in France had taught him nothing about drawing nature. So he decided to teach himself. “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples,” he winced at his first attempts. “So maimed were most of them that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle compared with the integrity of living men.” To improve his skills, he made an annual ritual of burning entire batches of drawings, resolving to redo those birds in the coming year. “After a few years of patience,” he wrote, “some of my attempts began almost to please me and I have continued the same style ever since.”)

He fell in love with an American girl born in England who made him at home in the new language, so that he could describe the birds he was drawing. He become increasingly lyrical in his writing. He changed his name — he was born Jean-Jacques Rabin — to sound American. He would soon be naming American birds new to the ornithological literature. (When he came upon an unusually small three-toed woodpecker never before described, Audubon named it Maria’s Woodpecker, after his friend Maria Martin — the botanical artist who drew most of the trees, flowers, and reeds on which his birds perch.))

Over the next three decades of his life, Audubon went on to paint and write about 435 birds, including several now extinct. He lavishes each bird with multiple pages of detailed description and anecdotes from his personal encounters, using vocabulary so beautiful that working with it felt like a cheat.)