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“Birds . . . more beautiful than in Europe”

IT WAS A COOL, lightly foggy day along the midcoast of Maine, the cries of herring gulls mixing with the throb of lobster boat engines out in Muscongus Bay. A dozen and a half birders were strung out along a beaver pond, spotting scopes perched atop tripods, their binoculars focused on a tangle of blueberry bushes and scraggly, head-high tamaracks that poked up from the boggy mat of sphagnum moss spangled with tiny pink orchids.

Bonnie Bochan, an ornithologist who splits her time between Maine and the Ecuadorian rain forest, stared intently at the thicket, from which a thin, slow trill emerged. “That’s a swamp sparrow,” Bonnie said quietly. “It sounds a lot like the pine warblers and juncos we’ve been hearing, but its trill isn’t as musical as the junco’s, and it’s not as fast as the pine warbler’s—you can almost count each syllable.” As though on cue, the sparrow itself hopped into view, tipped back its head and sang—a dusky bird with bright rufous wings and a dark brown cap, the feathers of its white throat quivering in song.

A little sigh rippled through the group; for most of them, this was a new species, a life bird, and some had come from as far away as California to see it. A few were experienced birders, most of the others complete novices, but all were dressed, as birders are wont to do, with more of an eye toward practicality than fashion—nylon pants tucked into socks, wide-brimmed Gortex hats snugged under chins, outsized vests with pockets big enough for field guides, bug repellent, and water bottles. They wore mismatched rain pants and coats of differing vintage and color, but always muted—nothing so bright that it would scare the birds.

I glanced down at myself: shabby green rain pants, a dark blue raincoat that had seen better days, a scruffy ball cap, and worn boots. Except for the expensive binoculars around my neck, I looked a bit like a hobo. I fit in perfectly.

Every summer, I help teach a course in field ornithology on this surpassingly lovely part of the Maine coast, at an Audubon camp on Hog Island, a 330-acre sanctuary near the town of Damaris-cotta. For more than seventy years, birders have been coming to this spruce-clad island, including some of the greatest names in birding and bird science. When the island was donated to the National Audubon Society in 1936, NAS director John Baker dispatched a young grad student named Olin Sewall Pettingill Jr. to inspect the place, with an eye toward turning it into an educational camp for adults. Pettingill—who later became the director of the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology—gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up, so Baker turned to the question of staffing. He had just the fellow to teach about birds—a chap named Roger Tory Peterson, who had published a revolutionary field guide two years earlier, and had just been placed in charge of Audubon’s education program. Peterson—in his twenties, single and good-looking—competed for birds (and for the attention of the young women campers) with Allan Cruickshank, another Audubon staffer who would go on to fame as a writer and bird photographer.

The list goes on and on, from John James Audubon, who passed through the area in 1832–33, to Rachel Carson, who lived just down the coast and wrote about the old ship’s chandlery on Hog Island. Kenn Kaufman, who has lifted Peterson’s mantle as one of the great popularizers of birding, is an instructor. Audubon scientist Steve Kress worked in the camp kitchen one summer as a college kid, in his spare time reading accounts of the old seabird colonies in the Gulf of Maine and wondering if the birds could somehow be brought back to places like lonely Eastern Egg Rock, nine miles offshore. Today, he is a pioneer in seabird restoration, and thanks to him, puffins again nest on Eastern Egg and many other Maine islands.

Kids keep coming to Hog Island, and dreaming. Along with the thirty-five adults, we had more than a dozen eager teen birders in camp that week, including Eve, whose bleached, bobbed hair had been dyed pink and orange, and Raymond, intense, focused, and mature beyond his seventeen years. Two years earlier, I’d taught Raymond’s best friend Ryan, and I was shocked when, the following summer, Ryan had been killed in a car crash while the two boys were on a birding trip. The wreck had almost killed Raymond, too, but he’d survived, and was following through on plans he and Ryan had made, continuing with a sophisticated research project they’d begun together to study the rosy-finches of the New Mexico mountains.

Birding and ornithology; sport and science; amateur and professional. The gulf between the two seems pretty wide today, but in fact it’s a fairly recent phenomenon. For most of the history of bird study, there was no such division; the ornithologists were all gifted amateurs, and the science of studying birds was enmeshed with the joy of watching them. Even today, as Raymond’s project shows, the threads that link hobby and profession are thick and entangling. “Citizen-science” is the buzzword for public participation in all manner of censuses, surveys, and field research projects, but it goes deeper than that. One friend of mine, the man who knows more about ruby-throated hummingbirds than almost anyone in the world, is a retired electrician, and he’s hardly alone. Every fall, I oversee an owl migration study, one combining banding, genetics, and radiotelemetry. Among the nearly one hundred people helping out are, not surprisingly, several wildlife biologists donating their time—but my crew also includes a plumber, a math teacher, a retired soft-drink executive, and a former music teacher who repairs pianos.

And it’s hard to find an academically trained ornithologist with a string of initials after his or her name who isn’t also an avid birder. I don’t know many structural engineers who devote their free time to visiting highway overpasses for fun, but there is something about birds that makes even those whose nine-to-five jobs are ornithological pick up their binoculars as soon as the workday is finished. That’s because in almost every case, the job followed the passion, not the other way around. Call it all “bird study,” and forget the distinctions.

The number of people with that passion keeps growing, too. Just as the birders keep swarming to Hog Island each year, so do they jam the trails at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas looking for chachalacas and whistling-ducks, or the scrubby thickets of Cape May, New Jersey, when the warblers are dropping from the sky and the merlins and peregrines are hurtling past the dunes. They come to Point Reyes on the northern California coast, to Point Pelee in Lake Erie, and Whitefish Point in Michigan; they know that the rocky man-made islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel attract the damndest rarities, like western rock wrens and Asian black-tailed gulls, and they made an obscure roadside rest stop near Patagonia, Arizona, so celebrated for the exotic Mexican birds that turn up there that the phrase “Patagonia picnic-table effect” entered the lexicon.

Birders stalk Central Park in Manhattan, the Mount Auburn cemetery near Boston, and Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC; they haunt the man-made Bellona Marsh in Los Angeles, Agua Caliente Park in Tucson, and Sauvie Island near Portland. They have made famous, at least within their circles, places that would make the general public blanch: the landfill at Brownsville, Texas, where you can usually find Chihuahuan ravens and an occasional Tamaulipan crow (and proximity to which is an actual selling point for nearby RV parks that cater to birders); or sewage treatment lagoons like Mitchell Lake in San Antonio, which is so birdy it has its own Audubon center. Among the hundreds of sites along the Nebraska Birding Trail are stops at sewage lagoons in Oshkosh and North Platte, but sadly, not everyone sees the attraction; the committee creating a Washington State birding trail specifically nixed including such lagoons on its list of hot spots, saying, “There may be birds, but sewage lagoons are not tourist attractions.” Which tells me the people creating the Washington birding trail weren’t really birders. Did they miss the article in Birding magazine a few years back, “North America’s Topflight Sewage Ponds”? There’s nothing like a good whiff of primary effluent to clear the sinuses on a cold morning.

How many of us are there? The latest surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggest there are 46 million birders in the United States, while another study, also sponsored by the feds but looking at all outdoor recreation, put the figure at 67.8 million—either of which would be impressive, if it were accurate. The USFWS, for instance, counts as a birder anyone who makes an effort to watch or attract birds, which means anyone who hangs a sunflower feeder or plants ornamental sage in the hope of luring hummingbirds is a “birder,” whether or not they ever crack open a field guide or join a Christmas Bird Count. (Of those 46 million, the USFWS admitted only 6 million could identify more than twenty species of birds.) But these and other studies agree that birding is one of (if not the) fastest-growing outdoor hobbies in the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, the last period for which numbers are available, it grew at more than 155 percent, more than twice the rate for the next-closest sport, hiking.

It was not always so, of course. Birding as a popular hobby in America was a phenomenon of the twentieth century, especially the decades after World War II, fueled by greater leisure time, affordable optics, and good field guides that made sense of the pleasantly confusing welter of species that fill the forests and marshes. But bird study itself, the foundation on which modern American birding rests, goes back much further than that—back through the nineteenth century, when frontier ornithologists risked an arrow between the ribs to collect new birds, back through the eighteenth and even the seventeenth centuries, back to the dawn of colonization, when the avian wonders of a new continent were unfolding before amazed Caucasian eyes, and exciting the interest of scientists in the Old World. The history of bird study on this continent is bound up with tales of liars, drunks, slave-runners and scoundrels of every unfortunate stripe. They were, in a few luminous cases, also brilliant naturalists in the bargain—and they were, not incidentally, the men who discovered America for Europe.

 

THE FIRST AMERICAN field ornithologists were the Indians, of course, whose knowledge of birdlife was based on deep association, long observation, and at times lifesaving necessity. Birds featured prominently in the social, religious, medical, and (naturally) gastronomic life of North America’s myriad Native tribes, but tragically, much of this traditional ornithology was lost to warfare, disease, and assimilation once the Europeans arrived. A lot of what’s left comes to us through the decidedly unreliable lens of accounts written by non-Indians.

Birds populated many Native stories and myths. The raven—often depicted as a morally ambiguous trickster deity—figures prominently in many cultures, particularly in the Arctic and Pacific Northwest. Birds played a role in many creation stories, like the crow who nags the Creator in Lakota mythology into creating dry land from an eternity of water. Other stories spoke of the origin of the birds themselves. According to one tradition among the Chiricahua Apache, the hero Child of the Water killed a buffalo, filled its intestines with blood, and wrapped himself in them, waiting for a hungry golden eagle to carry him back to its aerie. There, he killed both adults with his stone ax, and all of the eaglets save one, which he forced to carry him back down from the high cliff. Then Child of the Water killed that eagle, too, and, pulling out the feathers from the dead raptors, scattered them to the winds, saying, “Let these become all varieties of birds!” In this way, the Apache said, Child of the Water created the birds of the Southwest.

The serendipitously named George Bird Grinnell, a pioneering ornithologist who later founded the first Audubon Society, spent years with the Plains tribes, beginning in the 1870s, recording their stories. In one Blackfoot tale from Montana that Grinnell learned, the trickster figure Old Man fools a bunch of ducks into dancing with their eyes closed while he knocks them on the head, one by one, for his meal; at last, the smallest duck peeks, sees what’s happening, and sounds the alarm. This bird became “the red-eyed duck,” the Blackfoot elders said, the wary horned grebe that is always the first to spot danger.

Native mythology often used birds to tell moral tales, like fables the world over. In other cases, however, Indians passed on to ethnographers what they considered the mundane details of the natural world—and it sometimes took western science a long time to catch up. The Hopi knew the poorwill, a western relative of the whip-poor-will and common nighthawk, as hölchoko, “the sleeping one,” believing it passed the winter in a deathlike trance. What ignorant balderdash, white ornithologists scoffed—until in the 1940s several hibernating poorwills were found in the California desert. (Sadly, I don’t know the Hopi term for “We told you so.”)

So while almost every history of American ornithology begins in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia with Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon casting the mold of this branch of science (and the modern boom of recreational birding that grew from it, and repeatedly merged with it), they were hardly the first to give serious thought to the New World’s birdlife. In fact, they weren’t even the first Europeans to do so. The young Englishman Mark Catesby spent the better part of two decades, beginning in 1712, describing, collecting, and painting the plants and animals of the Southeast, and his work was built on that of earlier explorers dating back as much as a century and a half.

From almost the very first moment that European ships dropped anchor in the waters of North America, the visitors made awed note of the continent’s teeming skies and waterways, alive with birds. And if these early accounts lacked the scientific rigor that others later brought to the endeavor, they do offer a priceless glimpse of an aboriginal land and its wildlife.

The Vikings, so far as we know, were the first Europeans to find themselves in North America, exploring and briefly settling Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritimes around A.D. 1000. Their oral histories, finally written down in the thirteenth century as the Graenlendinga Saga, give scant notice to birds, except to comment on unusually rich seabird colonies in the North Atlantic, or when the presence of birds signaled the approach of land.

The Spaniards, focused with tunnel vision on gold, slaves, and converts, glossed over much mention of birds; the memoirs of Cabeza de Vaca—who fought his way through Florida, then was shipwrecked near Galveston in 1528 and spent eight years in the Southwest, trying to get back to Mexico—makes only passing mention of birds, and then only in terms of food. Later conquistadors did little better, and the first significant attention by Europeans to the western hemisphere’s birds came from the French and English. In 1562, a French expedition to the coasts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina reported (in the contemporary English translation) “faire meadows . . . full of Hernes, Curlues, Bitters, Mallards, Egrepths, Woodcocks, and all other kinds of small birds.” Jacques Le Moyne, an artist who in 1564 spent a year with the French garrison near present-day Beaufort, South Carolina, drew wild turkey gobblers in full display, along with alligators, manatees, and deer.

But the story of early American ornithology is largely an English one, beginning with John White. A man of somewhat mysterious origins, White left a limited but remarkable visual record of sixteenth-century wildlife near the colony of Roanoke, on the North Carolina coast. Little is known about him, and any discussion of him is peppered with uncertainties; he may have had a background in engineering, and he almost certainly had formal training as an artist. White may also have seen quite a bit of North America before he even arrived in Roanoke; historians believe he may have been part of the 1577 Frobisher expedition to the Arctic (his painting of a battle with the Inuit, they argue, could only have been made by an eyewitness), and it’s also suspected that he was part of the 1584 Amadas and Barlowe expedition along the East Coast.

The Englishmen who visited North America in the sixteenth century were staggered by the natural wealth they saw—the forests, the prosperous Indian villages with their lush gardens, the game and wild birds. “Having discharged our harquebuz-shot,” captains Amadas and Barlowe wrote, “such a flocke of Cranes (the most part white) arose under us, with such a cry redoubled by many ecchoes, as if an armie of men had showted all together.” That is the kind of spectacle that greeted White in 1585 when he returned to America as the staff artist for Roanoke.

White’s orders were to “drawe to lief one of each kinde of thing that is strange to us in England.” And it was all strange and wondrous to an English eye, so White’s paintbrush flew across the page. Even though some of his paintings were eventually lost, what remain are of immense historical value. White is best known for his many watercolors of Indian life and culture—robust societies before the decimation of European epidemics—but he also painted a variety of animals, including an alligator, a catfish, and a sea turtle, and more than thirty species of birds, among them brown pelican, bald eagle, eastern towhee, and Baltimore oriole.

White eventually rose to become governor of Roanoke, and his daughter and son-in-law became the parents of the first English child born in America, Virginia Dare. She and the rest of the colonists had, however, disappeared without a trace by 1590, when White returned from England with supply ships. Obscurity was also the fate of White’s bird paintings; while the Indian watercolors were published, as engravings, in 1590, his animal art languished for more than a century before coming to light again in England.

Such attention as White’s to the specifics of the New World’s birdlife was rare, however. The Spaniards, gold-hungry to the last, left almost no record of what birds they encountered in Florida or the Southwest. The English, on the other hand, weren’t looking as single-mindedly for treasure; many of the gentlemen adventurers who wrote about America were essentially land speculators, eager to convert royal land-grants into income by selling their version of paradise to potential colonists back in England. Birds thus became one more item in a laundry list of enticements, to be dangled before an eager audience.

“Squirels, Conies, Black Birds with crimson wings, and divers other Fowles and Birds of divers and sundrie collours of crimson, Watchet, Yellow, Greene, Murry, and of divers other hewes naturally without any art using,” wrote George Percy in 1606, tallying what he’d seen in his visit to Virginia. “We found store of Turkie nests and many Egges, if it had not beene disliked, because the ship could not ride neere the shoare, we had setled there to all the Collonies contentment.”

“The Turkyes of that Countrie are great, and fat, and exceeding in plentie,” agreed the Council for Virginia, in 1610. “The rivers from August, or September, till February, are covered with flocks of Wildfoule: as swannes, geese, ducke, mallard, teal, wigeons, hearons, bitters, curlewes, godwights, plovers, snights, dottrels, cormerants . . . in such abundance as are not in all the world to be equalled.”

The fact that the council’s report was titled A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia, With a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise might have given a suspicious reader pause. But by all accounts (even those not trying to spin a financial angle) the New World was bursting at the seams with birds. “Turkyes” were mentioned at every opportunity, with some observers claiming with straight faces that the wild gobblers exceeded sixty pounds. “Fowls of the air are plentiful here, and of all sorts as we have in England as far as I can learn, and a great many of strange fowls which we know not,” wrote the Reverend Francis Higginson about Massachusetts, in 1629. “Here are likewise [an] abundance of turkeys often killed in the woods, far greater than our English turkeys, and exceeding fat, sweet and fleshy.“^*

Another species that came in for frequent, and unsurprising, mention were the immense flocks of passenger pigeons that migrated through eastern forests. William Penn gushed about them, and Higginson said he’d seen the hordes and eaten them, finding them good. Then he made an astute observation. “They are of all colours as ours are, but their wings and tails are far longer, and therefore it is likely they fly swifter to escape the terrible hawks in this country.” “Turkie cockes and Turkie hennes: Stockdoves [another name for passenger pigeons], Partridges, Cranes, Hernes & in winter great store of Swannes & Geese,” reported Thomas Hariot (or Harriot), the scientist who accompanied White to Roanoke. “There are also Parats, Faulcons & Marlin haukes.”

A modern birder may search in vain through a field guide for many of the species mentioned in these old accounts. Parats? Marlin haukes? And what on earth is a snight? In fairness, these Englishmen were doing the best they could with make-it-up-as-you-go spelling and often a casual familiarity (at best) with birds—and one usually gained, at that, over the barrel of a gun back in England. For the most part, they did fairly well. Marlin haukes were merlins, the same species of sleek, speedy falcon found in the Old World, while snights were in all likelihood snipe. As for parats, that one is easy, if bittersweet; it seems certain Hariot was describing Carolina parakeets, eastern North America’s only native parrot, a green-and-orange dazzler that ranged as far north as Illinois and New York in large, screeching, spectacular flocks.

Among the most interesting accounts, and one often lost in Catesby’s shadow (as Catesby is often lost in Audubon’s), are the writings of John Lawson, who in 1709 published A New Voyage to Carolina, a report of his two-month journey from the coast of South Carolina up into the hill country and back to the coast of North Carolina. Lawson was a surveyor and land speculator, and he must have had an impetuous streak; he had prepared to travel to Rome, when a casual acquaintance mentioned how fine the land was in Carolina—and with that, Lawson canceled his passage to Rome, hopped a different ship, and spent the next eight years in the New World.

As his book makes clear, he was not one of those “Persons of the meaner Sort, and generally of a very slender Education; who, at their Return, [are] uncapable of giving any reasonable Account of what they met.” Lawson was a fine naturalist and a keen observer, whether it was of Indian customs or the quality of the soil. Wildlife, particularly birds, come up frequently in his narrative; in fact, he went so far as to declaim, “Birds in America [are] more beautiful than in Europe.”

While Lawson shared the usual habit of exaggerating the size of wild turkeys (“I never weigh’d any myself, but have been inform’d of one that weigh’d near sixty Pound Weight”), he was precise in many of his other descriptions, as of this first encounter with the male wood duck, or “scarlet ey’d duck,” as he called it. “We all set out for Sapona, killing, in these Creeks, several Ducks of a strange Kind, having a red Circle about their Eyes, like some Pigeons that I have seen, a Top-knot reaching from the Crown of their Heads, almost to the middle of their Backs, and abundance of Feathers of pretty Shades and Colours.”

Lawson’s report includes a detailed appendix—a modern birder would call it an annotated checklist—on the wildlife of the Carolinas, including at least 136 species of birds, though he acknowledged that others may have “slipt” his memory. Lawson correctly noted the presence of two species of swans in winter—“trompeters” and “hoopers,” the former larger and found in freshwater, the other restricted to coastal areas; we know them as trumpeter and tundra swans today, though trumpeters have been long extirpated from the region. He correctly noted that many species of waterfowl and some shorebirds were similar to those in England (a fact that some observers as late as Thomas Jefferson disputed), and for the most part, the natural history information he relayed was accurate.

Of the “Mocking-Bird,” he said, “they sing with the greatest Diversity of Notes, that is possible for a Bird to change to . . . They often sit upon our Chimneys in Summer, there being then no Fire in them, and sing the whole Evening and most part of the Night.” Lawson also noted what he called “the Ground-Mocking-Bird. She is the same bigness, and of a Cinnamon Colour. This Bird sings excellently well, but is not so common amongst us as the former”—not a bad description of a brown thrasher.

While the names may seem archaic and at times altogether incomprehensible, Lawson’s descriptions are usually good enough to determine what he meant. The Old Wife, which he said “makes a dismal Noise, as he flies, and ever and anon dips his Bill in the Salt-Water,” was the black skimmer. Sand-Birds appear to be sanderlings, “about the Bigness of a Lark, [they] frequent our Sand-Beaches; they are a dainty Food, if you will bestow Time and Ammunition to kill them.”

He, too, remarked on both Parrakeetos “of a green Colour, and Orange-Colour’d half way their Head,” and wild pigeons, “which were so numerous in these Parts, that you might see many Millions in a Flock; they sometimes split off the Limbs of stout Oaks, and other Trees, upon which they roost o’ Nights . . . At this time of the Year, the Flocks, as they pass by, in great measure, obstruct the Light of the day.” But Lawson’s greatest enthusiasm—like that of many early English explorers—was reserved for the ruby-throated hummingbird, which was such a marvel that the first reports were dismissed as moonshine by the learned folk back home.

 

The Humming-Bird is the Miracle of all our wing’d Animals; He is feather’d as a Bird, and gets his Living as the Bees, by sucking the Honey from each Flower. In some of the larger sort of Flowers, he will bury himself, by diving to suck the bottom of it, so that he is quite cover’d, and oftentimes Children catch them in those Flowers, and keep them alive for five or six days. They are of different Colours, the Cock differing from the Hen. The Cock is of a green, red, Aurora, and other Colours mixt. He is much less than a Wren, and very nimble. His Nest is one of the greatest Pieces of Workmanship the whole Tribe of wing’d Animals can shew, it commonly hanging on a single Bryar, most artificially woven, a small Hole being left to go in and out at. The Eggs are the Bigness of Pease.

 

Lawson was, for his day, unusually sympathetic to the Indians; writing of the Tuscaroras, he admitted, “They are really better to us, than we are to them; they always give us Victuals at their Quarters, and take care we are arm’d against Hunger and Thirst: We do not so by them (generally speaking) but let them walk by our Doors Hungry, and do not often relieve them.”

Among the many customs Lawson described among the local tribes was a particularly gruesome form of torture, in which the victim was impaled with hundreds of pitch pine slivers, then set afire. In this he may have been morbidly prophetic. In 1711, not long after writing to his sponsor in England that he was undertaking a comprehensive natural history of North Carolina, Lawson set out for the lands of the Tuscarora, even though tensions were running high over encroachments by the English for which Lawson, as surveyor-general, was in some measure responsible. Lawson and his companions were seized, and while the rest of the party was eventually released, Lawson was executed—by being set afire, according to some reports, though at other times the Tuscarora said he’d been hanged, or his throat slashed. Regardless, it was the opening act of the two-year Tuscarora War, which ended as disastrously for the tribe as for its first victim.

In April 1712, however, a young Englishman arrived in the colonies, hungry for their natural wonders, who picked up Lawson’s mantle (and, it must be said, appropriated some of his and John White’s work along the way). At first, however, there was little to distinguish Mark Catesby as a rising star of natural history. In his early thirties, he came from a landed, rather genteel family with excellent connections in Virginia, where an older sister had married a wealthy doctor serving as the colony’s secretary of state.

What little we know about Catesby suggests he was then a bit of a dilettante; not especially well-educated, though he seems to have picked up an interest in botany from relatives back in England, where he despaired of living in the country, “too remote from London the Center of all Science”; and with no real art background beyond the general introduction a young gentleman would likely receive. Catesby himself left no diary and relatively few letters, so the man who would become pivotal in the development of American ornithology remains something of a cipher.

He spent the next seven years wandering around the countryside, west as far as the Appalachians, and with one sea voyage to Jamaica, but by his own admission, he did little with the opportunity. “In the Seven Years I resided in that Country, (I am ashamed to own it) I chiefly gratified my Inclination in observing and admiring the various Productions of those Countries,” he lamented.

Something changed, however, once Catesby returned to England, in 1719. He had not been completely idle in America—he’d shipped botanical specimens and live plants to Chelsea Gardens in England, among others—and his experiences gained him entrée with influential men, some of whom had been correspondents of Lawson’s. Now they encouraged him to take up the project his predecessor’s death had cut short. Catesby assembled a cadre of important sponsors, including the incoming governor of South Carolina, who agreed to underwrite his further explorations. This was almost derailed by an opportunity to join an expedition to Africa, but that never materialized, and in the spring of 1722, Catesby embarked for the New World once again, landing three months later in Charlestown, South Carolina.

The once-dilettante now had a mission—to create an exhaustive natural history of the American Southeast. It’s hard to say what changed—maturity, the recognition of an opportunity to further science, or simple economics, since what modest means Catesby had once enjoyed were now largely gone and he was relying on what his “curious friends” would pay for the specimens he regularly shipped home to England. In any event, he buckled down over the next four years, traipsing around the Carolinas and Georgia, from the coast up into the mountains, “which afforded not only a Succession of new vegetable Appearances, but [the] most delightful Prospects imaginable, besides the Diversion of Hunting Buffello’s, Bears, Panthers, and other wild Beasts,” into Florida and out to the Bahamas.

Plans to visit Mexico apparently fell through, but Catesby was now in a frenzy of activity, collecting, preserving, and painting plants, birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates, and reptiles. He drew the “Largest White-bill Wood-pecker,” the first-ever depiction of the ivory-billed woodpecker; he took note of the ferocious territoriality of the eastern kingbird, which he called “the tyrant,” writing later that he saw one batten on to the back of an eagle, forcing the larger bird to eventually land. Confounded in his attempts to collect a yellow-breasted chat, he finally hired an Indian to shoot one. He took painted bunting chicks from the nest, keeping them as pets, though ruefully noting that “when they are brought into this cold Climate, they lose much of their Lustre.”

Some of the paintings he shipped back to his sponsors, along with specimens, though not all of the latter survived the ocean crossing; Catesby frequently preserved whole animals in spirits, and sailors—who would hardly let an embalmed rattlesnake stand in the way of a drink—had a habit of tippling away the contents. Birds were crudely stuffed, then safeguarded from insects by dousing the skins with powdered tobacco.

Back to England he sailed in 1726, ready to convert his observations, collections, notes, and paintings into a book—and instead found himself hard against a financial wall. Many of the sponsorships he’d been relying upon in America dried up, since he was no longer sending back specimens, and Catesby was forced to seek a loan from a friend, the Quaker botanist Peter Collinson, and to work as a nurseryman—no doubt growing many of the very North American plants he’d helped introduce to England. For three years he worked as best he could on the first volume of his book, learning to do the engraving and hand-coloring of the plates himself to save money.

The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands came out piecemeal beginning in 1729—issued in installments of twenty plates and accompanying text over the next three years—and the reception could hardly have been more gratifying. Besides brisk sales in England and abroad, the book brought Catesby scientific acclaim, including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. It eased his financial situation, and he was able to afford professional engraving and coloring on the plates for volume 2, which began appearing in 1734 and were completed nine years later.

Catesby’s book is generally credited with being the first true ornithological text dealing with American birds, but it owed heavily to the work of Lawson and White—some of which Catesby credited, and some of which he did not. When writing of Indians, he gave ample credit to Lawson’s “curious sketch of the natural dispositions, customs, etc. of these savages,” saying that his observations confirmed what Lawson had written, and suggesting that there was no need for him to reinvent the wheel.

But as ornithologist Alan Feduccia and others have noted, the overall structure of Catesby’s text was strikingly similar to Lawson’s, right down to some of the descriptions, such as that of the white-tailed deer. Such borrowing was common in those days, and even egregious plagiarism did not carry the same stigma it does today. In fact, this was not even the worst case of intellectual theft regarding poor Lawson’s work; the 1737 Natural History of North-Carolina, written by (and one uses the term loosely) John Brickell, is essentially a verbatim copy of Lawson’s book. But to his discredit, Catesby also directly cribbed seven of John White’s 1588 engravings of fish, an iguana, and a swallow-tailed butterfly, for volume 2, tracing them so that his own depictions were reversed, and not crediting his source.

 

English naturalist Mark Catesby painted a heath hen—the now-extinct eastern race of the greater prairie-chicken—along with the flowers of a shooting-star, for his book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas, which began appearing in installments in 1729.

Courtesy of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Ewell Sale Stewart Library

 

In the end, none of this really diminishes the importance of Catesby’s work, which finally lit the spark of widespread interest in American ornithology. There were 220 reasons for this—the handsome plates engraved from his watercolors. Catesby was a self-taught artist and made no bones about it: “As I was not bred a Painter I hope some faults in Perspective, and other Niceties, may be more readily excused,” he wrote in his preface. But in his day, the critics were few.

While Catesby’s work may seem stiff to us today, it was groundbreaking for its time. He first had the idea, later brilliantly developed by Audubon, of placing the bird with an element of its environment, like the bough of a tree or shrub—not some generic bit of floral stage-dressing, but a specific, closely rendered specimen that added another layer of scientific value to the illustration. He also claimed to have painted all but a few of his birds from life, rather than specimens, though in most cases it’s likely Catesby used both.

He painted more birds than anything else, and made the rather bold claim that he’d left almost no species unpainted: “I was induced chiefly (so far as I could) to compleat an Account of them . . . by which Method I believe very few Birds have escaped my Knowledge, except some Water Fowl and some of those which frequent the Sea.” In fact, his book listed 116 birds, which when duplicates are taken into account (like the “brown bittern” and “crested bittern,” which were the adult and immature forms of the yellow-crowned night-heron) comes to 109 species, fewer even than the 136 Lawson tallied. That’s about what a modern birder could expect to find in a good weekend during migration—a slim list, it may seem, for many years’ work in the field.

But consider how many birds pass through the Carolinas in a matter of a few weeks in migration, and stay in the forest canopy—small, fast-flitting warblers and vireos, the kind that birders depend on sharp hearing, knowledge of birdsong, and good binoculars to pick out; it’s really no wonder Catesby missed so many of them. Though he did include some of the more obvious and common forest songbirds, like the hooded warbler and the American redstart, it is puzzling why Catesby missed some of the most conspicuous species of the region, like any of the large buteos; several of the biggest egrets and herons, including the great blue; and the great horned owl (a bird Lawson included, “big as a middling goose”), and all but half a dozen species of waterfowl, including mallards, both species of swans, and the snow geese that Lawson said were plentiful along the North Carolina coast.

Each plate was accompanied by a brief description and an account of the life histories of the species he portrayed. In this, Catesby did a fine job, though sprinkled among his own observations was a dash of folklore, which he credulously passed on to his readers, and inaccurate bits and pieces of Lawson’s earlier work, such as the claim that turkey vultures often kill snakes.

Catesby was the first to state that the guts of Carolina parakeets are “certain and speedy poison to Cats,” a claim Alexander Wilson tried to confirm a century later. Wilson—rather cold-bloodedly—used his own cats, which survived, and Audubon tried much the same experiment on his dog, with similar results. But as Wilson himself noted, the captive parakeets he used had been feeding on corn, not their usual diet of cockleburs—a plant known to be toxic to livestock, and whose chemicals might linger in the birds’ digestive tracts. Researchers today wonder if Catesby was on to something besides folklore; if the parakeets enjoyed a kind of secondary toxic defense from their food, as do monarch butterfly caterpillars feeding on milkweed, or poison-dart frogs feeding on toxic ants, it might explain why large flocks of parakeets were able to roost in hollow trees, where one would expect them to be at risk from climbing predators, like raccoons.

Catesby was also the first to record the piracy of bald eagles stealing fish from ospreys, and he correctly credited the turkey vulture with “a wonderful sagacity in smelling.” Audubon later tested—and thought he had conclusively refuted—this idea by covering a fetid carcass with a tarp; vultures ignored it. Only recently have ornithologists shown that not only do turkey vultures possess a highly developed sense of smell, they also exhibit more refined tastes than anyone gave them credit for. It turns out they prefer their meat fairly fresh, and simply turned up their beaks at what Audubon was offering.

The annual arrival and departure of “Birds of Passage” was of particular interest to Catesby, and it is here that we see most clearly the sharp mind of an observant naturalist at work. He rejected the idea, still prevalent in the eighteenth century, that migratory birds hibernated in caves or hollow trees, or in the depths of the ocean—“Notions so ill attested and absurd in themselves, that they deserve no farther Notice,” he said. “If the Immenseness of the Globe be considered, and the vast Tracts of land remaining unknown but to its barbarous Natives, ‘tis no Wonder we are yet unacquainted with the Retreats of these itinerant Birds.”

Catesby was aware of the nocturnal, oceanic migration of the bobolink, having heard their distinctive flight notes as flocks passed over his ship in the Bahamas. He incorrectly assumed the “ricebirds” were flying from Cuba north to the Carolinas, when in fact, the birds would have been on their way from North America to the grasslands of South America. But his experiences led him to make a significant deduction about such birds.

“The Place to which they retire,” he argued, “is probably in the same Latitude of the southern Hemisphere, or where they may enjoy the like Temperature of Air, as in the Country from whence they came: By this Change they live in perpetual Summer, which seems absolutely necessary for their Preservation, because all Summer Birds of Passage subsist on Insects only, and have tender Bills adapted to it, and consequently are unable to subsist in a cold Country, particularly Swallows, Martins, and a few others that feed only on the Wing.”

One such bird was “the American swallow,” his name for the chimney swift, which he guessed passed the winter in “most probably Brazil . . . where, the seasons reverting, they may, by this alternate change, enjoy the year round an agreeable equality of climate.” This may at first seem like a tidy bit of prescience on Catesby’s part; chimney swifts do winter deep in the Amazon forest, but ornithologists didn’t discover that until the 1940s. In reality, Catesby’s deduction was correct but was based on a false assumption. Recognizing the similarity between the swifts he had observed and a species described from Brazil, he leaped to the conclusion that they were one and the same, having no way of knowing that there are almost a dozen generally similar species of swifts in Central and South America.

But there is another and far more surprising case of Catesby getting a jump on the rest of science—coming to an incorrect conclusion, but basing it on reasoning that stunningly foreshadowed one of the twentieth century’s major insights.

Catesby was intrigued by the presence of a few European species of birds in Carolina (not realizing, as later ornithologists did, that some of them are different though closely related species, like the European goldcrest and the North American golden-crowned kinglet). These, he surmised, had colonized the New World from the Old, “admitting the World to have been universally replenished with all Animals from Noah’s Ark after the general Deluge.”

Although land birds were sometimes blown from the mainland to Bermuda, Catesby said, the distance was far greater between Europe and America; therefore, any birds that made the crossing must have done so at some then-unknown point, probably near the Arctic Circle, where the continents might meet. Catesby bolstered his argument by pointing out that the birds shared by both lands are species adapted to colder climates.

All well and good; Catesby makes a pretty sound case, though we know today from radar studies that even tiny land birds like warblers can make overwater journeys that would have left the good naturalist gob-smacked, like blackpoll warblers flying nonstop from Cape Cod to the coast of Venezuela. For gulls, waterfowl, and raptors, a hopscotching dispersal route around the North Atlantic via Iceland and Greenland (or across the Bering Strait from Asia) isn’t that big a stretch.

But having constructed a strong rationale for natural dispersion, Catesby offers up a mind-blowing alternative: “To account therefore for this extraordinary Circumstance there seems to remain but one more Reason for their being found on both Continents, which is the nearness of the two Parts of the Earth to each other heretofore, where now flows the vast Atlantick Ocean.”

Read that again; your eyes are not playing tricks on you. It wasn’t until 1912 that the theory of continental drift was first proposed, and not until the 1960s that enough evidence had emerged to convince skeptical scientists of its accuracy. Yet here is Mark Catesby—a man who just a few sentences earlier was affirming his belief in the Biblical Flood—suggesting that moving continents may have, in effect, rafted birds to America. What other thoughts he might have had on the subject are a mystery; this single, hesitant reference is the only time he mentioned it in print. Doubtless he’d be gratified to learn that even today, the vast Atlantick—which did indeed split a formerly unified landmass some 230 million years ago—continues to widen, at about the rate your fingernails grow.

 

HIS NATURAL HISTORY A SUCCESS, Catesby gave up the traveling life, hardly stirring from England again. Even a friend described him in those years as “tall, meagre, hard-favoured and sullen look[ing],” and his later life is murky; he married late, though when and to whom, exactly, is clouded in confusion. Experts have even debated his death and resting place, some saying he died at home in December 1749, others noting evidence that he went to sea on an East India Company ship in the autumn of that year, contracted a fever, and was consigned to the deep in April 1750.

As celebrated as he was during his lifetime, Catesby’s work eventually fell into obscurity, and even today he remains little-known. Perhaps his most lasting contribution to American ornithology was the names he gave to the birds he described, many of which have come down to us today unchanged, or with a few grammatical tweaks: blew jay, red-headed and hairy wood-peckers, blew gross-beak, and hooping crane, as well as Canada goose, blue-winged teal, laughing gull, and purple finch.

Catesby also created Latin names for the plants and animals he painted, and in the fashion of the day, these tended to be long and descriptive, following no real rules except the namer’s whim. They might be two words long, or six, or twelve. Thus, the ivory-billed woodpecker was Picus Maximus rostro albo, “the large woodpecker with the white beak,” while the brown noddy, a chocolate-colored tern with a white cap, was Hirundo Marina Minor Capite Albo, “the small sea-swallow with the white head.” The “crested titmouse” (our tufted titmouse) was just Parus cristatus, which means pretty much the same thing as its English name.

Anyone could name any organism anything, and the result was nomenclatural chaos. At times, Catesby wasn’t even consistent in what he called a bird; his name for the blue grosbeak was Coccothraustes caerulea in the text of his book, but caeruleus on the illustration plate. Science needed order, and the great Swedish botanist Carl von Linné imposed it, creating a concise, workable system in which every living thing was given a Latinized genus name (shared by closely related species) and its own specific name. The two-part combination would be unique to each organism. This binomial approach had been pioneered two centuries earlier by a pair of Swiss brothers named Bauhin, but Linné—better known by his own Latinized name, Carolus Linnaeus—took the ball and ran with it. His Systema Naturae, published in 1758, remains the gold standard today.

Linnaeus swept up all the available information on plants and animals around the world, reclassifying many species that had already been given names by other scientists, including Catesby, condensing and restructuring them to fit his new format, sometimes keeping elements of the original names, sometimes junking them completely. Thus, the American robin went from Catesby’s Turdus pilarais migratorius to just Turdus migratorius under Linnaeus, and the ivory-billed woodpecker from Picus Maximus rostro albo to the far more manageable Picus principalis. (The genus of largest New World woodpeckers has since been changed to Campephilus, “caterpillar-lover,” a reference to their diet of beetle grubs.)

In all, Linnaeus’s book covered more than twelve thousand plants and animals, including seventy-five birds Catesby had originally described and named from North America. While Linnaeus noted where he drew on the work of others, one aspect of his system was a notation giving credit to the person who first described the species for science under his new framework, and the year of its publication. Linneaus started the clock, so to speak, with his own work, and so we have Picus principalis (Linnaeus 1758) and Turdus migratorius (Linnaeus 1758). Because Linnaeus’s system was so universally embraced, Catesby’s contribution disappeared, and the credit he should have received for his pioneering work was, for centuries, largely overlooked.

But Linnaeus’s binomial system did eventually produce one lasting memorial to Mark Catesby. In 1802, the English naturalist George Shaw officially named a species Catesby had illustrated in Natural History of Carolina—not one of the New World’s gloriously plumaged birds, but the bullfrog, forever hence to be known as Rana catesbieana.

 

LINNAEUS WAS ONLY PART of an explosion in European natural science, much of it focused on ornithology. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most scientists still deferred to the ancient Greeks like Pliny and Aristotle as the authorities on the natural world—men who argued that worms were born of horsehair soaked in mud puddles and that birds passed the winter under lakes or the ocean. By the eighteenth century that was changing, however, and fresh perspectives were emerging, driven by great minds like Mathurin-Jacques Brisson and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in France, who published treatises on ornithology in the mid-1700s. In south England, a vicar named Gilbert White, in the country parish of Selborne, was carefully noting the migratory movements and breeding behavior of the neighborhood birds, and corresponding with eminent colleagues in London; his letters would eventually be published as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.

Among those London naturalists was a Quaker wool merchant named Peter Collinson, a friend of Catesby’s, to whom the artist had turned for an interest-free loan when he was strapped for cash after his second American sojourn. An ardent scientist with a passion for botany, Collinson counted among his friends Linnaeus and, later, Benjamin Franklin, whose work on electricity he shepherded into print.

In 1732, Collinson began a correspondence with a fellow Quaker in Philadelphia named John Bartram. Several years earlier, after one of the epidemics that swept the city with morbid regularity had carried off his wife, Bartram turned to the serious study of botany; the story (perhaps apocryphal) goes that while plowing one day, Bartram saw a daisy between his feet and was struck by the fact that he’d destroyed such beautiful plants all his life without knowing anything about them. Although he was a farmer with no formal training, and relatively little education of any sort, Bartram applied himself with great effect, and by the time he and Collinson came into contact, he was traveling widely through the East, bringing back plants to his five-acre farm, the first botanical garden in the New World.

Collinson, eager for whatever Bartram could send him in the way of new and unique species, quickly became his sponsor, financing his expeditions and serving as a conduit for the seeds, cuttings, and specimens Bartram shipped regularly to England. It was a relationship of mutual benefit—intellectually, scientifically, and financially—that the men would maintain for the next thirty-six years, though without ever actually meeting. Through Collinson’s efforts, the Quaker farmer from Philadelphia gained acclaim across Europe—Linnaeus is said to have called him the greatest natural botanist in the world—and in 1765, he was appointed royal botanist to King George III.

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Bartram remarried shortly after his first wife’s death, and he fathered eleven children in all. The seventh was a son, William, who took after his father; “Billy, my little botanist,” John called him. Unlike his father, William had the benefit of an excellent education, with some of the finest minds in Philadelphia tutoring him—when they could drag Billy away from botanizing and drawing, that is. When he was only in his teens, William began accompanying his father on collecting trips, and bid fair to follow in his botanical and scientific footsteps. But with parental concern, the elder Bartram felt his son needed a trade. “I want to put him to some business by which he may, with careful industry, get a temperate, reasonable living,” John confided to Collinson.

More easily said than done. Benjamin Franklin, a family friend, offered to take on the young man as a printing apprentice; William declined. Surveying, engraving, and medicine were similarly rejected. Billy failed at attempts at business in Philadelphia, and in coastal North Carolina, where he opened a store with the help of an uncle. John Bartram—now nearly seventy, bearing the title of Royal Botanist and traveling on King George III’s shilling—was glad for Billy’s company on his last major expedition, a year-long tramp through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, starting in 1765. When it was over, William decided to remain in Florida, trying his hand at indigo and rice farming along the Saint Johns River. Perhaps predictably, that went belly up as well. “No colouring can do justice to the forlorn state of poor Billy Bartram,” a family friend wrote reprovingly in a letter to John. Billy returned to Philadelphia, dogged by debt, and became enmeshed in yet another bad business deal before heading back to North Carolina once more. One can only imagine the sleepless nights he gave his father, who had decided to turn the family gardens over to William’s younger (and more business-savvy) brother.

But while he was making a shambles of his business ventures, Billy Bartram was smitten with the plants, animals, and landscapes he saw in the South. Collinson, who had praised his drawings when the lad was still a teenager, now circulated the young man’s more mature work among his circle of influential friends. It was almost the last service the old wool dealer performed for the family before his death, in 1768, but it proved crucial. One of the men impressed by William’s drawings was John Fothergill, a physician with a keen interest in botany.

Something changed in Billy Bartram as he entered his early thirties. Like Catesby before him, something stiffened in the once aimless man, some nascent resolve. Who knows when he got the itch for an epic adventure, but finally, in 1772, he wrote to London with a proposal: Would Dr. Fothergill sponsor an expedition to Florida? Although Fothergill’s botanical interests lay with more boreal species, he agreed, paying Bartram fifty pounds per year in return for specimens, drawings, and an account of his journey.

Bartram set out from Philadelphia in 1773 on what proved to be a five-year, 2,400-mile trek that took him throughout the Southeast—through the cypress swamps and coastal lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia, into the azalea-spangled southern Appalachian highlands controlled by the Cherokee, overland to Mobile Bay and Baton Rouge, then back east and down south into Seminole country in Florida. Although his later narrative suggests one long continuous expedition, Bartram alternated forays in the field with time spent in cities, like Savannah and Mobile. Along the way he met Indian chiefs, battled alligators, was blinded by disease, and discovered a wealth of new plants and animals, from Mississippi kites, Florida sandhill cranes and limpkins to gopher tortoises, flame azaleas, and oakleaf hydrangeas.

Bartram’s ramblings were the first comprehensive exploration of an entire region of America by a trained scientist, who was, to boot, an eloquent writer and a skilled artist. His primary focus was plants—the Seminole called him puc-puggy, or flower hunter—but his ranging eye lit on curiosities everywhere he looked, from wildlife to the manner and customs of the Indians. Those Indians, it’s worth remembering, lived, farmed, and hunted the land in such numbers that it was wilderness only in the view of a visiting white like Bartram. Yet he nevertheless saw a land vastly different, and vastly wilder, from what it is today, and Bartram’s is one of the clearest pictures we have of the eastern frontier in its now-lost splendor—of flocks of whooping cranes and waterfowl on the Mississippi, stands of enormous old-growth hardwoods and cypresses that left him awestruck, and forests alive with wolves, panthers, and bears.

Birds are a recurrent theme in Bartram’s account of his journey; leaving Charlestown, he noted “the gay mock-bird, vocal and joyous, [that] mounts aloft on silvered wings, rolls over and over, then gently descends and presides in the choir of the tuneful tribes.” Tired of pushing against the current on Georgia’s Altamaha River, he rests his paddle and watches the scenery slip by:

 

My progress was rendered delightful by the sylvan elegance of the groves, chearful meadows, and high distant forests, which in grand order presented themselves to view . . . The air was filled with the loud and shrill whooping of the wary sharp-sighted crane. Behold, on yon decayed, defoliated Cypress tree, the solitary wood-pelican [wood stork], dejectedly perched upon its utmost elevated spire; he there, like an ancient venerable sage, sets himself up as a mark of derision, for the safety of his kindred tribes. The crying-bird [limpkin], another faithful guardian, screaming in the gloomy thickets, warns the feathered tribes of approaching peril; and the plumage of the swift sailing squadrons of Spanish curlews [white ibis] (white as the immaculate robe of innocence) gleam in the cerulean skies.

 

Bartram described “the laughing coots with wings half spread,” the “young broods of the painted summer teal [wood ducks], skimming the still surface of the waters” of the upper Saint Johns River, and the “snake bird,” or anhinga. On the Saint Johns, too, he gave one of his most evocative (and imaginative) descriptions of alligators: “Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder . . . The shores and forests resound his dreadful roar.”

Bartram apparently had a rough time with alligators, recounting many close encounters and fearful near-brushes with them, including a battle on the Saint Johns in which he said he held off several attacking gators with an improvised club. “I was attacked on all sides, several endeavouring to overset the canoe. My situation now became precarious to the last degree: two very large ones attacked me closely, at the same instant, rushing up with their heads and part of their bodies above the water, roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me. They struck their jaws together so close to my ears, as almost to stun me, and I expected every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured.” The next night, he said, he shot one enormous gator that climbed into his boat, and narrowly missed the grab of another.

Not everyone found this credible; alligators do not spew smoke like medieval dragons, after all, and they usually don’t mount frontal assaults on canoeists. His claim to have seen twenty-footers, and to have heard of some twenty-three feet long, met with raised eyebrows. Bartram stood by his stories, though in later years, the devout Quaker was said to be highly sensitive to any suggestion that he embellished them, especially the account of his epic fight. Clearly, the great reptiles made a deep impression on him; his friend and biographer George Ord said that Bartram had recurrent alligator nightmares all his life.

The book Bartram eventually published about his explorations, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida,^* devotes a long passage to birds, in which its author says humbly that he noted few species that Catesby and others had not already described—a false modesty, though he also took the opportunity to politely amend mistakes he’d found in his predecessors’ works. He accurately surmised that “blue linets” (indigo buntings) were not, as many assumed, simply young painted buntings that had yet to acquire their spectacular color, and he corrected Catesby’s disparaging characterization of the catbird’s song, “a mistake very injurious” to that bird, though he forgave Catesby for making a similar error about hermit thrushes, since they don’t sing their lyrical, flutelike songs on the wintering grounds where Catesby knew them. Bartram reported on the belief that Carolina parakeets might hibernate inside hollow trees, but said he’d seen no evidence for this in his travels—and lamented that the colorful parrots never came so far north as Pennsylvania, where “we abound with all the fruits which they delight in.”

He also made some shrewd observations on migration, a phenomenon he’d observed all his life with keen interest. “In the spring of the year the small birds of passage appear very suddenly in Pennsylvania, which is not a little surprising, and no less pleasing: at once the woods, the groves, and meads, are filled with their melody, as if they dropped down from the skies. The reason or probable cause is their setting off with high and fair winds from the southward; for a strong south and south-west wind about the beginning of April never fails bringing millions of these welcome visitors.”

Bartram seems to have had something of an inferiority complex, the colonial hayseed in the shadow of European scholarship. After he returned to his family’s farm in 1777, instead of publishing his findings on his own say-so, Bartram shipped his specimens to Fothergill, in London, where the Swiss botanist Daniel Solander was supposed to “officially” classify them. Only Solander didn’t; British expeditions were returning with crates of natural wonders from the far corners of the world, far more exotic than Bartram’s, which languished until Solander died, in 1782, two years after Fothergill’s death.

It must have been a rough time for Bartram. His father died just nine months after he ended his trip, and the Revolutionary War was raging around them, with the British occupying Philadelphia, and major battles just a short day’s ride away. Bartram began assembling his chaotic notes and journals (some dating back to his earliest southern travels with his father) into a book soon after he returned home, but it was slow going. His original route across the South meandered and curlicued, doubling back and repeating itself over the years, but William merged his various trips and experiences into a single narrative, whose dates and places do not always jibe—something that has given fits to the many people who in later centuries tried to retrace his movements.

It was almost a decade before a publisher in Philadelphia began an abortive attempt to advertise Bartram’s book, and not until 1791 did it finally appear. It proved modestly popular in Europe (though mostly through pirated editions), but the book landed with a thud in America, and even European scientists sniffed that it was, well, just a shade too enthusiastic, too lyrical and poetic.^* One reviewer dismissed it as “disgustingly pompous,” but in fact, it is a mix of rhapsodic, almost purple prose and straightforward scientific description.

More crushing to Bartram than the poor sales and biting reviews was the very permanent legacy of his long delay—the loss of scientific recognition for his many discoveries. All but a handful of the new species of plants and animals he discovered were trumped by other scientists, some using his own specimens in England, men who got their own descriptions into print first, bumping Bartram into the shadows. It is believed he discovered more than two hundred species, yet only a dozen or so carry his name today. Bartram, writing to a friend in 1788, said he sought “no other gratuity than the bare mention of my being the discoverer, a reward due for traveling several thousand miles mostly amongst Indian Nations which is not only difficult but Dangerous, besides suffering sickness cold & hunger.”

In the end, what distinguishes Bartram’s Travels from everything that came before isn’t its significant improvement in scientific merit, or a tally of newly discovered species, important as they may be. What marked this book as a turning point is the same thing that has drawn readers like me back to it repeatedly over the years—the way Bartram reveled in the beauty of the primal American landscape.

For the first time, we encounter not an immigrant, but an American naturalist on his home turf, a man exulting in the wilderness he explores. True, Bartram tended to see it through the lens of his religious and political beliefs—the natural world as a reflection of the mind of God, and the frontier settlements and farms along its edges, a manifestation of the young republic’s strength and vigor. Most of Bartram’s contemporaries—and many of his successors for generations thereafter—saw wilderness as the barbaric haunt of savages and snarling beasts. He celebrated it as a sublimely (and divinely) ordered realm of beauty and majesty.

The youthful wanderlust seems to have burned itself out in Bartram, and in his later years, he stuck close to the family farm, run by his younger brother John. William had lost the vision in one eye from an illness that had first struck him on Mobile Bay, but he remained active, classifying his collections, corresponding with scientists in Europe and America, illustrating plates for a groundbreaking textbook called Elements of Botany, by Benjamin Barton, accumulating scientific honors, and entertaining visitors as august as Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. (In 1804, Jefferson offered Bartram a place on a federal expedition into the new Louisiana Purchase, either up the Red River into what is now Arkansas, or Zebulon Pike’s 1805 excursion up the Mississippi to Minnesota; historians aren’t sure which, and in any event, Bartram declined, citing his health.)

Not every visitor was a Revolutionary luminary. In 1803, a young man with a Scottish brogue showed up at the door, introducing himself as a schoolteacher from Gray’s Ferry, a mile away along the Schuylkill River, who shared a passion for nature. Within a few months, the slender, intense fellow was taking art lessons from William’s niece Nancy, and poring over her uncle’s extensive library. There’s some evidence to suggest he’d also taken a romantic shine to Nancy.

Her father, John, held a low opinion of the would-be suitor; the young man was a poor schoolteacher with a checkered past, a poet, and a political rabble-rouser back in Scotland; he may even have known that the fellow had been imprisoned for blackmail. Any suggestion of a match was out of the question. William, though, likely saw something of himself in the Scot, a man who had drifted through life, from place to place and occupation to occupation, before finding an anchor in natural history.

He was also impressed with his erstwhile pupil’s determination. The fellow was ravenous when it came to reading and questioning; he was taking additional art lessons from a well-known engraver in the city, and was with each passing week becoming more and more entranced with America’s birds—and with the idea of a book. A book like Catesby’s, but complete and comprehensive, a thorough, illustrated review of the continent’s birdlife in its glorious entirety.

This may have struck Bartram as an amusingly conceited goal for a newcomer with little field experience and of then-limited artistic ability. But if so, he’d underestimated his pupil—for the eager young Scotsman was Alexander Wilson, known today as the Father of American Ornithology.