Under a Wild Sky, page 18
Rafinesque had been told that Audubon included flowers and shrubs in his drawings and was curious to see if there were any that were unknown to him. Audubon thought the man seemed impatient and skeptical—as if he were wasting his time with Audubon and not the other way around. After dinner Audubon opened his portfolio, which Rafinesque evidently found impressive. At one page, however, he stopped Audubon and declared—rudely it seemed to Audubon—that the plant depicted on it did not exist. Audubon assured him that it did and offered to find it for him the next day. But as it was still light out, Rafinesque begged Audubon to take him right then. After a short walk, Rafinesque was holding several examples of the plant in his hands and dancing a jig. Not only was it a new species, he said, it was a whole new genus!
They sat up late that night, looking over Audubon’s drawings and talking of natural history. A beetle flew near the candle on the table and Audubon grabbed it out of the air. It was a strong insect, he told Rafinesque, so strong it could carry a candlestick on its back. Rafinesque said it couldn’t—whereupon Audubon put the candle on the bug, which marched away with it. Rafinesque was dumbfounded. Finally they went to bed. Audubon, who was lying awake thinking, was sure the whole house was asleep when he heard a commotion in the guest bedroom. He ran down the hall and threw open the door on a memorable tableau. Rafinesque, naked and wielding Audubon’s favorite violin, was swatting at several bats that had entered his room. Audubon stared, uncertain whether to laugh or to try to save his fiddle, which already looked the worse for wear. Rafinesque, racing about, shouted that he was certain this was a new species of bat and that he must have specimens. Audubon shrugged and picked up the bow from his violin and, with a few swift fencing strokes, killed several bats. Then he went back to bed, more awake than before.
Rafinesque ended up staying with the Audubons for three weeks. Audubon gradually realized that, although he was generally smart and skeptical, Rafinesque could also be something of a credulous fool. As Rafinesque attempted to learn more about local flora and fauna, Audubon indulged his penchant for telling tall tales, supplying his visitor with a mixture of fact and hokum. He invented some mythical fish species, and even sketched a few of them for Rafinesque—who later reported the “discovery” of several of these new fish. One of them, the “Devil-Jack Diamond Fish,” was described as being between four and ten feet in length. Audubon found some rock shavings that he offered to Rafinesque as examples of the Devil-Jack’s armorlike scales. In his account of the fish, Rafinesque declared that it was impervious to bullets and that its scales emitted sparks when struck against steel. Rafinesque added that he had actually seen the Devil-Jack Diamond Fish, though “only at a distance.”
When Audubon came home caked in mud one afternoon, Rafinesque asked where he had been. Audubon explained that he’d been hunting in a canebrake. In those days there were stands of native bamboo, or cane as the locals called it, around Henderson. Canebrakes were nearly impenetrable areas where the stalks, each one or two inches in diameter, grew to thirty feet in height. The cane was so densely packed together that the only way through was by cutting a path or by turning around and thrusting your body backward, heedless of your direction or of what you might encounter along the way. Rafinesque, eyes goggling at this description, said he would very much like to visit a canebrake. Audubon smiled to himself and said that would be no problem at all. Later, he wrote about what Rafinesque was in for:
If you picture to yourself one of these cane-brakes growing beneath the gigantic trees that form our western forests, interspersed with vines of many species, and numberless plants of every description, you may conceive how difficult it is for one to make his way through it, especially after a heavy shower of rain or a fall of sleet, when the traveller, in forcing his way through, shakes down upon himself such quantities of water as soon reduce him to a state of the utmost discomfort.
Audubon led Rafinesque out after breakfast a day or two later, taking him across the Ohio and into the woods on the Indiana shore. They walked a few miles through gentle woodlands and then came to a substantial canebrake. At first the going was easy, and Audubon thoughtfully hacked down a stalk here and there to make the passage even less difficult. But the stand grew thicker and their pace slowed. They turned their backs and shoved on, with Rafinesque pausing occasionally to pick up a plant he didn’t recognize. When they came to a downed tree, Audubon and Rafinesque stood considering how best to get either over or around its immense crown when a bear hiding in the tree emerged with a snarl and rushed at them. Rafinesque turned to run, but only toppled into the cane, becoming hopelessly wedged among the stalks. As the bear hurried off, Audubon laughed at his companion, who was by now screaming for assistance to his feet. Once Audubon got him upright, Rafinesque suggested they go back the way they’d come. Nonsense, said Audubon, the worst is over.
And then the going got harder still. Audubon, watching the sky as slivers of it appeared here and there through the canetops, noticed it getting darker. A thick cloud “portentous of a thunder gust” moved over them. Audubon had hoped for as much. Panting and sweating profusely, Rafinesque struggled to keep up, aware now that he would be hopelessly lost on his own. As the rain started and then became a downpour, Audubon trooped on. He told Rafinesque to buck up and be a man, that they were almost at the edge of the brake—which he in fact knew to be at least two miles ahead. Drenched and despairing, Rafinesque begged for a rest. Audubon obliged, and offered Rafinesque a drink of brandy to steel his resolve. Off they went again. Rafinesque threw away his plant specimens, laboring with each breath in the oppressive air. Being in the canebrake in the rain felt like drowning. Audubon, smiling, with leaves and mud plastered to his sodden leather hunting shirt, kept going, bending their course slightly but steadily, taking Rafinesque in a series of wide circles. Eventually—and in consideration of the possibility that he might actually get them lost—Audubon led Rafinesque back to the river, where he blew his horn to summon a ferry to take them back across.
Despite Rafinesque’s gullibility—or maybe because of it—Audubon grew fond of him. It was disappointing a short time later when the awkward visitor abruptly disappeared without so much as a word of goodbye. After a while a letter from him arrived, informing Audubon that he was well and extending his thanks for everything.
Rafinesque continued downriver and in the end reported the discovery of more than two hundred species of animals—bats, snakes, lizards, rats, and a great many fishes among them. He also collected more than six hundred plant species and estimated that at least a tenth were previously unknown. Rafinesque eventually became a professor of natural history at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he was forever an object of amazement to his students, who found him a ridiculous genius.
11
LEGIONS OF THE AIR
Ardea herodias: The Great Blue Heron
Its sight is acute as that of any falcon, and it can hear at a considerable distance, so that it is enabled to mark with precision the different objects it sees, and to judge with accuracy of the sounds which it hears.
—Ornithological Biography
Audubon’s determination to survey the natural history of American birds—however vaguely formed at this stage of his life—was apparent in the attention he paid to every species he encountered. Each bird possessed a distinct personality that Audubon fixed in his mind.
The cedar bird—now called the cedar waxwing—was a glutton. Audubon found that the cedar bird was especially fond of sugary fruits, like the berries found on the red cedar or mountain ash. With an abundant supply of berries, cedar birds sometimes ate until they were rendered temporarily flightless and could actually be caught by hand. Once, Audubon wounded several cedar birds. Hoping to nurse them back to health, he put them in a cage and fed them apples—only to watch the birds gorge on the fruit until they suffocated. When he dissected the birds, they were packed with apples “to the mouth.”
Audubon thought goldfinches and purple finches were among the smartest birds. They learned a trick for escaping from “bird lime,” a sticky substance that was used to capture small birds. When a goldfinch landed on a twig Audubon had coated with bird lime, he saw that the bird recognized its predicament at once. But instead of struggling, the bird pressed its wings against its body and fell backward, so that it hung upside down. Gradually the glue began to give, stretching into a long strand—like the filament of a spider’s web—until the goldfinch perceived it was about to break, whereupon it gave a flap of its wings and flew off.
Everything about the great horned owl interested Audubon—from its sailing flight to its “ludicrous” mating ritual, a weird, hopping dance that the male initiates and the female then mimics as the birds snap their bills at one another. Audubon loved birds of prey, and in his drawings he often depicted them in full, fearsome attack mode—stooping on small birds or carrying off their bleeding victims in the grip of razor-sharp talons. The great horned owl affected him differently. Audubon recorded that the owl hunted several species of large birds—such as young turkeys, grouse, domestic poultry, and various ducks—as well as just about any kind of small mammal. But his portrait of this owl, easily the eeriest of all his images, shows a pair perched passively on a mossy limb. With their enormous, haunted eyes staring straight off the page, the birds look imperious, almost affronted—stony monuments to everything wild that stood before the onrush of humanity across America.
Audubon had probably seen something very much like the look he imparted to the great horned owl. He discovered that he could get quite close to the bird in broad daylight, but that on cloudy days the owl was quick to detect danger. If they were happened upon near the bank of a river, owls invariably flew to the opposite bank—a tactic Audubon felt certain the bird understood “renders its pursuit more difficult.” Audubon once almost got himself killed hunting owls when he happened to shoot one in a boggy willow thicket. Rushing to pick up the bird, Audubon failed to notice the sponginess of the earth beneath his feet until he all at once sank up to his armpits in quicksand. Feeling himself settling further into the ooze with each breath, Audubon froze. Fortunately, he was not alone that day. He called out to his companions, who managed to extricate him just in time.
Audubon always noted the flight pattern of each bird, as well as its style of nest. These, after all, are the elemental aspects of life as a bird. He thought it ironic that the nighthawk actually spends most of its time aloft during the day and usually roosts early in the evening. Audubon also maintained that no other bird could rival the nighthawk for aerial stunts, especially those performed by the male during courtship—the time Audubon invariably referred to as the “love season.” The signature maneuver of the male nighthawk is a death-defying plunge from a great height. With its wings flared back, the nighthawk dives toward the earth at a steep angle as the watching female glides through the air nearby. At the last instant, only a few feet above the ground, the nighthawk thrusts its wings sharply downward, reversing direction and creating a loud, concussive pop, which Audubon likened to the sound of a sail filling and snapping taut in the wind. For all its acrobatic grace in the air, though, the nighthawk was a disappointing nest maker. The female, Audubon observed, lays her eggs anywhere—on bare ground, a rock, a high spot in a plowed field—without so much as a twig or a scoop of dirt added. Because the nighthawk’s legs are small and set far back on its body, the bird can’t stand or even perch, Audubon said, without resting its breast on the ground or a branch—an awkwardness that necessitates its landing “sideways” in a tree. A nighthawk thus at rest was easily approached. As always, Audubon’s researches on this bird had a pragmatic side. Nighthawks, he noted, are good to eat.
American white pelicans were numerous around Henderson in the fall. Audubon observed them in large flocks sitting on low islands or swimming in the river shallows, often so densely packed together that he killed several at a time with a single discharge of his gun. Although Audubon found all birds beautiful, he considered the white pelican unusually handsome. This was due in part, he thought, to the bird’s careful grooming of its plumage, which was frequently passed feather by feather through its long bill when the bird was at rest. Audubon was impressed at how different the bird was from its cousin, the brown pelican, in the way it fished. White pelicans, he said, never dive upon their prey from the air but instead swim after fish and sweep them up by extending their necks and thrusting their heads underwater. Sometimes a flock hunted together in a militaristically choreographed group deployment. One Indian summer afternoon, as the sun lowered and the day cooled, Audubon watched a flock of white pelicans lazing on a sandbar. The forest was changing its colors and the red of the sunset touched only the tops of the trees. A commotion started in a small bay a little way off from the flock, which was instantly alert. The birds waddled into the water, where their ungainly land movements disappeared and they began to glide forward across the current in a surging mass toward the place where a school of small fish had begun thrashing the surface. The fish, Audubon said, seemed at play. They made the water sparkle. As the pelicans approached, the splashing continued. The birds swam closer together and, nearing the shoal, spread out their wings so that they formed a solid wall pushing forward. Now the pelicans propelled themselves faster still, sending the fish fleeing ahead, into ever shallower water, herding the school toward its demise. When the fish were at last trapped against the shore, the pelicans moved in, heads lowering, and devoured them by the thousands.
Audubon made notes and kept journals of his field observations. Years later, when he was writing about America’s birds, he consulted these records for the traits and the descriptions of each species, sometimes in conjunction with an examination of more recently killed specimens. But he relied, too, on his memory. However far he traveled from the lush forests of Kentucky, his days there went with him. Wherever he was, Audubon seemed always able to see the woods and the birds as he’d seen them as a young man. He could remember how white a pelican looked in the afternoon sun and how cool it was in the shade of a towering sycamore as he leaned against its smooth trunk. He took with him the feel of his gun pounding into his shoulder and rubbing against his cheek where it was pressed to the stock. He remembered what it was like when the stillness of a pallid dawn was split by the whistle of wings cutting through the air, sometimes like a gentle breeze and other times in a prolonged aaahhhh, like the sound of silk tearing. Audubon could forever hear the calls and songs that rang through the trees, as well as the sounds of rivers and storms and horses. He could feel the pull of a swamp against his shins and recall the torment of mosquitoes and withering heat spells and terrible winters when life on the earth seemed to stop and the rivers ceased to flow. Much of what Audubon saw and remembered now exists only in remnants, and some of it is gone entirely. For everything that Audubon took from America—and he took a lot—he left behind a spirited portrait of a country that is no more.
The Carolina parakeet—or parrot as it was also known—was already in decline when Audubon began observing it in Kentucky, though its numbers had been so great that the bird was still seen in immense flocks across much of the eastern portion of North America. Like the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet was disappearing in defiance of the usual precondition for extinction, which is rarity. Animals that go extinct typically shrink to very small numbers over a long period of time before they reach the vanishing point. Populations become isolated and contract to a handful of individuals, which are wiped out one by one. Usually this is a natural process. Species average about a million years on earth, and many more animals have gone extinct than exist today. But in the cases of both the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, the birds persisted in huge numbers right up to the time when they went very suddenly extinct. It’s now believed that both species were adapted to survive and breed only in massive flocks of millions upon millions of individuals, so that even when many remained there were not enough. The last time anyone saw a Carolina parakeet in the wild was in 1905. The passenger pigeon had disappeared five years earlier. The very last individuals of both species died in zoos not long after.
The Carolina parakeet was one of the few species of bird that Audubon worried about. The only parrot native to North America, it was a large, noisy resident of the forest, as common at it was beautiful:
Bill white. Iris hazel. Bare orbital space whitish. Feet pale flesh-colour, claws dusky. Fore part of the head and cheeks bright scarlet, that colour extending over and behind the eye, the rest of the head and neck pure bright yellow; the edge of the wing bright yellow, spotted with orange. The general colour of the other parts is emerald-green, with light blue reflections, lighter beneath. Primary coverts deep bluish-green; secondary coverts greenish-yellow. Quills bluish-green on the outer web, brownish-red on the inner, the primaries bright yellow at the base of the outer web. Two middle tail-feathers deep green, the rest of the same colour externally, their inner webs brownish-red. Tibial feathers yellow, the lowest deep orange.
But loss of habitat and a great continuing slaughter—by market hunters after the bird’s extravagant feathers and by farmers trying to save their crops from marauding flocks—devastated a species that many then regarded as a pest. Audubon, whose published drawing of the Carolina parakeet was from specimens he eventually shot in Louisiana, observed the bird in decline while he was still at Henderson. Carolina parakeets, he wrote, were fond of cockle-burs, the small, spiny fruit that is found, as Audubon noted, “much too plentifully” across the eastern and southern parts of America. Cockle-burs were—and still are—a great nuisance, sticking to clothing and livestock. The parrot ate cockle-burs with abandon, plucking them from the stem and then manipulating the bur while holding it with one foot until its “joint” was aimed at the bird’s mouth—whereupon it would squeeze out the inner flesh and then drop the barbed husk to the ground. Anyone with cockle-burs on their property should have been glad to have Carolina parakeets alight and dig in, thought Audubon, though he was careful to add that while there was as yet no known use for the cockle-bur, it could not be assumed that it would not in the future prove useful in “medicine or chemistry,” as had other plants thought to be of no value.
