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“Except three or four, I do not know them”

FOR A QUIET, sensitive boy who loved birds and the outdoors, the Scottish Lowlands of the mid-eighteenth century were a lovely place to be born, except for one flaw. Lovely, because Paisley—the small town west of Glasgow, where Alexander Wilson’s family lived—sat beside a picturesque waterfall known as Laigh Linn, or the Hammills, on the White Cart River; in fact, the home in which he was born was just three doors down from the falls. Outside of town was moorland and pastures; wagtails nested on the stone bridges that arched the little streams, corncrakes made their rasping cries at night from the boggy meadows, and every fall, the great flocks of waders, greylag geese, and other waterfowl came through the valley of the Clyde, into which the Cart flowed.

But Paisley was a company town, and therein lay the flaw. By the late seventeenth century, weavers were already its largest trade group, and their importance grew in the first half of the eighteenth century, as the fame of their silks and muslins spread. (Paisley would later lend its name to the famous shawl designs woven there, a nineteenth-century knockoff of vastly more expensive Kashmiri fabrics bearing tiny, interlocking patterns.) In Paisley, the future for a working-class child lay indoors, with the weaver’s hand loom, which dominated local life to the exclusion of almost all else; there were only forty-five families in Paisley, but sixty-six looms.

 

A penniless convicted blackmailer, Alexander Wilson left Scotland in 1794 for America, where he fell in love with his new country’s birds. In a rush of enthusiasm, he decided to create a book illustrating all of them—even though he could only identify a handful himself.

Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society

 

Alexander Wilson was born on July 6, 1766, to one of those weaving families. His father, Alexander Senior (or Saunders, as he was known), had given up smuggling—another local specialty—when he’d married a respectable girl, and did rather well as a weaver, supplementing his income with a hidden still in the backyard of their home, in the neighborhood known as the Seedhills. It was not an overly comfortable life, but young Sandy, as the family called the boy, was smart, and looked to have good prospects—perhaps in the ministry, always an option for a bright young Presbyterian.

But revolution in America bludgeoned the economy, and life for Sandy and his two older sisters became harder still after their mother died, when he was ten years old. His father quickly remarried, a woman with children of her own, and the large (and still-growing) family struggled, even though Saunders resumed smuggling, later moving his family out of town and into the ruined castle tower of Auchinbathie, some miles away.

Young Sandy had a bit of school and, according to some accounts, may have spent a summer herding livestock, but at age thirteen, his future closed in on him and he was apprenticed as a weaver, ending his formal education. He wove for the next seven years, three as an apprentice to his brother-in-law William Duncan, and four as a journeyman in various shops earning a shilling a day, reading the classics when he could, poaching grouse on the moors when he had free hours. He went back to his brother-in-law’s business, now in Edinburgh, but Duncan’s weaving trade was foundering, and Sandy spent much of his time on the road, peddling their wares across Scotland.

No doubt this fed the young man’s thirst for the outdoors, and gave him a chance to stretch his poetic legs as well (he’d been writing verse since an early age). But life as a “packman,” as peddlers were known, was usually hard and frequently miserable; his letters from this period speak of rough quarters and the regular hunger he faced. On one occasion, he walked through mud and cold rain until, exhausted, he fell to the ground in a stupor, barely rousing himself in time to avoid being run over by a stagecoach.

He kept writing poems, though—and in the process, followed another Paisley tradition. Scotland is known for its working-class poets who, like Wilson’s hero Robert Burns, wrote in the tongue-twisting vernacular, but Paisley seems to have had more than its share. Locals still talk about the time someone proposed a toast, “To Paisley poets!” and every man in the pub stood to accept the accolade.

Wilson published a small volume of poetry in 1790, which he peddled himself to no great success; and little wonder, because it’s not especially good, though he did have flashes of brilliance. Amid peddling far and wide, his work on the book, financial woes, and a socially awkward love affair with a woman well above his station, Wilson’s health began to crack—a problem that would revisit him throughout his life.

In 1792 he authored an anonymous poem, “Watty and Meg: A Wife Reformed,” about a drunkard who silences his complaining wife by threatening to leave her, which was enormously popular (and initially ascribed to Burns). But Wilson’s pen also got him into trouble. He was becoming a political radical, agitating on behalf of the weavers against mill owners, who were mechanizing their operations. He wrote another anonymous work, this one a satire called “The Shark, or Lang Mills Detected,” about a mill owner who is cheating his workers.

Not only did the poem bring a charge of libel from its thinly disguised target, William Sharp, but Wilson apparently tried to blackmail Sharp in the bargain. “The enclosed poem, by particular circumstances, has fallen into my hands,” said a letter to Sharp signed “A.B.” “If you know any person who will advance five guineas, the manuscript from which I copied the enclosed, shall, with the utmost regard to justice and secrecy, be immediately destroyed.” Confronted by the authorities, Wilson confessed to writ ing the poem and the letter and was ordered by the court to publicly burn the offending article in the town square, but he could not pay the fine and was imprisoned, on and off, over the course of the next eighteen months.

As pointed out by Wilson’s biographer Robert Cantwell (on whose work I have heavily depended), something doesn’t quite add up here. The charges against Wilson were civil, and quickly admitted to, yet he was held on criminal charges. The reason seems to have been the growing political roil across Scotland against English rule; “the police and British agents were kept busy jotting down the names of people who were heard giving the new toast—’To George the Third and last!’” The weavers whom Wilson’s poems celebrated were at the heart of this anti-English movement, and he was among their champions.

Wilson was finally released, a humiliated man whose hopes of a literary career were ruined, and he went back to work as a weaver just long enough to earn his passage to America. Accompanied by his nephew, he sailed in May 1794 and landed that July, all but penniless, in Delaware. Wilson shouldered his pack, picked up his gun, and walked the thirty miles to Philadelphia. He shot the first bird he saw (by most accounts a red-headed woodpecker, a species he did not recognize), and in the days to come, he was struck by how much more colorful the birds of this new country appeared to be. His ornithological path, like the wagon road to Philadelphia, lay open before him, even if Wilson didn’t know it yet.

Alexander Wilson was twenty-eight years old when he arrived in America. A portrait made years later shows a lean and spindly man with deep-set eyes and dark hair framing a high, square forehead. Charles Robert Leslie, an artist who later assisted Wilson, described him as resembling his subjects:

 

He looked like a bird; his eyes were piercing, dark, and luminous, and his nose shaped like a beak. He was of a spare bony form, very erect in his carriage, inclining to be tall, and with a light elastic step. He seemed perfectly qualified by nature for his extraordinary pedestrian achievements.

 

Initially, though, Wilson fared not much better in the New World. Philadelphia was recovering from an horrific yellow-fever epidemic and looked more like a ghost town than a thriving city. Work was hard to come by, and Wilson drifted from printing to day labor to weaving to peddling, bouncing from place to place before finally finding steady employment as a schoolteacher. His first appointment came in 1796, near Philadelphia, but after that ended in 1801 (caused, it is thought, by a scandalous affair with a married woman, which sent him temporarily to New York), Wilson took a job teaching at Gray’s Ferry, also near Philadelphia and an easy stroll from the Bartram estate.

William Bartram appears to have been generous with his time and advice, even lending original paintings to Wilson so that the younger man might copy and learn from them.^* Wilson also combed through Bartram’s library, where he found and was entranced by Catesby’s volumes. Another inspiration appears to have been George Edwards, a protégé of Catesby’s, whose four-volume A Natural History of Uncommon Birds launched British ornithology and included several American species. The realization that Edwards drew his own illustrations and etched his own plates, as had Catesby, seems to have given Wilson the idea that he could do the same—create a book documenting all of his adopted land’s birds, a dream he shared in a letter in 1803 to a friend back home in Scotland.

But there remained one serious—one would think insurmountable—obstacle to writing the definitive work on New World ornithology: Although he had collected many of them, and kept a number (ranging from hawks to hummingbirds) as pets, Alexander Wilson still didn’t know very much about American birds, even how to identify the majority of them. A letter he wrote to Bartram in March 1804 shows just how far behind the curve Wilson was when he finally discovered his life’s calling. The letter accompanied several bird paintings for the older man’s critique, and Wilson was self-deprecating regarding his abilities—he hoped Bartram’s “good nature will excuse their deficiencies.” He needed not only his mentor’s artistic advice, but some ID help as well.

“I have now got my collection of native birds considerably enlarged; and shall endeavor, if possible, to obtain all the smaller ones this summer,” Wilson wrote. “Be pleased to mark on the drawings, with a pencil, the names of each kind, as, except three or four, I do not know them.” And this was almost a year after Wilson first confided his dream for a complete American ornithology. Whatever the Scots-Gaelic term for chutzpah might be, Wilson had it in spades.

Call it determination or arrogance, it served him well. Wilson was by then working with Alexander Lawson, a Philadelphia engraver born near Paisley, learning how to etch his own copperplates—a tricky process, and one that Wilson, not surprisingly, at first bungled. But he quickly got the hang of it. By the beginning of 1806, Wilson had successfully etched the first plate of his “Birds of the United States,” and had triumphantly sent it to Bartram for his “amusement and correction.” (He had earlier sent some of his drawings to President Thomas Jefferson, who eagerly sought Wilson’s help in identifying a bird—it proved to be a wood thrush—that Jefferson did not know. But Wilson, who had made public orations in support of Jefferson’s policies, was stung when his request to accompany the Pike Expedition that year was ignored.)

Meanwhile, Wilson was finally able to leave teaching, taking on the job of revising a twenty-two-volume encyclopedia—a position that not only gave him more free time and a steadier salary, but, more importantly, the ear of one of Philadelphia’s better publishers, Samuel Bradford, whose sons Wilson was tutoring. When Wilson pitched his idea for a multivolume set he titled American Ornithology, Bradford agreed, though Wilson was required to solicit subscriptions to pay for it.

Wilson threw himself into the work with a vengeance, converting into copperplate etchings the paintings he’d been accumulating. Fervent American nationalists, he and his publisher made a point of using only American-cast printing type, and American paper made from American-discarded linen rags. Only the colors used to hand tint the plates were, by necessity, imported from Europe, though Wilson stressed that “some beautiful native ochres . . . and one of the richest yellows” came from the United States. Throughout the years of production, Wilson always shot fresh birds for his colorists, “so there should be no chance of the fading or changing of the brilliant tints of life.”

 

With lessons in drawing and bird identification from William Bartram, Wilson turned next to learning how to engrave his own plates for American Ornithology, many of which he also hand-colored.

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

 

The first volume appeared in 1808, with Wilson hitting the road in the autumn of that year, examples in his trunk, to peddle orders from New Jersey to Maine and Vermont, then south to the Carolinas and Georgia. He was on the road until the following March, through sometimes severe winter storms, chatting up the luminaries in every major town for subscriptions and combing the woods and marshes for new birds. The reception was uneven; he sold a subscription to the president of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and President Jefferson (who had already subscribed) received him warmly, but the governor of New York glanced at the book, then told Wilson, “I would not give you one hundred dollars for all the birds you intend to describe, even had I them alive.”

Wilson wandered constantly—even before the book, he’d careened all over the place, including a 1,200-mile walking trip to Niagara Falls in 1804 that resulted in an epic poem titled The Foresters. Once he got rolling on Ornithology, though, he was unstoppable. Scholars have put the accumulated distance he covered at something like ten thousand miles, and it was rough travel much of the way. Wilson slept in Indian villages, in bug-ridden frontier taverns, in open boats, and in the saddle. He fell deathly ill more than once, and on the worst nights, he must have felt little better off than the Scottish packman of his youth. Melancholy overtook him at times. But generally he was doing what he loved—taking copious notes, shooting and stuffing birds, and grilling locals about what they knew of their region’s birdlife.

He was amazingly thorough; by one modern estimate, Wilson described 268 of the almost 350 species he could have seen east of the Mississippi, including twenty-six that were entirely new to science. (Wilson thought he had named fifty-one new species, but some were simply new plumages of previously described species. In other cases he’d been beaten to the punch by competing scientists; for example, in September 1808, he described the “yellow-throated flycatcher”—now the yellow-throated vireo—not knowing a French author had published a description of the same bird a month earlier.)

Wilson took what was probably the first stab at calculating regional bird populations, estimating that one hundred million birds entered Pennsylvania each spring, with about four hundred pairs remaining to nest in each square mile of land (ornithologists now consider both figures grossly low). He also used some shrewd, back-of-the-envelope figures to estimate the size of a passenger pigeon flock he witnessed in Kentucky; the flock was a mile wide and passed by for four hours at a rate of one mile a minute, he said, so assuming that each square yard of space “comprehended” three pigeons, that “would give two thousand two hundred and thirty millions, two hundred and seventy-two thousand Pigeons!”

Wilson accomplished so much by working himself nearly to death. Over the six years he worked on Ornithology, he spent nineteen months in the field, eventually visiting fifteen of the eighteen United States as well as four federal territories. Typical was a journey that he began in January 1810 (he had invited Bartram to accompany him, but the elderly botanist, just weeks away from his seventy-first birthday, wisely declined the winter tramp). With his second volume fresh from the printer, Wilson set out overland to the Ohio River—two hundred and fifty miles of bad road, in freezing weather. From Pittsburgh he floated more than seven hundred miles down the Ohio in a small boat on whose stern he had grandly painted the name The Ornithologist, going with the current and in the motley, ever-changing company of keelboat crews, pioneer families, Indians, scalawags, and thieves, all using the Ohio as their highway to the frontier. Then he traveled by horse and by foot a thousand miles to New Orleans, with a Carolina parakeet that he’d winged, then nursed back to health, riding on his shoulder or wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket the whole way.^*

The pickings were better in some places than others; Pittsburgh surprised him with the strong reception his project received from its leading citizens, and he was met with acclaim in New Orleans, while he made no attempt to hide his contempt for Louisville: no culture, no intelligence—and no subscriptions. He was there in March, and Wilson did come close to making a sale; he’d walked into a store and struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, a fellow speaking eccentric, French-accented English, who seemed dazzled by Wilson’s plates. But then the man’s partner muttered something to him in French, and the climate in the room chilled distinctly; no, the would-be subscriber said, pushing back the volumes he’d been admiring; thank you, but no. Wilson’s eyes hardened, and not long after, he shook the unfriendly dust of Louisville from his clothes and headed south again. “Science and literature has not one friend in this place,” he grumped to his journal.

 

IT WAS ONLY by a stroke of luck that the man with the French accent was even working that day in 1810, because John James Audubon did everything in his power to avoid being trapped behind the counter of the Louisville store he owned with his friend Ferdinand Rozier. He spent most of his time shooting, riding, teaching art, or painting the birds that he obsessively collected and which his network of local hunters brought him, piling up thick stacks of watercolors. Anything but business. “My days were happy beyond human conception,” he later wrote. “I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting its habits, Rozier meantime attending the counter.”

It’s unclear how Rozier felt about this, but it’s easy to guess; he had a twenty-five-year-old slacker for a business partner, and most of the work fell to him. Rozier was eight years Audubon’s senior, a friend from their days in France, but friendship goes only so far, and their partnership had but a few more months to run. Audubon’s single enthusiastic contributions to the business were the long overland trips to Philadelphia or New York for more goods, which took him for weeks at a time “through the beautiful, the darling forests of Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania,” where he’d let the pack animals wander while he went chasing a new bird.^*

Audubon, with his young wife Lucy and his friend Rozier, had arrived in Louisville two years earlier, from Pennsylvania. The illegitimate son of a French sea-captain and a chambermaid, who died shortly after his birth, Audubon had already seen a lot of the world; he’d been born, in 1785, in what is now Haiti, where he was known as Jean Rabine. His father, accurately predicting violence between white plantation owners and their slaves, had Jean, still not four, sent to France for his safety, and gave the boy his own family name. Jean learned the things a young gentleman needed—some schooling, some art and music, some military training—but his father’s antennae were twitching again. Eighteen-year-old Jean—his name now anglicized to John James Audubon—was packed off to America, in 1803, to avoid possible conscription into Napoleon’s army.

Audubon père’s idea was that John would profit from learning to manage his father’s estate of Mill Grove, just above the confluence of Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River, less than twenty miles north of Philadelphia. In fact, the young man had little aptitude for and even less interest in the farm and its small lead mine, and devoted himself to riding, shooting, dancing, and music. He was a dandy, going out in shooting parties dressed in black breeches, silk stockings, and ruffled shirts. After he made the acquaintance of pretty Lucy Bakewell, whose father owned a neighboring property, he paid even less mind to his responsibilities.

One thing Audubon did apply himself to with fierce determination, however, was the study of birds, something that had fascinated him all his life. In France, he’d drawn the stuffed birds in his father’s home, in a flat, stiff style that Catesby would have recognized. Audubon found Mill Grove a paradise for this work—not only did the area abound with game birds, like ducks, geese, grouse, and woodcock, which the local hunters all sought, but there were also all manner of smaller species he’d never seen before, and which most of his neighbors ignored.

Charging his fowling piece with bird shot, he’d set out in the first damp light of day, looking for specimens to bring back to the house. At first, he drew them as they hung before him, tethered by the feet, like the still-life paintings of game so popular in those days. Several of these early, long-lost paintings have recently turned up in France, and one can understand why Audubon was unhappy with them—he wanted to capture the vitality and movement of the live bird, like a pair of phoebes whose “graceful attitudes” he watched and sketched endlessly, and in rising frustration.

He tinkered with threads to hold up the wings or heads of his freshly shot birds, to no avail. He tried to make an articulated mannequin of cork and wire in the shape of a bird, hoping to use it as a model, but the result was a “grotesque figure,” and when a friend laughed at it, Audubon kicked apart the mannequin in a fit of pique. He failed again and again, until at last he struck upon the idea of a clever armature that allowed him to impale the warm, limp carcass on slender wires, holding it in a natural pose. In great excitement, he rode to town for supplies, assembled the framework, and then raced to the creek, where he shot the first thing with feathers that he saw, a belted kingfisher. Audubon pinned it into position, and—mon dieu!—it was as though the bird were patiently sitting for its portrait.

There are still kingfishers along Perkiomen Creek, where the old Audubon home—a handsome stone farmhouse with a large barn and outbuildings—sits on 175 acres owned by Montgomery County and managed by the National Audubon Society. Ivy cloaks the rear of the house, which is now a museum, while the porch (which was added years after Audubon left) looks across a lawn falling away to the placid millpond on the creek. Valley Forge, where Washington’s forces spent the winter of 1777–78, is just a mile away. You can squint and imagine it in 1803, especially if, as I did, you try it on a spring day when the old maples and sycamores are full of migrants. Small waves of birds rippled through the treetops—a black-throated green warbler singing brightly, a couple of red-eyed vireos, a black-and-white warbler hitching like a nuthatch in spirals around the branch of a large oak. But leaving the present, even briefly, can be a tough job. The Philadelphia suburbs have engulfed this area, leaving Mill Grove marooned among homes, businesses, and industry; almost everywhere on the property, you can hear the growl of traffic noise from a commuter expressway just across the creek.

But in Audubon’s day it was paradise for someone as bird crazy as he was. Every time I visit Mill Grove during the warm months, I look for eastern phoebes, which in Audubon’s era nested in the eaves of the farm buildings and the steep, rocky banks of the creek. Curious if the same birds returned every year, he tied what he described as “silver thread” to the legs of a nesting pair and, with delight, noted their reappearance the following year—the first case of bird banding (after a fashion) in the New World.

It’s ironic that he and Wilson met on the distant Kentucky frontier instead of here along the Schuylkill, where they lived for several years within an easy morning’s ride of each other and had several mutual acquaintances. But when the meeting came at last, it was pivotal, for it seems likely that it shocked Audubon into finally thinking of completing his own collection of American bird paintings and may have been his first inspiration to create a published work of his own.

Of course, we only have Audubon’s word for what transpired that spring day in 1810; Wilson’s original journals from that period are lost, and the varying accounts published after his death (apparently based on those missing journals, and edited by Audubon’s enemies) raise more questions than they answer. It appears the men did meet, and went hunting two days later, but beyond that, we’re left with Audubon’s version, which casts the tale in a predictably flattering light. Wilson, he said, came into the counting room of the store, two volumes of Ornithology under his arm, looking decidedly out of place—dressed too formally for a frontier town, with a long nose, keen eyes, and prominent cheekbones that “stamped his countenance with a peculiar character.”

Audubon said he’d known nothing of Wilson’s project until that moment and was so struck by what he saw that he had a pen in hand, ready to subscribe, when Rozier, looking over his shoulder, asked in French, “My dear Audubon, what induces you to subscribe to this work? Your drawings are certainly far better, and again, you must know as much about the habits of American birds as this gentleman.” Audubon changed his mind, and Wilson’s attitude grew frosty. With that, Audubon took down his portfolio, which he claimed was stuffed with almost two hundred paintings. Wilson, he said, was amazed; did Mr. Audubon intend to publish them? One is meant to imagine Wilson’s relief when Audubon replied that no, he hadn’t given it a thought.

Audubon claimed he loaned Wilson several paintings,^* and even took him hunting, showing him new birds, and receiving from Wilson an agreement that any work of Audubon’s that appeared in future volumes would be credited. That there is lingering doubt about the veracity of these statements is an indication of what a damnably awkward challenge Audubon still poses, almost two centuries after his pinnacle.

Much has been written about the complex, often paradoxical layers to John James Audubon. It’s hard to read much about him without feeling the twin urges to lionize and strangle him. He was a genius, pure and simple; no one had ever brought such vitality, such raw emotion and surging power, to the painting of birds. Audubon smashed centuries of artistic convention, packing his pages with action and movement, setting fluid, believably living birds among lovely vignettes or fully realized landscapes: a pair of white-crowned pigeons gently billing among the orange blossoms of a geiger tree; a lesser yellowlegs in a moss-draped swamp near Charleston; two warbling vireos feeding among the huge, creamy flowers of a magnolia; a pair of great crested flycatchers in a violent dustup, their tail feathers scattered to the wind. (Many of the botanical and landscape elements of Audubon’s later paintings were added by his assistants, whom he trained and whose work he often repainted and refined.)

Yes, his work could be melodramatic—two peregrine falcons, their beaks dripping gore, hunch over ducks; four brown thrashers battle a black snake, one bird snared in the coils; a young red-shouldered hawk, its talons flared, slams into a covey of quail. But these were birds as individuals, birds that flew and breathed and sometimes died on his sheets of linen rag paper, in watercolor, pastels, pencil, and ink. And they were always drawn lifesized, which meant that Audubon had to find compositionally creative ways to mold the largest species to the page, like the whooping crane twisting down to catch a baby alligator. They were not generic, pasteboard silhouettes, although Audubon drew a few of those, too, especially the ones he lifted from Wilson. These, however, were the anomaly. The break between past and future was clean; there was bird painting before Audubon and after—and after him, nothing was ever the same. Wilson may be lauded as the Father of American Ornithology, but Audubon’s very name has become synonymous with birds.

Unfortunately, no one held a higher opinion of Audubon than Audubon himself. He was self-aggrandizement personified, a master at the calculated effect; whereas at Mill Grove he had tried to hide his humble origins and project an air of nobility, when he eventually traveled to England and Scotland in the 1820s to promote his Birds of America, he made sure to look every inch the “American Woodsman” he proclaimed himself to be—the long, flowing hair, a hunting shirt and wolfskin jacket, a fur cap with bushy tail. It was a shrewd affectation that fit perfectly with the Romantic view of the wilderness then in vogue, and it would have worked equally well in our celebrity-conscious century. Yet lurking beneath this bluster was a murky current of self-doubt, manifested in the way he hid his illegitimacy, lied about where he was born (Louisiana, he often said), his assertion that his father had been a French admiral, or his extravagantly unnecessary claims to have studied art under Jacques-Louis David, painter to the French court. Most people would have considered it a triumph for a self-taught artist to reach such heights; Audubon seems perennially embarrassed by that fact.

And finally, what must Wilson have thought, that day in Louisville, leafing through Audubon’s portfolio? Audubon was still years away from the peak of his powers, but Wilson must have sensed the potential there. Was he excited, unsettled, amused? Except for Audubon’s claim (filtered through his meddling granddaughter) that Wilson’s “surprise appeared to be great,” we don’t know. But Rozier was right: My dear Audubon, you are clearly the superior artist.

 

WILSON ENDED his western trip in New Orleans, sailing back to New York by way of Florida and the Carolinas, where he collected fourteen “stormy petrels,” a species that would later bear his name. He arrived in Philadelphia in August 1810, almost eight months after he’d left. Over the next two years, he completed volumes 3 through 6 of American Ornithology, living part of the time at the Bartram estate and making short trips into the Appalachian ridges and Pocono plateau to the north, or south and east to the New Jersey coast, for more specimens.

The copperplate etchings were simply black-and-white line prints, each of which needed to be hand-tinted with watercolors—a laborious process that rendered each reproduction, in effect, an original work of art. In Europe, large publishing houses maintained staffs of trained colorists, but Wilson struggled throughout the period to find artists able to maintain the quality of the finished plates. Making a smooth, even wash with ink or watercolor across a sheet of linen paper is hard, nerve-wracking work; if the brush hesitates for a second, or overlaps a previous wash, the image is indelibly marred with a line. The pace and stress were tearing at Wilson’s body and making this naturally quiet and reserved man crankier than normal, so that he had a hard time retaining colorists and had to do much of the work himself.

Biographer Robert Cantwell has noted the herculean task Wilson set himself. American Ornithology, by normal reckoning, took seven years, but Wilson was at first teaching school, and then for five years serving as editor of the encyclopedia, which actually paid his bills. “Nearly a full year was given to his three great trips, through New England in 1808, the Southern states to Savannah in 1809, and the West to New Orleans in 1810. Really, only five years were spent on the Ornithology itself, and between thirty-six and forty-eight months of uninterrupted labor.” Travel, writing, collecting, painting, engraving, coloring, hustling subscribers—it’s a wonder the man found time to eat.

Wilson, caught in a financial squeeze, made one last major trip into New England in 1812, trying to secure subscription payments on which the book hinged, though he found most people more gripped by concern over the war with England than with matters ornithological; in Haverhill, New Hampshire, he was briefly detained on suspicion that he was a spy.

Still, in some circles American Ornithology was making Alexander Wilson a celebrated figure in his adopted country. Men of importance elbowed to become his friends, which was not an altogether comfortable position for the convicted felon, whose personal background was a source of pain and embarrassment. One newfound admirer was George Ord, a wealthy Philadelphian whose money came from the family rope-making business, but who, like many gentlemen of the day, spent most of his time pursuing science. Ord became one of Wilson’s contributors, sending him descriptions of bird behavior and, on at least one trip to the New Jersey coast in 1812, throwing himself into collecting specimens for Wilson, whose energy was visibly flagging. (Among the birds Ord collected was the first Cape May warbler ever described, by Wilson, for science.)

Ord, no specialist himself, became a sort of zealously involved hanger-on, moving into scientific circles largely on the weight of his association with Wilson, though he later made significant contributions of his own. He was described by contemporaries in a barrage of unflattering terms—quarrelsome, picky, intolerant, and abrasive among them. With Ord, Cantwell wrote, “there was no distinction between someone with whom he disagreed, and an enemy.” Malvina Lawson, whose father was Wilson’s engraver and a close acquaintance of Ord’s, recalled in later years that Ord was “very much respected but not very much loved,” a man whose temper brought him to the brink of more than one duel before her father stepped in as peacemaker. Ord’s generalized hostility would eventually find a particular target in John James Audubon, in whom Ord saw a challenge to Wilson’s—and his own—primacy in ornithology.

By April 1813, Wilson wrote to Bartram, “I have been extremely busy these several months, my colorists having all left me; so I have been obliged to do extra duty this past winter.” He was pushing himself relentlessly, and his health, which had never been robust, was failing. He had chronic problems with the “flux,” or dysentery, a common problem in those days of contaminated water and poor sewerage disposal. Hard enough on a healthy man, dysentery can be deadly to a compromised system.

In August, Wilson came down with flux once more; the story was told by Ord, and others, that this followed a cold he caught after swimming a chilly creek to retrieve a bird, but there is little evidence to support this. Wilson, realizing the end was at hand, drew up his will, naming Ord as coexecutor, and died a few days later, on August 23, 1813. He was forty-seven.

Ord, who was traveling when Wilson died, stepped in as the official protector of his friend’s reputation and legacy, a task he completed in a spectacularly uneven fashion. Ord wrote an incomplete and only sporadically accurate biography of Wilson, unable even to supply his birth date, but he also brought out the eighth volume of Ornithology, in 1814, and gathered the material to publish the ninth and last volume a few months later. In it, Ord named a newly described plover for Wilson, and in the years to come, a warbler, a phalarope, and the storm-petrel would follow, honors bestowed by other admiring naturalists. Ord, meanwhile, moved to the pinnacle of Philadelphia’s scientific establishment, eventually becoming president of the Academy of Natural Sciences. He made it his mission to preserve Wilson’s reputation—by destroying Audubon’s, if necessary.

 

SO WHAT WAS IT about America’s frontier that kept turning rudderless dreamers, ne’er-do-wells, and idlers into maniacally focused naturalists? It happened with Catesby and with William Bartram; it happened with Wilson and—most famously—with Audubon, he of the silk breeches and ruffled shirts, more interested in impressing the ladies with his fashionable dance steps than doing anything concrete with his life. Audubon’s interest in drawing and in birds was there from the start, but he floundered for years, even when he had a family to support and a business to mind. Then something clicked, and the happy-go-lucky layabout became ferociously dedicated to studying birds.

For Audubon, at least part of that “something” was meeting Wilson in Louisville, which all but certainly started Audubon thinking about publishing his own great ornithological book. But there must have been something about the birds themselves—the sheer numbers and vivacity of North America’s birds that grabbed these men. Imagine spring as Audubon saw it—not just the sight of things now gone, the magnificent torrents of passenger pigeons blotting the sun and raining their droppings thick as snow, the heath hens strutting and booming by the thousands in the meadows, the whooping cranes and trumpeter swans heading north, or the screeching flocks of parakeets. Simply imagine the raw spectacle of a healthy, undiminished continent’s worth of songbirds overwashing the winter-gray land with movement and color, the incalculable hundreds of millions of warblers, vireos, thrushes, orioles, tanagers, flycatchers, and more. Even today, after centuries of erosion, the great aerial ballet of spring migration is a staggering thing to see. In those days, it must truly have been breathtaking. The question isn’t why were these men ensnared by America’s birds; the question is why wasn’t everyone struck dumb by them?

Rozier and Audubon moved their business downriver to Henderson, Kentucky, in the summer of 1810, but soon thereafter they went their separate ways—Rozier to great commercial success in Missouri; Audubon to continue to muddle along as a storekeeper, this time in partnership with his brother-in-law, using the proceeds from the sale of Mill Grove. Things looked brighter for a while, but by 1819, when an economic panic swept the country, the business was in ruins and the Audubons were bankrupt. John James was taken up for unpaid debts in Louisville and briefly imprisoned. For the second time in as many years, an infant daughter died.

The only thing left to him was his art, and even that, fortune tried to steal. Rats had gotten into the trunk in which he stored his drawings, shredding all but a few and forcing him to start afresh. But from this lowest ebb, Audubon scratched his way back. He and Lucy, with their two surviving sons, moved to Cincinnati, where he got a short-lived job doing taxidermy work for the museum; by this time, he had clearly set his sights on completing a Wilsonesque collection of all North American birds—in fact, one reason for seeking the museum job was access to Wilson’s volumes in the college library. He taught art, and made money on the side by drawing commissioned portraits in charcoal and pencil.

From Cincinnati, Audubon rode a barge south along the Mississippi, and again his family followed, fetching up in New Orleans and Natchez, where Lucy and the boys would spend the next nine years. Audubon was teaching, painting portraits, and collecting birds and drawing them at a feverish pace. The rats back in Kentucky had done him an enormous favor; his newer compositions were far more complex and challenging, their execution infinitely better than those early works. Lucy, now settled in New Orleans, was supporting the family by working as a governess; John James had hired an assistant, Joseph Mason, to add the floral and landscape elements of his paintings.

By 1824, Audubon was ready to begin marketing his grand publication, which he called Birds of America, and he set out to find a publisher. He visited Philadelphia and was invited by Charles Lucien Bonaparte (a nephew of Napoléon’s and a talented ornithologist who was completing a four-volume extension to Wilson’s books) to speak at the Academy of Natural Sciences. It was a disaster. Audubon may have foolishly begun by criticizing Wilson’s work, as one story claims, but regardless, he earned the immediate and lasting enmity of George Ord, Alexander Lawson, and other Wilson partisans.

They recognized a rival when they saw one, and thereafter missed no opportunity to attack Audubon’s paintings, scholarship, and credentials. They pointed out, with perfect validity, the places where Audubon had cribbed Wilson’s drawings and then awkwardly fibbed to hide that fact. Ord further complained that Audubon had shockingly mixed botany and zoology by setting his birds among flowers and plants (even though Wilson had done the same) and charged that Audubon’s dramatic poses were “attitudes never seen in nature.” When Audubon’s former assistant, Joseph Mason, stepped forth to say he’d been unfairly denied credit for his botanical paintings, Ord added artistic theft to his litany of charges.

It was a drumbeat of criticism that Ord and his friends would maintain for the next twenty-five years. In the long run, of course, the sheer force of Audubon’s gift won out, which is why Wilson is a footnote today and Audubon’s name is shorthand for birds. In the near term, however, Ord and his compatriots were effective; Audubon had no hope of publishing in America and was forced to look to Europe. In 1826, he sailed to London with his now extraordinary collection of paintings, spending the next three years shepherding it into engraving and publication. He exulted over the reception he received. What America had denied him—recognition of his genius—Europe was happy to supply. An exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Institution in Edinburgh brought wide acclaim; he was wined by the highest circles of London society and given honorary memberships in lofty societies and academies of science. In Paris, Baron Georges Cuvier, perhaps the greatest biologist of his day, told the members of the French Royal Academy of Sciences that Birds of America was “the most magnificent monument which has yet been raised to ornithology.”

 

A family of pileated woodpeckers feeding in a grape-tangled snag—a work Audubon completed along the upper Lehigh River in Pennsylvania in 1829—is typical of his later, complex compositions, many painted with help from his assistant, George Lehman.

Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, accession number 1863.17.111

 

But Audubon was also chronically short of funds, painting copies of his larger works to sell for cash; he made multiple oils of his Otter in a Trap and Eagle and Lamb, scenes of hunting dogs, fighting cats, and variants on his huge wild turkey, which became something of his trademark. The same chase after subscribers that wore down Wilson had a similar effect on Audubon, who found himself beset by black depressions. “The same sad heart to-day, and but little work and much company,” he despaired in his journal while in Scotland. “The papers give such accounts of my drawings and myself that I am quite ashamed to walk the streets; but I am dispirited and melancholy.” He missed Lucy terribly, but she—busy keeping the family afloat back in Louisiana and no doubt resenting his squiring around the urban centers of Europe—rarely wrote him.

When Audubon returned to the United States in 1829, he threw himself into traveling, collecting, and painting. Birds of America was gathering steam, and he needed new specimens, new species, new paintings. He spent months along the New Jersey coast, then traveled to the “Great Pine Swamp” of Pennsylvania, the virgin pine and hemlock forest along the upper Lehigh River, where he stayed in a logger’s cabin and ate “juicy venison, excellent Bear flesh, and delightful trout.” It was a remarkably productive period for Audubon, who completed drawings of ninety-five birds and sixty eggs, with a new assistant, George Lehman, supplying the floral and background elements. These were some of his most dramatic paintings, including that of the thrasher nest attacked by a black snake, and another of a family of pileated woodpeckers in a grape-tangled snag.

Back to England again, this time with Lucy in tow, one of four transatlantic crossings in the next eight years as Audubon shuttled between the production of the book, in London, and acquisition of new species. Birds of America had become a family enterprise; Lucy handled paperwork, Victor came to London to ride herd on the engravers, and John Woodhouse Audubon (himself a talented artist) helped his father with painting and taxidermy. Audubon was in his glory now, traveling south through the Carolinas and Florida to the Dry Tortugas off the Keys, hobnobbing with turtle hunters, egg collectors, and salvagers; north to Labrador, with John Woodhouse, in a chartered schooner, collecting gannets, puffins, three-toed woodpeckers, and Lincoln’s sparrow, a new species named for a young man on the expedition.

Ord and the Wilsonians kept interest in Birds of America damped down in Philadelphia, but elsewhere the subscriber list grew, despite its steep price—$1,050, the equivalent of about $40,000 in modern currency. The aquatint prints made from the original paintings were huge, printed on enormous sheets of paper, 39½ by 28½ inches, that printers called a “double elephant.” Andrew Jackson received the Audubons in the White House, and if money remained a perennial problem (Audubon was briefly detained again for old debts) his reputation grew with the release of each new folio in the series—massive books of one hundred plates each (one hundred thirty-five in the fourth and final volume), which came out in “numbers” of five plates at a time over the course of eleven years.

But enough, for a moment, about the emerging science of birds—what about the pure pleasure of watching birds, which by the opening of the twenty-first century would grow to one of the most popular outdoor pastimes? Were there birders—in spirit, if not name—in the early years of America when Audubon was at work?

Of course; our species has been watching and enjoying birds for as long as we’ve been human. But while history has noted those giants like Catesby, Wilson, and Audubon, who moved the science of ornithology forward, it overlooked those who rested at the plow to watch a flight of teal come twisting down the creek valley, or the farmwives who shared crumbs of scarce family bread for the pleasure of seeing juncos and sparrows scuff in the snow on a cold day. Early Americans, especially those in rural areas, were astute observers of birds, though it was not usually the purely recreational pastime it is today. Birds were guideposts to the seasons, to planting and harvest, forecasts of the changing weather and even changing personal fortune—visible tokens of what was soon to come.

Birds figured in all sorts of old folk wisdom, especially regarding the weather. Some was clear and accurate; Bartram noted that when the “pewit, or black cap flycatcher” (our eastern phoebe) first arrives in southern Pennsylvania in mid-March, “we may plant peas and beans in the open ground . . . and almost every kind of exculent garden seeds, without fear or danger from frosts.” Swallows flying close to the ground presaged rain, the old farmers believed, while geese flying high meant fair weather—both beliefs having some basis in truth. Cuckoos were known as “rain crows” for the way they call on humid, storm-brewing summer days, and ruffed grouse were thought to drum most often in fall and winter before a big snowstorm. Wilson wrote that when an osprey circles high while calling, then dives, it means an approaching storm—an observation that time has not borne out.

Nor were the auguries all related to weather. A bird flying into a house meant impending news, while a whip-poor-will or a screech-owl calling outside the window heralded approaching death for a loved one. Most of the odd or unusual birds were the subjects of superstition, and whip-poor-wills, a species Wilson first described, had more than their share. The family to which they belong is still known formally as the goatsuckers, stemming from the ancient belief that they sucked milk from the teats of livestock. Besides being an omen of death, a calling whip-poor-will could bring luck if you wished on the first one of the spring—and if you had backache, turning somersaults in time with the whip’s call would cure you.

This folk wisdom came down through the oral tradition, and few of these rural people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote down their observations, other than in a handful of journals, diaries, and newspaper accounts. But what they have bequeathed to us is a rich, exuberant, linguistically joyful store of old folk names for American birds—a reflection of the newness of the continent they were settling, and a mirror held to a frontier culture that was, like Adam, putting names to things.

Not surprisingly, these mostly European settlers looked for similarities with the birds they’d known back home, giving them names that recalled (often with bitter poignancy) the lands and birds they’d left behind. Europe has an orange-breasted thrush known as the robin, and the name was pinned to the larger American species with a similarly rusty breast, even though they belong to different subfamilies. Thrashers were called thrushes, wood warblers were known as flycatchers, and kinglets were wrens (even though there are kinglets in Europe, too). It was a nomenclatural mess, and exactly what the relationships were between Old and New World birds set the specialists to scratching their heads.

But even as scientists like Wilson were trying to sort things out, you had new generations across the eastern frontier with no firsthand memory of Old World birds, nor much interest in academic arguments, creating their own regional names for the birds they encountered on their farms and in their forests. Most were descriptive—“hangnest” for a Baltimore oriole, “cutwater” for a black skimmer, “high-hole” or “yellowhammer” for a flicker, “sawbill” for a merganser.

The result was a welter of colloquial English names that grew up in different regions, varying sometimes from valley to valley. One person’s “silver tongue” was another’s “hedge sparrow” or even “everybody’s darling”—all names for what we now call the song sparrow. American bitterns were called “thunder pumpers,” “water-belchers,” “mire drums,” or “bog-bulls” because of their booming calls; their habit of freezing in the cattails, bill pointed skyward, gave them the names “stake-bird,” “look-up,” “sky-gazer,” and “sun-gazer.” Flush a bittern or a heron, and it’ll usually void a stream of excrement as it takes off; such birds were known as “shitepokes” in polite company, but the middle e vanished when the audience was rougher.

One popular reference lists nineteen alternate names for American woodcock, including “bog-borer,” “bog-sucker,” “Labrador twister,” “night-peck,” “siphon snipe,” and “hookum-pake.” Only one, “timberdoodle,” is in anything like wide use today, and then mostly as a fond nickname among hunters. In most cases, these old names have vanished entirely, but once, almost every bird had dozens of them. Nineteenth-century hunters along the coast might report shooting checkered snipe, bishop-birds, calico-jackets, chuckatucks, jinnys, creddocks, rock-birds, redlegs, and sea quail, all of which represent fewer than half the more than two dozen vernacular names for ruddy turnstones.

It was a big, confusing country out there, full of far more birds than any of the early naturalists realized. Wilson, Audubon, and their contemporaries tried to make sense of it all, but given the pioneering nature of their work, mistakes were inevitable. Wilson, for instance, described a new songbird he named the “autumn warbler,” not realizing it was the blackpoll warbler in nonbreeding plumage, while Audubon mistook a very large, very dark immature bald eagle for a new species, dubbing it “the Bird of Washington.” He also named “Brewer’s duck,” even though he suspected (correctly) that it was merely a hybrid between a mallard and a gadwall.

Interestingly, though, not all the mystery birds in Wilson’s and Audubon’s paintings can be dismissed as simple misidentifications. They include Wilson’s “small-headed flycatcher,” which he painted from a specimen said to have been collected in New Jersey, and which he said he encountered again several times. “Flycatcher” was the name then commonly used for warblers, and the bird depicted in Wilson’s plate—which Audubon copied, claiming to have found the same species in Kentucky—could be a hybrid warbler, or perhaps a weird kinglet or Empidonax flycatcher. Regardless, nothing matching the drawings and descriptions has ever been seen again.

Wilson and Audubon also described the “Blue Mountain warbler,” again possibly a hybrid, and Audubon the “carbonated swamp-warbler,” about which specialists have been arguing ever since. Some believe the latter represents an immature Cape May warbler, perhaps inaccurately drawn from memory—Audubon had lost many of his original paintings from his days in Kentucky. Others, including Roger Tory Peterson, thought it very likely was a legitimate species, so rare that it soon vanished entirely, leaving Audubon’s painting of the two males he collected as the only evidence. Audubon’s “Cuvier’s wren” may have been an odd golden-crowned kinglet with an all-red cap, or a hybrid between a golden-crowned and a ruby-crowned. Townsend’s bunting, collected near Philadelphia in 1833 and named by Audubon for its discoverer, is thought by some to have been a hybrid, and by others to be a dickcissel lacking the normal yellow pigment; unlike the other hypothetical species, the specimen skin is still in the Smithsonian.

Actually, though, some of the most fascinating examples of lost species involve those pioneering naturalists Catesby and William Bartram, if only because the birds involved are so spectacular and the idea of them once inhabiting the United States is so exotic. Catesby referred to the “red curlew,” or scarlet ibis, as being common in the Bahamas, and Wilson recorded that it was wide-spread in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Given that this vividly colored wading bird is today found no closer than Trinidad and the coast of South America, it seems unlikely that their reports were accurate, and both men may have been relying too heavily on what they’d been told by others.

It’s much harder to dismiss William Bartram’s enigmatic “painted vulture” in Florida: “a beautiful bird . . . white or cream colour, except the quill-feathers of the wings and two or three rows of the coverts, which are of a beautiful dark brown; the tail which is large and white is tipped with this dark brown or black.” His description, of which this is a small excerpt, is almost spot-on for the king vulture of the neotropics—a species which, sadly for Bartram’s reputation over the years, does not occur any closer to Florida than southern Mexico.

Forget whatever unfortunate mental image the word vulture conjures up in your mind, because the king vulture is nothing short of dazzling. The body plumage is gleaming white, the wing feathers and tail a glossy black, and the head—well, the head looks as though Picasso had tried his hand at designing a bird right after he painted Guernica, all abstracted oranges and purples, wattles and carbuncles. The first time I saw one, in the Maya Mountains of southern Belize, I was watching a kettle of black vultures and swallow-tailed kites playing on the humid updrafts. From the hazy sky, a single white bird appeared, dwarfing the smaller vultures; then another, and another, until seven kings were swirling in tight circles above me. A few days later, I encountered one early in the morning, perched on a dead snag, and marveled at that kaleidoscopic head.

So this is, you’ll understand, an unmistakable bird, and it’s hard to see how anyone who reads Bartram’s description could think he was talking about any other species. And yet this record has been ignored or dismissed, sometimes in the most disparaging terms, by ornithologists for centuries. Naturalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries generally accepted it, perhaps because Florida remained a soggy wilderness where anything was possible. But as ornithologists pushed into every corner of the state without ever finding Bartram’s “sacred vulture,” doubts began to grow. By the 1850s, authors were expressing reservations, and twenty years later, Bartram’s sighting was derided as a “purely mythical species” by one prominent ornithologist, who called the report “a confused mixture of . . . pure fiction and truth, with the former in preponderance.”

Bartram had many faults as a writer; his Travels were written years after the fact, which led to many mistakes, vague generalities, and misplaced locations, but this would be a degree of falsehood or sloppy fieldwork that seems beyond possibility. More and more ornithologists have come to believe the record is valid; manuscripts by Bartram, uncovered in England in the 1930s, include an account of his finding and shooting a “Croped” (cropped) vulture that matches his later description of the painted vulture, including the distinctive, brightly colored bare crop that protrudes from a king vulture’s chest feathers.

Audubon, who on his southern expedition put in along the Saint Johns River almost seventy years after Bartram’s first visit, found no painted vultures, but he did paint a subspecies of crested caracara that would come to bear his name. Like the caracara, Florida is still home to many species of birds with disjunct ranges, marooned on the peninsula when climate change or rising sealevels cut them off from the rest of their kind. It’s one of the Sunshine State’s big attractions for birders—western species like burrowing owls and scrub-jays (the latter an endemic form), and tropical raptors like the snail kite and short-tailed hawk, both of which are common across Latin America. It seems at least reasonable to think that a disjunct population of king vultures was originally found in Florida as well—so reasonable, in fact, that a few raptor conservationists have called for reintroducing the king vulture to its old Floridian range.

We like to think that Audubon was witnessing the untouched frontier, and when one reads his account of, say, collecting twenty Carolina parakeets and two ivory-billed woodpeckers along the Mississippi, that impression is plaintively reinforced. But the tide of exploration and settlement—and the frontiers of ornithology—had already passed far to the west, and although Audubon burned to go there himself, he was chained to the East and to London by the trials of bringing Birds of America to life.

He was also moved by the changes he saw in the land he’d adopted as his own. In October 1836, Audubon was in Philadelphia, negotiating for the purchase of western bird skins brought back by some of the early expeditions. “Passed poor Alexander Wilson’s schoolhouse, and heaved a sigh,” he wrote in his journal.

 

Alas, poor Wilson! would that I could once more speak to thee, and listen to thy voice. When I was a youth, the woods stood unmolested here, looking wild and fresh as if just from the Creator’s hands: but now hundreds of streets cross them, and thousands of houses and millions of diverse improvements occupy their places. Bartram’s Garden is the only place which is unchanged. I walked in the same silent wood I enjoyed on the same spot when first I visited.

 

The Philadelphia that they both knew is gone. It was Wilson’s hope, as he was dying of the flux, that he would rest where he could always hear birdsong. Wilson’s grave lies in the cemetery of Gloria Dei (Old Swedes) Church, which today is wedged between I-95 and Columbus Boulevard in Philadelphia, a small clot of trees amid the mayhem of traffic and the commercial waterfront of the Delaware River. There’s little birdsong today, although the Canada geese and ring-billed gulls still move up and down the river. Wealthy admirers had offered to move Wilson’s remains to a prominent location in the Laurel Hill cemetery, overlooking the falls of the Schuylkill River, but Ord refused.

Remarkably, Bartram’s Garden has managed to withstand the times; like Mill Grove, it remains an oasis in an urban landscape, protected as a monument to its namesake. The old stone house and barn, John Bartram’s rock cider press, the historic gardens, all remain much as they were. On a spring morning, the migrant songbirds still come back to the old trees around the homestead, like the giant yellowwood that Bartram planted in the 1790s, which still explodes in white blossoms, and to the thickets of ash and river birch along the Schuylkill. Along the boardwalk that passes through the soggy, riverine forest, there is a flickering of wings, and the song of a warbling vireo, a yellowthroat, a catbird. I suspect that if the shade of Sandy Wilson walks anywhere to hear the birds, it is here.