Birds and Men : American Birds in Science, Art, Literature and Conservation, 1800–1900

258 Pages·1955·14.706 MB·English

by  Robert Henry Welker

Atheneum 82 $2.45
~~~~
BIRDS &MEN
AMEl(ICAN Bil(DS IN SCIENCE, Al(T,
LITEl(A TUl(E, AND CCNSEl(VA TION
d <f>tJtJ-d,9 tJtJ
WITH 40 ILLUSTRATIONS
originally publiihed ·by Harvard Univer1ityP reu
BIRDS and MEN.
American Birds in Science, Art
Literature, and
Conservation, 1800-1900
Robert Henry Welker
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENEUM 1966 NEw YoRK
To my good friends and mentors
Ludlow Griscom (1890-1959)
Ornithologist and Writer
and
Howard Mumford Jones
Critic, Teacher, and Pulitzer Prize Author
I am happily privileged to dedicate this book
Published by Atheneum
Reprinted by arrangement with Harvard University Press
Copyright© 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America by
The Murray Printing Company, Forge Village, Massachusetts
Bound by The Colonial Press, Inc., Clinton, Massachusetts
Published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
First Atheneum Edition
Contents
Introduction I
I New Lands, New Birds 6
2 Pioneera nd Prophet:A lexander Wilson 18
3 The "AmericanO rnithology" 33
4 A Meeting of Consequence 48
5 FulfillingG enius:J ohn JamesA udubon 59
6 Bird Art and Audubon 71
7 LiteraryB irdman:H enry David Thoreau 91
8 Emersona nd Other Worthies II6
9 "John o' Birds":J ohn Burroughs 125
10 American Bird Poetry:W hitman and Others 136
1 1 End-of-the-CenturyP rose 149
12 The Beginningso f Con~ervation 157
13 Federala nd State Bird Books 167
14 Educating a Wider Public 177
15 Boys, Pot-Hunters,a nd Women: Enemies of Birds 193
16 Rescue at Hand 200
Bibliography 213
Index 221
Illustrations
THE HEATH HEN. Figure z. Facing page 1
Followingp age 38
MARK CATESBY AND ALEXANDER WILSON: Con
tributions to American bird art. Figures 2-6: Catesby's crested
flycatcher, Horal design, and "crested Jay"; Wilson's cowbirds,
gnatcatcher, vireo, warbler, and peregrine falcon.
AUDUBON'S PLAGIARISMS FROM WILSON. Figures
7-12: Wilson's male cerulean warbler and Audubon's "female";
Wilson's and Audubon's redwing plates; Wilson's Mississippi
kite and Audubon's "female" kite.
Followingp age 70
PROGRESS IN BIRD ART. Figures 13-15: From medieval
grotesquerie to accurate drawing in Willughby's Ornithology
of 1678- eagle and osprey; some common and some exotic
birds. Figures 16-17: Further advance in British bird drawing,
from Edwards' Natural History of 1751 - blue grosbeak and
"Blue belly'd Finch." Figures 18-20: Diversity of illustration
in continental works of latter eighteenth century- a bedraggled
pigeon hawk, a jay, and an American meadowlark.
Followingp age 86
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON. Figures 21-24: Flexibility and
range of Audubon's art- his black and white warbler, Carolina
paroquets, house wrens, and rough-legged hawk. Figures 25-
30: Versatile handling of point of view - a raven, fish crows,
Savannah sparrows, short-billed marsh wrens, black vultures,
and a yellow rail. Figures 31-32: Two crowded plates-west
ern woodpeckers and a conclave of owls. Figures 33-34: Vio
lent animation for dramatic effect - hawk swooping on a covey
of quail; red-shoulder hawk preying on a bullfrog.
Followingp age 198
WHAT WAS CHIC. Figures 35-40: Dead birds, fancy
feathers, kitten heads; fashion plates from Godey's Lady's Book
and The Delineator.
BIRDS and MEN
1. THE HEATH HEN, an eastern race of the prairie chicken or pin
nated grouse, was a locally abundant species when this illustration
appeared in Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina in 1748.
But it was destined to be one of several birds exterminated by white
settlement. A New York law of 1708 established a closed season for it;
later other states extended protection. Yet excessive shooting in the re
stricted habitat of this bird caused its disappearance from the mainland
by 1870, with the last of the race surviving only on Martha's Vineyard
off the Massachusetts coast. In 1928 only three birds were left on the
island; in 1933 the last one died and the race became extinct, having
failed to adapt its ways well enough to survive.
Introduction
Sumer is i-cumen in Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhude sing, cuccu! Lhouth after calve cu;
Groweth sed and bloweth med Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth;
And springth the wude nu. Murie sing cuccu.
Singcuccu; Cuccu, cuccu!
Wei singes thu, cuccu,
Ne swik thu naver nu!
Middle English lyric, c. 1300
From the beginning men have taken note of birds. In his concern with
them, the fourteenth-century English poet singing of the cuckoo was
a late comer indeed. A century earlier another poet had written The
Owl and the Nightingale, seventeen hundred lines of argument be
tween a spitfire songster and a grumpy bird of night; and as early as
the eighth century had appeared the Anglo-Saxon riddle "A Swan."
About that time also Beowulf had mentioned the swan, the eagle, and
the raven. Centuries before, there had come to Europe the Physi
ologus tales, drawing upon nature lore of Greece and the Middle
East, in verse and prose; and before them, the Naturalis Historia of
Pliny the Elder, who in tum looked back to Aristotle for much of his
material- but who scarcely aspired to his mentor's standards of criti
cal scientific inquiry. A century before Aristotle, Aristophanes had
peopled his ideal state of Cloudland with political birds; and Aesop,
yet another century earlier, had assembled his winsome animal tales,
many of them with birds as speaking characters.
2 Birds and Men
By Aesop's time, or earlier, the Hebrew singers had written:
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The Rowersa ppear on the earth; the time of the singing
of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is
heard in our land;
and
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair;
Thou hast dove's eyes within thy locks:
and
My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten
thousand.
His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy,
and black as a raven
and
My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of
her mother, she is the choice of her that bare her.
And the ravens had fed Elijah the Tishbite, and the lawgivers had
forbidden the eating of nineteen "birds of abomination" (Leviticus
I 1: 13-19), and the quails had come up to the camp of the Israelites
fleeing Egypt.
The land from which they Bed had been for many centuries rich
in bird lore. Painted, carved into frieze and hieroglyph, or drawn on
papyrus, birds had appeared centrally in Egyptian culture; and in
Egypt had arisen the idea that the bird is symbolic of the human soul.
In other great civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean - the Cretan,
the Corinthian, the Laconian, the Chaldean, the Boeotian, the Attic,
the Etruscan-bird art also had developed."'
It was not here, however, amo~1gt hese peoples of known history,
that the earliest bird artifacts were produced. Perhaps as early as the
thirty-fifth millennium before Christ, Paleolithic man, carving or
painting on the walls of caves in France and Spain, drew the first
birds (so far_as we know) ever recorded by human hands.t And he
drew them well enough that today we know them in our own scientific
terms; we can assign the family, or even the genus or species, to sev-
" See Claus Kruger, Der fliegende Vogel in der antiken Kunst 'bis zur klassischen
Zeit (Quakenbriick, 1940).
t See Jean Anker, Bird Books and Bird Art (Copenhagen, 1938), p. 1. See also
Alcalde de! Rio, Breuil, and Sierra, Les Cavernes de la region canta'brique, peintures
et gravures murales des cavernes paleolithiques (Monaco, 1911), pp. 230-237.
Introduction
3
eral of his birds. By these tokens we know that the human creature
even in the Age of Stone was aware of birds, and observed them in
critical detail.
But to return across three hundred and fifty centuries to the
Cuckoo Song. One might suppose that so slight a lyric would count
for very little by way of observation of nature. In fact, however, its
honesty shines forth amidst the gloom of its time; for if the poem ob
serves little, it observes truly, and if its truth is unimportant, at least
the verse does not lie. Elsewhere in this period we can find avowed
"natural history" enough- the Physiologus tales mentioned above,
with their offspring, the bestiaries; and scarcely a page of them can
be read today without incredulity, amusement, or dismay. For in the
course of time these tales had lost all pretense to scientific truth; what
had been originally an accurate observation of a bird or a mammal
was now wrenched askew to fit some churchly saw, and what had
begun as fabulous lore was now further debauched by grotesque
moralizing. With natural science thus captive to the ecclesiastics,o ne
turned to the Cuckoo Song, to The Owl and the Nightingale, or a
little later to The Parliament of Fowles - in short, to the poets - to
learn more truly of birds.
About the time of the Cuckoo Song, however, there was circulating
in Europe a notable ornithological work by one of the most remark
able men ever to wear a crown. It was De Arte Venandi cum Avibus
by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Frederick, Holy Roman Emperor,
the Christian ruler who often dressed as an Arab; who established a
great university in his capital, Naples; who brought thither scholars
from all over the Moslem and Christian worlds; who introduced the
study of the great Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd, and who rejuvenated
the study of Roman law; who often defied papal authority, and suf
fered more than one excommunication- this man was the foremost
ornithologist of the Middle Ages. The Art of Falconry was primarily
concerned with hawks and their uses, of course; but in addition to
the sections on falconry there were passages on the structure and
habits of birds in general, and as originally circulated in manuscript,
the work was illustrated by many colored drawings, showing various
species of birds.* Here, then, was a genuine work of ornithological
• An excellent modem reproduction of De Arte V enandi cum Avibus is that of