Birds Of America Research Articles

Audubon as Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America

Audubon as Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Review of ‘Audubon’s Birds of America’ at the National Museum of Scotland

This is a review of the exhibition ‘Audubon’s Birds of America’, held at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh from 12 February to 8 May 2022.

Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America

Acknowledgments Introduction: Long-Distance Pictures 1. Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley's Atlantic 2. Audubon's Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America 3. Gathering Moss: Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape Epilogue: Material Visual Culture Notes Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

Review: Piranesi Unbound

Review: <i>Piranesi Unbound</i>

The limits of imperial influence: John James Audubon in British North America

For two decades, John James Audubon (1785–1851) travelled widely and frequently while working on his illustrated natural history volumes – still highly prized today for their aesthetic and scientific merit: Birds of America (1827–1838) and Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846–1854). Neither independently wealthy nor employed as a salaried scientist, the artist-naturalist with a flair for marketing financed his projects by selling subscriptions. Successfully marketing Birds to members of the British aristocracy, as well as to organizations and to artistic and intellectual elites, Audubon was reluctant to take Quadrupeds to Britain even though sales there were key to the financial viability of his work. Instead, in 1842 Audubon travelled to Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), the most populous region of British North America. The colony was, he calculated, a viable source of subscribers; however, he was wrong. Moreover, having travelled to British North America previously, he should have expected modest returns. Nonetheless, he was optimistic that this expedition would succeed where those to New Brunswick (1832) and Labrador and Newfoundland (1833) had failed. This paper examines why success eluded Audubon in the colonies, arguing that entrepreneurialism buttressed by patronage – a winning strategy in Britain – failed because there was a vast difference between metropolis and hinterland when it came to supporting the arts and sciences.

Isolation and characterization of influenza A virus (H6N2) from a temporary artificial pond in Mexico

Veterinaria Mexico OA ISSN: 2448-6760 Cite this as: Barron-Rodriguez RJ, Chavez-Maya F, Loza-Rubio E, Garcia-Espinosa G. Isolation and characterization of influenza A virus (H6N2) from a temporary artificial pond in Mexico. Veterinaria Mexico OA. 2018;5(2). doi: 10.21753/5.2.475. . Most epidemiological surveillance studies of the influenza A virus (IAV) have focused on the isolation and detection of the virus in wild birds. However, there are limited descriptions of both the wild duck population and the purpose and size of the aquatic habitats where viruses have been detected or isolated. The objective of this study was to determine if a pond of 16 hectares (39.536 acres), used for agricultural and fishing purposes and visited by approximately 9000 wild migratory ducks consisting of nine different species during the wintering stay, is suitable to support the isolation of IAV. One influenza A virus was isolated from Pekin ducks used as sentinels during the wintering stay season from September 2007 to March 2008. Only one IAV subtype was isolated from 9 of the 88 samples collected from the sentinel ducks over seven months, and the molecular characterization of this isolate revealed an H6N2 virus subtype. Based on this information, it is suggested that a pond such as the one in this study provides a suitable biological setting to support the presence of IAV, but the minimum biological environment to isolate the influenza A virus is still unknown. Figure 1. Location of the artificial pond in the State of Mexico with 19°24’22” N, 99°41’36” W coordinates and the routes of migratory birds in America (Google Earth).

The Birds of America, the U.S. Presidents, and American Paintings of Native Fauna and Flora

The Birds of America, the U.S. Presidents, and American Paintings of Native Fauna and Flora

Bared Teeth, Plucked Feathers, Broken Eggs: Reading Human-Animal Relationships through Audubon

In this paper, I study John James Audubon’s famed drawings of wildlife to uncover his perspective on the evolving relationships between humans and animals during the era of American westward expansion. Using three engravings from Birds of America, along with his accompanying essays, I look beyond the animals in the foreground to examine the human settlements often lurking in the background. I discover that Audubon portrays three distinct types of human-animal relationships, which I then compare to the human presence shown in two of his later works, the engravings of Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America and their subsequent essays. This second set of drawings undercuts any attempt to derive an optimistic interpretation of the Birds plates, for they reveal an unsustainable relationship between humans and the animals whose habitats they invade. I conclude that while Birds and Quadrupeds glorify their animal subjects, rightly qualifying as artistic and scientific triumphs, their depiction of human activity carries a much darker weight, suggesting that human presence in nature necessarily causes damage. Ultimately, this idea recasts Audubon as a thinker who transcends his historical location and offers a relevant perspective on the environment occupied by the modern reader.

Stephen Schryer Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American FictionFantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

<i>Stephen Schryer</i> Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction<i>Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction</i>. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

Historical biogeography of theIsthmus ofPanama

About 3 million years ago (Ma), the Isthmus of Panama joined the Americas, forming a land bridge over which inhabitants of each America invaded the other-the Great American Biotic Interchange. These invasions transformed land ecosystems in South and Middle America. Humans invading from Asia over 12000 years ago killed most mammals over 44 kg, again transforming tropical American ecosystems. As a sea barrier, the isthmus induced divergent environmental change off its two coasts-creating contrasting ecosystems through differential extinction and diversification. Approximately 65 Ma invading marsupials and ungulates of North American ancestry, and xenarthrans of uncertain provenance replaced nearly all South America's non-volant mammals. There is no geological evidence for a land bridge at that time. Together with rodents and primates crossing from Africa 42 to 30 Ma, South America's mammals evolved in isolation until the interchange's first heralds less than 10 Ma. Its carnivores were ineffective marsupials. Meanwhile, North America was invaded by more competitive Eurasian mammals. The Americas had comparable expanses of tropical forest 55 Ma; later, climate change confined North American tropical forest to a far smaller area. When the isthmus formed, North American carnivores replaced their marsupial counterparts. Although invaders crossed in both directions, North American mammals spread widely, diversified greatly, and steadily replaced South American open-country counterparts, unused to effective predators. Invading South American mammals were less successful. South America's birds, bats, and smaller rainforest mammals, equally isolated, mostly survived invasion. Its vegetation, enriched by many overseas invaders, remained intact. This vegetation resists herbivory effectively. When climate permitted, South America's rainforest, with its bats, birds and mammals, spread to Mexico. Present-day tropical American vegetation is largely zoned by trade-offs between exploiting well-watered settings versus surviving droughts, exploiting fertile versus coping with poor soil, and exploiting lowland warmth versus coping with cooler altitudes. At the start of the Miocene, a common marine biota extended from Trinidad to Ecuador and western Mexico, which evolved in isolation from the Indo-Pacific until the Pleistocene. The seaway between the Americas began shoaling over 12 Ma. About 10 Ma the land bridge was briefly near-complete, allowing some interchange of land mammals between the continents. By 7 Ma, the rising sill had split deeper-water populations. Sea temperature, salinity and sedimentary carbon content had begun to increase in the Southern Caribbean, but not the Pacific. By 4 Ma, the seaway's narrowing began to extinguish Caribbean upwellings. By 2 Ma, upwellings remained only along Venezuela; Caribbean plankton, suspension-feeding molluscs and their predators had declined sharply, largely replaced by bottom-dwelling corals and calcareous algae and magnificent coral reefs. Closing the seaway extinguished the Eastern Pacific's reef corals (successors recolonized from the Indo-Pacific 6000 years ago), whereas many molluscs of productive waters that once thrived in the Caribbean now survive only in the Eastern Pacific. The present-day productive Eastern Pacific, with few, small coral reefs and a plankton-based ecosystem contrasts with the Caribbean, whose clear water favours expansive coral reefs and bottom-dwelling primary producers. These ecosystems reflect the trade-off between fast growth and effective defence with attendant longevity. Overfishing with new technologies during the last few centuries, however, has caused population crashes of ever-smaller marine animals, devastating Caribbean ecosystems.

Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature

Christopher P. Iannini's Fatal Revolutions is a significant contribution to the hemispheric turn taken by Ralph Bauer, Susan Scott Parrish, and others in recent studies of the relationship between natural history and literary culture in European colonies in the Americas. Through close readings of a seemingly “eclectic series of texts” (p. 8) Iannini makes a compelling argument for the role of depictions of the Caribbean region in the development of American letters, capaciously defined: From Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina through [John James] Audubon's Ornithological Biography and Birds of America, North American readers had been trained to regard the southern colonies (later, states) … as part of an extended Caribbean region that was both a primary source of national wealth and enlightened knowledge and a corrosive influence on national manners, borders, and beliefs. (pp. 282–83) Iannini's primary concern is the linkage between the development of the plantation economy in the Americas and “the rise of natural history as a new scientific discipline, intellectual obsession, and literary form” (p. 3). In effect, Fatal Revolutions traces the increasing role that the ethnography of slavery plays in works of natural history written between 1700 and the early nineteenth century.

Resurrecting the Story of the Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania

The passenger pigeon was the most impressive species of bird that man has known. Elegant in form and color, swift and graceful of flight, it moved about and nested in such enormous numbers as to confound the senses. —A. W. Schorger, The Passenger Pigeon and Its Extinction (1955) Only a handful of centenarians can recall the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, but generations of school-children know that the incident launched World War I. Two months later, in September of that year, another notable death occurred. Martha, the world’s last remaining passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha’s remains, accompanied by a sign reading “EXTINCT” in large block letters, graced the bird exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution for almost eighty years. Martha’s death received considerably less attention than the archduke’s. Her death marked the formal extinction of the passenger pigeon, but the critical years for the species were the 1860s to the 1880s, when Americans slaughtered them by the millions.

John James Audubon's journal of 1826: the voyage to The birds of America

John James Audubon's journal of 1826: the voyage to The birds of America

Fantasies of the new class: ideologies of professionalism in post-World War II American fiction

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Fantasies of the New Class1. The Republic of Letters: The New Criticism, by Harvard Sociology2. Life Upon the Horns of the White Man's Dilemma: Ralph Ellison, by Gunnar Myrdal3. Mary McCarthy's Field Guide to U.S. Intellectuals: Tradition and Modernization Theory in Birds of America 4. Saul Bellow's Class of Explaining Creatures: Mr. Sammler's Planet and the Rise of Neoconservatism5. Experts Without Institutions: New Left Professionalism in Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin6. Don DeLillo's Academia: Revisiting the New Class in White NoiseAfterwordBibliographyIndex

John James Audubon's Tastes of America

John James Audubon (1785–1851), the ornithologist and artist, traveled widely through the great American wilderness searching for bird specimens to draw for what became The Birds of America (1827–38). He observed them closely in their natural environment, keeping detailed field notes and journals under difficult conditions. Out of curiosity and hunger, he often cooked and ate these birds after drawing them and wrote down how they tasted—another kind of evidence. The article concentrates on his written descriptions (lively, humorous, wry, or astonished) and tasting notes in the wild. Audubon traveled down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, north to Labrador, south to the Florida Keys, and later, when searching for mammals to draw for The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, northwest up the Missouri River. There he wrote about hunting American buffalo (bison), sometimes comparing customs and rituals of white hunters and various Indian tribes, and even sampled dog served by a Blackfoot princess. During the western expansion of the early nineteenth century, Audubon witnessed and recorded profound changes in the American landscape. Settlers’ encroachment on habitat and hunters’ wanton destruction of wildlife increasingly alarmed him. He presaged the extinction of some species whose habits and tastes he described. Conservation is an implicit theme.

Make a Bid for Bird Biodiversity

On 7 December 2010, the hammer dropped at London auction House Sotheby's auction of James Audubon's Birds of America . The final bid: 7,321,250 pounds (US$11.6 million), making this work the most expensive book ever sold ([ 1 ][1]). The book of life-size bird illustrations, painted between 1827 and

Million-Dollar Bird

![Figure][1] CREDIT: THE BIRDS OF AMERICA , VOLS. I—IV, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY SYSTEM, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Last week, this hand-painted print and the 434 others in John James Audubon's mid–19th century book The Birds of America sold at Sotheby's in London for $11.6

The Double Elephant Folio: The Story of Audubon's "Birds of America." [An expanded reprint of the 1973 edition through permission of the American Library Association]. Waldemar H. Fries , Suzanne M. Low

<i>The Double Elephant Folio: The Story of Audubon's "Birds of America." [An expanded reprint of the 1973 edition through permission of the American Library Association]</i>. Waldemar H. Fries , Suzanne M. Low