“close application to My Ornithology[,] Writting every day from Morning until Night, Correcting, arranging from My Scattered Notes all My Ideas.” He and Mason finally “left this abode of unfortunate Opulence without a single Sigh of regret,” but Audubon found it painful to leave the “sweet Woods around us … for in them We allways enjoyd Peace … [and] I often felt as if anxious to retain the fill of My lungs with the purer air that Circulate through them.”38
Back they went to New Orleans, then, and back to the uncertain work of making a bare living through art—but not the sort of art Audubon wanted to do. From October 15, the day he arrived back in the city, through the end of 1821, the journal contains a series of dispirited entries about looking for work (“visited several Public Institutions where I cannot say that I Was very politely received”), enduring the jealousy of competitors in teaching art (“My Style of giving Lessons and the high rate I charge for My Tuition have procured Me the Ill will of Every other Artist in the City”), and actually having to give art lessons again and again (“Gave lessons at Mrs. Brand,” “Gave a Lesson to Miss Pamar,” “Gave My Lessons all round”). Finally, on December 18, Audubon recorded one much happier note: “My Wife & My Two sons arrived at 12 ’o’clock all in good health.” After fourteen disappointing and lonely months without his family and “all that renders Life agreeable to Me,” Audubon mustered up his gratitude and “thanked My Maker for this Mark of Mercy.”39
Louisiana Ornithology
All Audubon had ever really wanted in Louisiana was birds—birds and enough paying work to allow him to keep finding and drawing more birds. And draw birds he certainly did: Well over a third of the avian images that would later fill the 435 plates of The Birds of America, and at least 75 of the 100 images in the first volume, originated during his Mississippi-Louisiana period in the early 1820s; some of them—for instance, his near-iconic image of the now-extinct Carolina Parrot (or Carolina Parakeet), which he began at the Pirrie’s Oakley Plantation in 1821 and completed in New Orleans in 1822—have become emblematic of his art.40 By the same token, the pages of Audubon’s journal that cover his time in Louisiana offer extensive lists and descriptions of the species he saw there, and references to the region recur throughout the five volumes of Ornithological Biography, such as his “having studied the habits” of the Purple Gallinule “under every advantage in Louisiana, and especially in the neighbourhood of New Orleans.”41 Audubon had chosen his destination well, and he made the most of the ornithological opportunity, getting down to work right after his arrival.
No sooner had he settled into New Orleans in early January 1821 than he “took My Gun, rowed out to the edge of the Eddy and killed a Fish Crow.” Thus begins a series of ornithological entries in Audubon’s journal, always searching for birds to draw, whether dead ones bought in the city’s market or live ones shot in the surrounding environs. When he killed the first Fish Crow, for instance, “hundreds flew to him, and appeared as if about to Carry him off, but they soon found it to their Interest to let me have him.” Audubon also bagged the birds common to coastal areas—pelicans, gulls, cormorants, ducks, geese—and welcomed the early arrival of migrants in the mild winter weather. “I had the pleasure of remarking thousands of purple martins travelling eastwardly,” he wrote in the second week of February 1821, when the temperature sat at 68 degrees, and ten days later, he saw “Three Immense Flocks of Bank Swallows that past over Me with the rapidity of a Storm.” Even though he seemed surprised at the birds’ early arrival, he felt “pleased to see these arbingers of Spring,” figuring that they would make it to Kentucky in about a month. Even if he stayed within the city, he could find that “the Market is regularly furnished with the English Snipe … Robins Blue Wingd Teals Common Teals, Spoon Bill Ducks, Malards, Snow Geese, Canada Geese, Many Cormorants, Coots, Water Hens, Tell Tale Godwits … Yellow Shank Snipes, some Sand Hills Cranes, Strings of Blew Warblers, Cardinal Grosbeaks, Common Turtle Doves, Golden Wingd Wood Peckers &c.”42
As February turned to March, then April, Audubon marked the migrations that came and went during the Louisiana spring, noting that “to My Astonishment, the Many Species of Warblers, Thrushes &c that Were numerous during the Winter have all Moved on Eastwardly,” but then, likewise to his surprise, he “heard the Voice of a Warbler new to Me, but could Not reach it.”43 That summer, when he and Joseph Mason moved to the Pirrie plantation at Bayou Sarah, Audubon took care of his tutor duties well enough, but he more happily spent hours, sometimes several days, ranging through the woods and relishing the profusion of big birds (ibises, woodpeckers, herons) and small (flycatchers, orioles, warblers of all sorts). After that job came to an abrupt end and he moved back to New Orleans, he still took pleasure in recording sightings of birds of all sorts—“Green Back Swallows, Gamboling over the City and the River the Whole day”—and sometimes making very detailed ornithological notes; his extensive description of the Brown Pelican covers two complete pages, and his journal ends with brief descriptions of over sixty “Water Birds of the United States.”44 Even now, Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal contains the sort of careful and comprehensive field notes that a modern-day ornithologist might still find extremely useful.
“Mr Wilson Has Made an Error”
Audubon cared only for one ornithologist, one who had come earlier—the late author of American Ornithology. Alexander Wilson’s work stood as the most comprehensive and authoritative work on American ornithology to date, and before Audubon could hope to surpass it, he had to see it. He frequently looked to Wilson’s work for corroborating his own observations, but even more, he took quiet pleasure in correcting any errors or omissions he found in American Ornithology.
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