A Renowned Birder Shatters the Audubon Myth

 

BookShelf: A Renowned Birder Shatters the Audubon Myth

“The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness”
By Kenn Kaufman
Avid Reader Press, $32.50

Reviewed by Tom Henry

John James Audubon.

Countless people on Earth know he is the namesake for the National Audubon Society, one of the world’s best-known scientific and advocacy groups.

But relatively few know who John James Audubon was as a person like Kenn Kaufman does.

Who knew, for example, that the legendary French-American naturalist, ornithologist and illustrator was such an egomaniac that — despite his enormous contributions to science — he was a petty, miserable person who was at times guilty of committing fraud?

In his utterly fascinating, deeply researched book, “The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness,” Kaufman takes on the iconic Audubon and shatters myths about his legacy.

 

Author carries weight in birding community

Kaufman lives in a rural part of northwest Ohio with his wife, Kimberly Kaufman, executive director of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory, one of the Great Lakes region’s largest and most-respected birding organizations.

But that’s not why he’s in the catbird seat, so to speak, for taking on the legendary Audubon.

Kaufman is himself a world-renowned naturalist-writer who has published numerous books, including major award-winners. He is a brilliant illustrator and painter, too, just like Audubon.

He and his wife are no strangers to the Audubon Society; Kaufman is a field editor for the group’s flagship publication, Audubon magazine.

He has been with the American Birding Association since its inception in 1972. The countless awards he has won include the Roger Tory Peterson Award and the Ludlow Griscom Award for outstanding contributions to regional ornithology.

Suffice it to say Kaufman knows his stuff and his words carry a lot of weight in the birding community, which makes his dissection of Audubon the person all the more interesting.

 

A brutally honest account

And, no, it’s not a hit job.

Kaufman, in his book and during a Zoom webinar in July that drew nearly 500 viewers, is quite respectful in his handling of Audubon while also being brutally honest.

He admires Audubon as an illustrator, claiming that he — as a fellow artist who also specializes in drawing and painting birds — can’t match Audubon’s technique. He said that it became painfully obvious to him that he should focus on his own style and not try to replicate the master.

But Kaufman is not in awe of Audubon as a person.

 

As the whole science of ornithology

was developing, there was something

akin to the space race going on.

 

Here’s the context that many of us don’t know: From the late 1700s until Audubon’s death in 1851, as the whole science of ornithology was developing, there was something akin to the space race going on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in other parts of the world.

Grown men fond of nature — including Mark Catesby, William Bartram and Carl Linnaeus — were on a hunt for birds they could take credit for discovering and, thus, assign naming rights.

Audubon was one of them. His chief rival was ornithologist Alexander Wilson. Others in the mix included George Ord, a protege of Wilson’s who held a grudge against Audubon, and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, a 19th century naturalist who was Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew.

 

How Audubon marred his own legacy

What emerged as a result of Kaufman’s deep dive into history and his passion for setting the record straight is a significant piece of work few other people likely could have left us.

With occasional humor and a lot of mind-blowing, meticulous detail, Kaufman walks us through that era and sheds light on the personalities of several key figures.

Audubon got a lot of facts wrong, and knowingly made things up about certain birds simply because of his ego and his fierce sense of competition. Similar things could be said about some of his contemporaries.

In so doing, Audubon marred his own legacy as a person, yet left the world with one-of-a-kind drawings of birds that, when accurately depicted, will be lasting treasures, Kaufman writes.

It should be noted this was a much different era than today, too, one in which hunting meant literal hunting. Without the brilliant optics of modern photography, those drawing or otherwise studying birds back then shot them and pinned up their carcasses to get a closer look at them.

In one passage of the book, Kaufman quotes Wilson saying that his pursuit of a large shorebird called an oystercatcher “nearly cost me my life” because he almost got swept by a current out into the ocean while holding his powderhorn.

Wilson grew frustrated with shorebirds in general, misidentifying the few he tried to identify and largely giving up. His frustration was shared by others.

“No other birds in North America and Europe proved as challenging for the first scientists who attempted to figure them out,” Kaufman wrote. “Their early struggles echo today for every birdwatcher trying to learn to recognize the shorebirds.”

 

Evenhanded examination of ornithology origins

What makes this a powerful book beyond Kaufman’s incredible research and his beautiful prose is his ability to step back and be objective.

 

This is not a rant about

Audubon per se. It’s not meant

to insult, but to enlighten.

 

He hits Audubon’s legacy hard, but in an intelligent, evenhanded manner. This is not a rant about Audubon per se, but a worthwhile examination of how the foundation for ornithology had its cracks. It’s not meant to insult, but to enlighten.

“It’s easy, too, for us to look back now, with two centuries’ worth of accumulated knowledge, and say the early naturalists should have noticed all these things,” Kaufman wrote. “But is it fair? Would I have done any better? Probably not.”

He went on to say it is “a bittersweet fact of life for naturalists that we can take to the field regularly, primed for discovery, and walk right past things that would have been new. In most cases, we’ll never know what we missed. A human lifetime is so short that we can’t even begin to grasp the diversity of nature. But even our attempts will fill our days with delight.”

A few pages later, Kaufman laments how some species, such as the once-plentiful passenger pigeon, have gone extinct.

“The diversity of life is important to me, at a level that’s spiritual and not just academic, and I grieve for every loss,” he wrote. “Having a few living individuals of a species would be vastly better than having none at all. But still it would be only the palest shadow of what we have lost. The mere existence of a species isn’t the only thing that matters.”

But extinction, Kaufman points out, is a fairly recent concept. It would have been alien to naturalists of the late 1700s because all but a few believed that all species on Earth resulted from an original act of creation and “it was unthinkable that any might disappear.”

Those who shared that view included former President Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist who offered such thoughts in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” in the 1780s.

 

Extolling a sense of discovery

Through it all, Kaufman believes it’s important that people never lose their sense of wonderment about nature.

He ends his book with sweet thoughts about that feeling of euphoria.

He opened his talk in July with an anecdote about his sense of discovery when, as a 7-year-old boy, he thought he’d discovered a bird in his neighborhood that nobody else had ever seen.

Kaufman considers himself “one of those lucky people” who have maintained a strong love affair with nature.

 

‘We remain as children, eyes wide,

expecting miracles around every

corner. As we should.’

                          — Kenn Kaufman

 

“For us, the wonders of nature never disappoint and they never end. Every time we find something new, we want to know what it is,” he said. “We remain as children, eyes wide, expecting miracles around every corner. As we should. Because, you know, there are miracles around every corner.”

Kaufman said the best he can hope for anyone is that they develop this sense of wonder with the outdoors “and that they go out with that sense of discovery, because there are so many discoveries to be made by all of us.”

“This early history (of bird discovery) is fascinating for a number of reasons,” Kaufman said earlier in his talk. “It’s not my place to pass judgment on these historical characters. I’m just trying to present them as they actually were.”

Tom Henry is SEJournal’s BookShelf editor and a former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 34. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.