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- [00:00]
Steven Rinella
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- [00:48]
Dan Flores
His international fame as the most American of artists, naturalists John James Audubon amazed the world with his life size paintings of of nearly 500American birds. But by the time of his Western Journey for a book on American mammals, he had grown depressed at the widespread.
- [01:07]
Destruction of nature in America. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the.
- [01:13]
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- [01:16]
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- [01:19]
A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvinyards.com enjoy responsibly.
- [01:45]
John James Audubon and Vanishing America.
- [01:59]
Randall
In.
- [01:59]
Dan Flores
The 1850s late in his life, the.
- [02:02]
Famed American writer Henry David Thoreau looked back on the colonial past and early American history and felt personally injured.
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By then, the number of animals and birds that had disappeared or drastically declined.
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In the east was shocking to anyone who paid attention.
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The Atlantic world's original penguins, the great.
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Auks, were entirely gone, driven to extinction.
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Whooping cranes and sandhill cranes were rarely, if ever, seen. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys. Heath hens, passenger pigeons, trumpeter swans, even pileated woodpeckers and ravens had become rare, reading accounts like William woods of the New England they both shared but two centuries apart in time. Thoreau sat down to his journal one morning in March of 1857, and as thought followed thought, took up his pen and scribbled a stark, powerful line, I am that citizen whom I pity. I can imagine Thoreau, at first reflective as he sat at his desk in the morning twilight, becoming more irate by the minute when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here. He finally sat down in his the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey. I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country. As he went on, I imagined his mind growing ever darker. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it's but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places. This experience, he realized, was like attending a symphony, then understanding that many of the finest instruments were missing, their contributions to the score silenced. Or, as he pushed the idea, like looking into the night sky, only to discover that familiar constellations had vanished. No one else had put American history in quite this way, and no one since has said it so movingly. I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. Thoreau raged. I wish to know an entire heaven.
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And an entire earth.
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One person who knew America's and the West's entire heaven and entire earth better than anyone and gave anguished witness to its passing was the naturalist painter, writer John James Audubon. Like Thoreau, Audubon benefited from a strategic placement in the American story. Native peoples had spent 23,000 years studying and learning America's animals, a stupendous body of oral knowledge, but one also badly damaged in the colonial disease epidemics that took away so many native historians. Europeans and Africans, on the other hand, came from worlds away. Almost everything about America was brand new to them. The continent turned out not to yield up griffins or sirens, mermaids or unicorns, those chimerical beings out of medieval fantasies, although occasional rumors of such did pop up in the journals of European observers. In 1614, a British ship's captain said he saw a siren of great beauty in New England waters. And in 1720, the French explorer Bernard de la Harpe claimed a unicorn sighting in today's Oklahoma. But America's real flesh and blood creatures, unexpected and puzzling as they were, turned out to possess an enduring fascination all their own. For Old Worlders, America's strangeness had begun with a new category of birds, barely larger than bumblebees, whose hovering, diving and buzzing earned them the name humbirds. There was a large and beautiful parrot and an astonishing bird that mimicked to perfection every other bird song it heard. There was a mammal that carried its young in a stomach pouch and a squirrel that flew like a bat. Endless rivers of wild pigeons flowed at fantastical speeds over the Towering forests of America. Some colonists told stories of wild cattle with humpbacks and lion manes and tails carried like a scorpion stinger. Skeptics in Europe dismissed many of these stories. But those creatures all were real. So were America's poisonous snakes. From the first landings, Europeans were chilled to find that America possessed deadly snakes, including one that telegraphed intention to strike with an angry rattling warning. As one account put it, there are a thousand different kinds of birds and beasts of the forest which have never been known as neither in shape nor name, neither among the Latins, nor Greeks, nor any other nations of the world. This human interest in birds and animals is inherent and millions of years old in us even today. Our evolutionary origins among other creatures leads us to expose human toddlers to images of birds and animals as a first step in learning about a diverse world. That's a bedrock foundation of human cultural training. We were made by our past to be naturalists. But for colonial Europeans, convinced by their religion that as a result of divine design, humans were exceptional, different from all other living things and possessed also of an economic system that regarded wildlife as potential sources of wealth, a fascination with America's biological diversity was never merely curiosity about never before seen creatures. By John James Audubon's time he was alive from 1785 to 1851, natural history had acquired a purpose. Europe's colonial age Royal societies had given natural history the task of of determining whether the new species emerging from the Americas and elsewhere held advantages for the colonial enterprise. One of the Age of Reason's breakthroughs was the so called scientific method which rested on a critical assessment of evidence and conclusions that other disinterested researchers could test for validity. Western science's supposed purpose was was to enable humanity to re establish the control over nature it had lost when God had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. By Ottoman's time though, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, which revealed the universal force of gravity and the laws of motion, had transformed humanity's grasp of nature. Although Ottoman himself was not inclined to push the at the philosophical edges of science, during his lifetime natural history was hoping for a similar grand theory to Newton's. Unfortunately, he did not quite live long enough to learn about Charles Darwin's ground shattering insights into the diversity of life.
- [10:38]
And humanity's true place in it.
- [10:42]
So pre Darwinian natural history occupied a separate historical moment. Naturalists like Mark Catesby, John Lawson, Antoine LePage Duprat, William Bartram, Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon were doing their best to Learn America by seeking out and engaging with the continent's remarkable and unique wildlife. Aided by the natural history geniuses of the age. In the 1700s, Carolus Linnaeus had established a universal system of species classification and Alexander von Humboldt had laid out early ideas about ecology. Audubon and his fellows investigated and portrayed America's diverse life, never dreaming. The animals and birds they studied often had histories that stretched back millions of years. What Ottoman and other early naturalists also chronicle though, was the beginning of American nature's decline. A decline we now know would ultimately produce the loss of 2 million years of specially evolved genetics. This happened in the space of a mere 400 years and was well underway in Audubon's time. Of all America's early naturalists, Audubon best answered the Old World's fantasy imagination of what a European become American nature man should be. With wavy, shoulder length chestnut hair, gray eyes and the easy grace of an athlete, Ottoman remained lean and cut a striking figure all his life, speaking English with an accent. A visitor once asked him, you are a Frenchman, sire. You look like a Frenchman and you speak like one. Audubon was the very definition of romantic charisma, a rough hewn New World Byron, a white Indian, as his own brother in law said of him. Audubon was not just a painter of nature subjects, but are noteworthy for the elegance of his figure. He was also an expert with guns, an excellent swimmer and a fine fencer and dancer who had a way with dogs and horses and with women, like the New Orleans beauty who asked to pose nude for him, or women of high station all over Europe. Like Byron, Audubon actually shared many traits with the native American deity Coyote. He was hugely talented and charismatic. But like Coyote, Audubon was also vain, jealous and rarely generous. Destined to be one of early America's celebrity exports, Audubon was actually the out of wedlock son of a wealthy Frenchman, Captain Jean Audubon. Audubon spent his entire life hiding the actual facts of his birth. But he came into the world in the Caribbean. His mother, the Captain's young mistress, Jeanne Rabann, who died soon after giving birth. Audubon always denied his mother, claiming he was the offspring of a Spanish woman of good breeding, not the result of his father's fling with a peasant chambermaid raised in Nantes, along with another of Captain Audubon's illegitimate children, Audubon dodged Napoleon's draft at age 18 and fled to America in 1803. By the time he arrived in Pennsylvania, he had anglicized his name and promptly fell in love with a well educated young neighbor named Lucy Bakewell. He had been captivated by drawing and painting since childhood. Picturing nature was his first love, but for all his later mastery, he was self taught. He claimed to have studied under Jacques Louis David in France, but there exists no evidence of it. In 1808, when he quit his father's farm and fled with his new bride Lucy to Kentucky and then Louisiana, painting seems to have hovered in his mind like a beckoning evening star. The couple had two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, by 1812. To support them, Audubon tried farming briefly utilizing slaves, which in our time has sometimes gotten him canceled. Then he tried business. He lost everything the family had accumulated in the great financial crash of 1819, and that disaster led him to try, at age 34, to become a full time painter. It was the literal fulfillment of the notion of art as an act of desperation. Audubon's art interests had always been painting birds. But therein lay a problem. By 1819, all nine volumes of the bird book done by his predecessor and rival, Alexander Wilson were out. Wilson had passed away, but his work was widely respected. Of their meeting when the Scotsman was In Kentucky in 1810, Audubon's version had it that after Wilson proudly showed his work, Audubon had laid some of his own paintings on the store counter, stunning Wilson into dismayed silence. Wilson's account of his Kentucky visit barely mentioned Audubon and at all. No friendship ever developed between them. A pattern in Audubon's life.
- [16:36]
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- [16:59]
Dan Flores
Auto Parts.
- [17:04]
Steven Rinella
Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre order right now. Meat Eaters American History The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys. Guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson and Charles Squirrel Eye Emry. How they organized their hunting expeditions or what they took with them. How they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills. How they suffered and died in the field. And the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre Order Meat Eaters American History The Hide Hunters 1865-1883 Wherever you get your audiobooks and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen. On October 14.
- [18:42]
Dan Flores
Audubon intended his opus the Birds of America to be a comprehensive book that would portray every bird in the United States life sized. That meant the naturalist had to find, observe, collect, study and paint every species, which brings up an unavoidable topic. All these early naturalists were shootists. To capture and paint the iridescent color shadings of a hummingbird's wing, the bird had to be in hand. For the bird to be in hand, it had to be dead. Audubon certainly observed and wrote about living birds, but to paint he needed specimens which he wired in lifelike poses and tried to render rapidly with either hand and sometimes both, before death glazed their eyes and dulled the vibrancy of their coloring. Ottoman didn't just paint, he wrote. Which means that his great published works, along with the journals he kept, have left us some of the most profound descriptions of a long lost America he inhabited. An age though when much of the original wildlife above abundance of the colonial period was disappearing. How could that be? In the mid-1700s a 90 year old American colonist had lamented to a visiting European that during his lifetime he had witnessed an orgy like slaughter of Atlantic seaboard wildlife. No one would even accept blame for such destruction. When the animals disappeared and everyone pointed fingers at someone else. It was the Indians fault, the colonists claimed, or the fault of the French or the Spaniards. The European was aghast. Why have none of your governments passed laws against such a thing? The old man's answer summed up an enduring American sensibility. The spirit of freedom in America, he told the visitor, would never brook such an infringement of individual rights. Killing as many animals as one wished was an American franchise essential to freedom. Governments could pass all the laws they wanted, but his fellow citizens simply would not suffer them to be obeyed, he said. So Audubon lived, painted and wrote in the decades when much of original America was starting to wobble seriously. None of us alive now for instance has ever experienced anything like the full body impact of passenger pigeon flights that had characterized the continent for 15 million years. They were a multi sensory overload and often left people shocked in a state of nervous exhaustion. Millions of beating pigeon wings created a roar like a tornado shaking down a forest or a hurricane hitting shore. The air they moved was a palpable wind against hair and skin. The flocks emitted a peculiar scent. Witnesses struggled to assign something like the smell of a very large poultry farm, but gamier with hearing, touch, smell, all engaged to their limits. The visual impression then added the beautiful and the scarcely believed. The flights, one of the continent's iconic natural spectacles resembled the windings of a vast and majestic river. Ottoman said of these feathered rivers that when a hawk or falcon swooped into one, the whole body of birds proceeded to create a kind of grand curvilinear straight swerve through the sky. Then like a snowmelt stream routing around a boulder, all the succeeding flocks would reenact the same movement all day long. Auburn wrote that he saw one of these bird rivers that ran for three days. Then there was America's giant woodpecker. From its dagger like bill to the stiff forked tail that propped it upright on tree trunks, the Ivory Bill woodpecker was nearly a two foot tall woodpecker. In flight, its wingspan extended two and a half feet. The Ivory Bill was the second largest woodpecker in the world, exceeded only by its genetic kin, the imperial woodpecker of Mexico. Native people had long admired its disposition and courage. Attired as if in a tuxedo, the Ivory bill's black body was artfully set off by a pair of white stripes extending from its yellow eyes to a large patch of white feathers on its back. Matching white strips on both sides of the trailing wing edges made it easy to identify in flight. Both sexes had topknot crests, but the male's was a link. Livid scarlet, giving the bird an air of formal self aware magnificence. Beneath the crest was a skull like a compressible sponge built to absorb shocks when not in use. The 8 inch tongue recessed into storage around the back and top of its head. There were three eyelids, one of which was transparent and remained over the eye to protect it from from flying debris. Its flight was direct and fast with slight up and down undulations. Wing beats, then glide. Wing beats, then glide. All who wrote about seeing one mentioned the elegance of an ivory bill's passage through the forest and its strange primal toy. Trumpet cries audubon famously said that every time he saw an ivory bell for fly through the old growth southern forest, its passage reminded him of an Anthony Van Dyke painting. The Great Auk. Notwithstanding, he could not imagine that America would ever lose such a creature. And one more act of witnessing. When he was still an aspiring naturalist painter, Audubon left those of us down the timeline a chilling account of how one other symbolic wild American animal experienced the war we were leveling at wildlife. That animal was the wolf. And the year was 1814, by which time American attitudes towards wolves had become almost vicious. Spending the night with a farmer on the Vincennes trace, Audubon accompanied his host to a a capture pit that held three wolves. The wolves sin they had attacked the farmer's loose stock in a country by then bled of nearly all its deer, bison and elk. From his colonial forebears, this farmer had learned exactly how to respond. Climbing into the pit, he one by one severed the wolves hamstrings with a knife, exhibiting as little fear as if he had been marking lambs, Audubon wrote. Then the farmer dragged the wolves out so his dogs could tear them to pieces. Audubon helped him pull up the largest, a black male wolf in the prime of life. Audubon described this beast of Old World horror stories as motionless with fright, as if dead, its disabled legs swinging to and fro, its jaws wide open and the gurgle in its throat alone, indicating that it was alive. Petrified with fear, the black wolf offered no resistance. It took the dogs less than a minute to stop the gurgling and extinguish his life each. Even as he witnessed such things, including what he called the dreadful havoc of the passenger pigeon slaughter, Audubon initially reacted like most Americans of his time. The great author of nature, as he put it, would never allow something like extinction. Then, in the 1830s, he came face to face with reality. Seeking out a pair of great auks, the Northern Hemisphere's penguins, to paint for his bird book, Otaben discovered that egg hunters already wiped out the last known American colony. He had to copy his ox from a prior painting by another naturalist. The experience forced him to reassess his faith in divinity and in human nature. To preserve for posterity the natural world he experienced, Audubon first had to conduct fieldwork like that I've just described. After he'd labored over the paintings, he had to find an engraver and a team of printmakers, then enroll subscribers while he was writing the text that would become the final book. When no publisher in either Philadelphia or New York would take on his bird project. In 1826, Audubon hauled 400 of his bird drawings to England. Here at last, the handsome American was an immediate sensation. A long haired Achian, someone wrote, with locks spilling down his back. Once the subscribers tore their eyes from Audubon and his gorgeous paintings with the birds and dramatic animated poses and everyone set and what the English called a landscape wholly American. Trees, flowers, grass, even the tints of the sky and the waters worked their magic. He found his publisher in London and he even merited advance praise by the French. The Parisians, never expecting strange such genius from an American. Somehow Audubon completed all these tasks on both sides of the Atlantic in just 12 years. When it finally appeared in 1839, the birds of America didn't just present beautiful birds shown in their habitats. Audubon had painted them life sized, a showstopper. The book was stunning and at 30 by 40 inches, the size of a small house window. Even so, the biggest birds, like whooping cranes, wild turkeys and great blue herons, had to strike unusual poses to fit the page without cropping legs or wings. The final version contained 435 plates, and with the 85 western birds whose skins he had acquired from other naturalists and enumerated 489 species of American birds, the world, especially the European world, where Audubon traveled, dined, partied and sold subscriptions, was utterly entranced. No less than famous Parisian naturalist Georges Cuvier called the Birds of America the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature. It's fitting then, that a final poignant story in Audubon's life as a nature witness took place in the West. In the summer of 1843, Audubon finally made it to the sunset side of the continent. While the Birds of America was gathering admirers and praise, he'd launched an ambitious new new project. Assisted by his sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, and their able father in law, John Bachman. Audubon's team had published the first volume of a new work the previous year. It had a less catchy title than the Byrd book. Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America was notably awkward, but the country beyond the Mississippi had now lured one of the world's premier nature artists aboard the steam vessel Omega to witness the fable bestiary of Western America on what Audubon called the grand and last journey I intend to make as a naturalist. This was a world apart from anything Audubon had experienced before. The man had spent almost his entire life in nature, he'd witnessed what he'd estimated were billions of passenger pigeons in flight, waterfowl and unimaginable numbers migrating down the Mississippi Flyway. Captive wolves terrified by the human hand. Yet his journal makes clear that he was in no way prepared for what unfolded in front of them as the Omega chugged up the narrowing Missouri river. Their destination fortunately, Union, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri. The west stunned him. In the east, the woods were alive with birdsong, but mammals were often secretive and hard to see. But in this wide open country, animals were in sight almost constantly and their diversity and strangeness were breathtaking. Two weeks before they arrived at Fort Union, not far from the eastern border of today's Montana, Audubon set down these scenes in his journal. I've excised some of his other observations here so we can get to the pure experience of what he was seeing and feeling. We've passed some beautiful scenery and almost opposite, had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or bighorns on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them. They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter, producing a beautiful, picturesque view. We've seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we are now in. In fact, Ottoman wrote, it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean like prairies, face to face with a spectacle equaled only by the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara. Marvelous aggregations of big grazers and their predators all visible in the bright light and vast spaces. He was reeling. He closed a letter to his wife that summer. This My head is actually swimming with excitement and I cannot write anymore. Audubon portrayed himself in 1843 as Hale and hearty, although by the time he went west his hair had gone white and many of his teeth were missing. But the eight month journey wore on him. He declined a buffalo hunt because, as he said, he was too near 70. He had actually just turned 58. He took on painting animals much as he had birds. By shooting them and wiring them into active poses, their eyes fixed on the viewer. But of the 150 plates in the quadruped's three volumes, he would paint only half of them. His son, John Woodhouse, less talented, did the rest. Perhaps Audubon's age made him value life all life more. But the artist had now begun to refer to himself as. As a two legged monster with a gun. And now in the west, he soured on seeing animals die. Thousands multiplied by thousands of buffaloes are murdered in senseless play, he wrote. What a terrible destruction of life, as if it were for nothing or next to it. Audubon's personal experiences in the west were rich, but the scientific returns were meager. Meriwether, Lewis, Catlin and Bodmer had already been in this country. Of the 27 mammals the party collected on the Missouri, only the black footed ferret, a primary predator in prairie dog ecology, turned out to be a new discovery. They did at least add 14 new birds to science. To approach the thoroughness of Birds of America, John Woodhouse had to make a separate trip to Texas, where he collected an ocelot, a red Texan wolf, and heard stories of muscular jaguars, which seemed to range over most of the Southwest. What naturalists already knew of the animal life of the southwestern deserts and the west coast, the Audubons painted from specimens. The book was a heroic effort, but not nearly the cultural triumph of birds. Partly because Ottomans could not complete it, partly because, as one reviewer put the difference, birds were exalting and spiritual, while mammals somehow seemed earthy and base. Because Ottoman set it down in his journal, his lingering memory of how he experienced the trip remains. Here is his last impression of the west as they headed downriver, wolves howling and bulls roaring, just like the long continued roll of a hundred drums, thousands upon thousands of buffaloes, the roaring can be heard for miles. Four years after Audubon wrote that, his collaborator John Bachman visited him at his home on the Upper west side of Manhattan and found Audubon's noble mind is all in ruins. As Bachmann says, the great Naturalist was only 62. John James Audubon passed away three years later. In the same decade, Thoreau would write his entire heaven and entire earth passage and Charles Darwin would publish his blockbuster on the Origin of Species. All three of them changed natural history and are so sense of ourselves for the rest of time.
- [38:56]
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- [39:15]
Randall
Oh, oh, oh.
- [39:16]
Dan Flores
O'Reilly Auto Parts.
- [39:24]
Steven Rinella
Our crew at Meat Eater has centuries worth of collective experience procuring and preparing meat. Hunting, butchering, preserving, cooking it for ourselves and our families. I've chased it from one end of the world to the other. Grilling caribou steaks in the Arctic, butchering elk in the high country of the Rockies, Drying fish in the headwaters of the Amazon. The main thing I've learned is that there's nothing better than knowing where your meat comes from.
- [39:52]
So when we set out to make.
- [39:54]
Jerky and sticks with our own recipes perfected on wild game, I wanted to start with the American buffalo, An iconic North American native that's fed this continent for thousands of years. These are recipes I use in my own kitchen, not meant to mimic what's already out there. They're meant to showcase everything I've learned about good meat from the wilds or from the ranch. This ain't your typical phony gas station jerky. It's American buffalo done right. And it's just the beginning. Meat eater snacks from folks who know meat.
- [40:32]
Randall
I got two hummingbird questions.
- [40:34]
All right.
- [40:35]
I'm gonna give them to you both, and you can take them.
- [40:37]
Steven Rinella
No hummingbirds in Europe. And 2. Somewhere.
- [40:41]
Randall
You wrote something. Maybe it was in. In Wild New World about someone.
- [40:49]
Steven Rinella
Selling.
- [40:50]
Randall
Or buying 4,000 hummingbird skins.
- [40:54]
Yeah. Okay.
- [40:55]
Yeah, whichever one do first.
- [40:59]
Dan Flores
Yeah. So there no hummingbirds are a North and South American.
- [41:04]
Randall
Man.
- [41:04]
Steven Rinella
I had no idea what a surprising little.
- [41:08]
Randall
Yeah.
- [41:09]
Treat that would be, man.
- [41:10]
Dan Flores
Yes.
- [41:12]
Randall
Like, the hell is that?
- [41:13]
Dan Flores
Well, I mean, that's. And that's how the Europeans reacted.
- [41:16]
It was like, what in the hell is this?
- [41:18]
Randall
I had never. I never knew that, man. Yeah, I picture. I would have guessed they were everywhere. Some version of them. Everywhere.
- [41:22]
Yeah.
- [41:23]
Dan Flores
No, they. They were purely an American feature. And they were one of the things that Europeans immediately. I mean, at once began to describe and marvel over. And yes, you are remembering correctly, that happened in the 1880s at a time when the. The use of bird feathers for fashion was a big deal both in America and in Europe. And the actual figure is, in one week in the London Commercial rooms, 400,000. 400,000 hummingbird skins from America, from North America, from the United States.
- [42:08]
I feel like if you told me.
- [42:09]
Randall
To get some, I could get you maybe like three or four over the summer. If I was really diligent about hanging out by my hummingbird feeder.
- [42:18]
Yeah.
- [42:19]
Do you have any idea how are they? Like, what are they doing? They were used to netting them or something.
- [42:25]
Dan Flores
I think they were netting them. I think that's exactly what they were doing. I think they were catching them in what would be some sort of modified butterfly net or something and just snagging them, skinning them out and skinning.
- [42:36]
Randall
So that someone can have some little. And feather like that on a.
- [42:39]
Dan Flores
Yes.
- [42:39]
Randall
On a hat.
- [42:41]
Dan Flores
On their clothing.
- [42:42]
Randall
Yeah.
- [42:44]
Dan Flores
And I've never.
- [42:45]
Randall
You never. Like, I'm surprised, like, with that volume there'd be more accounts and mentions of it.
- [42:52]
Dan Flores
Well, I blurbed a new hummingbird book about two years ago, and according to this particular book, the trade in hummingbird skins in Latin America is still a going enterprise. So hummingbirds evidently are still being killed and skinned to preserve their. Their feathers intact. And then apparently the skins are dried and they're used on. You know, I'm not sure exactly how they're used, but supposedly it's a going thing.
- [43:23]
Randall
Tell you, you want to get on my kid's bad side, you'd bring harm to a hummingbird.
- [43:30]
Dan Flores
I think a lot of people would feel that way. I think a lot of people would.
- [43:34]
Randall
Yeah.
- [43:37]
Guest Expert
Audubon is one of those characters that, from a contemporary perspective, there's a little bit of irony in what they do in that he's killing these birds. You know, you think of the Audubon Society.
- [43:48]
Randall
This is over.
- [43:49]
Steven Rinella
This is over, people.
- [43:51]
Guest Expert
You don't want this question.
- [43:53]
Steven Rinella
No, go ahead and ask it.
- [43:55]
Guest Expert
Go ahead and ask.
- [43:56]
Steven Rinella
This is over observed.
- [43:57]
Dan Flores
I feel over observed that Ottoban killed birds.
- [44:02]
Randall
It's like. It's inconsequential in the scheme of things.
- [44:05]
Guest Expert
I just. I think what I'm interested in is this early. I mean, some. He's. He's not a scientist. He's working in the field of natural history. And I think, like, there's a really interesting distinction between natural history and. And quote, unquote, modern science, where a lot of it just has to do with description.
- [44:26]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [44:26]
Guest Expert
And collection and cataloging and in, you know, inherently, in that you're killing a lot of stuff. Like up until the, you know, early 20th century, there's a lot of people who are just collecting things. Right.
- [44:44]
Randall
Yeah.
- [44:45]
Dan Flores
Is regarded. That sort of collection is regarded as one of the things actually that contributed to the demise of the Carolina parakeet.
- [44:52]
No, there.
- [44:53]
There were naturalists collecting.
- [44:56]
Guest Expert
Question does get us somewhere new.
- [45:00]
Dan Flores
There was a naturalist in about 1901 collecting for. It was either the Smithsonian or for the American Museum of Natural History. Who found a flock of about 40 Carolina parakeets because they existed in flocks.
- [45:14]
And he killed all but, like two.
- [45:16]
For the specimen collection for the museum he was working for.
- [45:21]
Now, I would say, in Audubon's time.
- [45:24]
Audubon's take to be able to paint these birds is. I mean, it's pretty paltry.
- [45:30]
It's small.
- [45:31]
Steven Rinella
Yeah.
- [45:32]
Randall
That's like a specimen.
- [45:34]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it's a specimen, but.
- [45:35]
Steven Rinella
And then one could almost say, thank.
- [45:37]
Randall
God he did, because now you have these renderings and understandings of them that if he just said, like, yeah, I don't know.
- [45:42]
Dan Flores
And we have the actual.
- [45:45]
Guest Expert
Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I just think it's not that he contributed to the decline of these species, but it's sort of anathema to our contemporary sensibilities. It's like, hey, I'm into birds. Let me kill a bunch of them and draw them all.
- [45:59]
Randall
It's not. I have friends that work on entomology surveys, aquatic invertebrates, baseline data collection and stream systems.
- [46:09]
You.
- [46:09]
You'd be aghast. You'd be aghast because they'll take those invertebrates and put them in little vials of alcohol.
- [46:17]
Heaven.
- [46:18]
Steven Rinella
I told you. I told you.
- [46:20]
Randall
You'd be aghast.
- [46:22]
Dan Flores
Well, yeah, I mean, I. So I understand your question completely, Randall. And. But I think that this has been a feature of, you know, of science for a long time. And I. Ottoman.
- [46:38]
I mean, Ottoman's not doing it specifically.
- [46:41]
To preserve collections in museums, although I do have on my phone right now.
- [46:47]
A photograph of the specimen.
- [46:50]
Two of them, in fact, that are just beautifully preserved Carolina parakeets that he collected on that 1843 Western.
- [46:59]
Steven Rinella
Where are those? Are they in New York?
- [47:01]
Dan Flores
I think they're in New York, yeah.
- [47:02]
Randall
I held one. Well, they had everything, man. It was at the ornithological, you know, the Cornell.
- [47:11]
Steven Rinella
Phil was there.
- [47:12]
Dan Flores
Cornell, that's right.
- [47:13]
Randall
Yeah. They pull out that. They kind of got like all the really good stuff in one tray.
- [47:17]
Yeah.
- [47:18]
And they had Carolina parakeets. They had a passenger pigeon.
- [47:21]
Yeah.
- [47:21]
And they had. They had ivory build woodpecker.
- [47:24]
I have.
- [47:25]
Dan Flores
I have not seen.
- [47:26]
Yeah.
- [47:26]
Randall
Wow.
- [47:26]
Dan Flores
An ivory bill woodpecker. A specimen of that.
- [47:28]
Randall
Am I making that up, Phil?
- [47:30]
No.
- [47:30]
Dan Flores
So I, you know, and so one of the things that's happening, that. Which you know very well because you and I both are serving on a particular advisory board that does this kind of thing. Scientists are going and looking at those kind of specimens for DNA, for. In order to possibly clone a line of, say, black footed ferrets. Which is actually happened, that has additional genetic diversity, so that the present population, which is based on only eight animals, is a little more diverse. So those specimens that were collected, and Ottoban certainly collected some of them have, are actually turning out to be really important for modern science and maybe even for, you know, preserving endangered species today. But yeah, he shot them and he wired the animals into poses to be able to paint them. And so when you look at those marvelous paintings that he did of birds.
- [48:27]
And later he did the same thing.
- [48:29]
With the mammals when he went west. I mean, that's what they are.
- [48:32]
They're actually already dead.
- [48:35]
But he would wire them into these lifelike poses and then he would try.
- [48:38]
To paint them really fast before they would start to lose the luster of.
- [48:42]
The feathers and the eye, the liquid of the eye and all because of course that vanishes really fast.
- [48:50]
And he learned to paint.
- [48:51]
George Catlin did the same thing.
- [48:52]
Randall
Learn.
- [48:53]
Dan Flores
Learned to be ambidextrous in painting them.
- [48:55]
So he could paint with bones.
- [48:57]
Steven Rinella
Seriously?
- [48:57]
Randall
Yeah, yeah.
- [48:59]
You know, Audubon, I didn't know he died. Probably not as young in his time as it would seem now, but. 61, right?
- [49:06]
Dan Flores
61, yeah.
- [49:07]
His.
- [49:08]
Randall
His friend visited him. You mentioned his friend visited him and talks about his mind was in shambles or somewhere.
- [49:14]
Yeah.
- [49:14]
Steven Rinella
Did he go.
- [49:15]
Randall
Did he go mad or did he have dementia?
- [49:17]
Dan Flores
No, he had dementia. Okay. I mean, yeah, that's what he. That's what Bachman, who was Bachmann, both of Ottoman's sons. They married sisters and so they had the same father in law, John Bachmann, who participated in that western expedition. And Bachmann was a very good naturalist himself. And that's where that comes from. He went to see Audubon and what he meant by his mind is all in shambles is that he had dementia. He didn't recognize Bachmann or kind of know very much of anything at all.
- [49:49]
Randall
What was the understanding of that at that time period?
- [49:53]
Dan Flores
Nobody really knew what it was, what caused it, but it was like cancer was. Which we also didn't understand.
- [50:03]
It was an observable thing.
- [50:05]
Randall
Yeah.
- [50:05]
Dan Flores
And that was. It was attributed just to old age. Although, I mean, even then 61 was not very old.
- [50:12]
Randall
Okay.
- [50:13]
Yeah.
- [50:13]
Dan Flores
And he's only 61 years old when. When he passes away. But, you know, he had lived this really remarkable life. And as I tried to convey in the episode, I mean, he.
- [50:28]
He left us with this.
- [50:30]
You know, when you're trying to recreate.
- [50:32]
A past world, somebody who both writes.
- [50:36]
And also can come up with a visual representation of what they're seeing. In Ottoman's case, being able to paint things, I mean, that's a hell of a record to leave to the future.
- [50:48]
And so that's probably why people like.
- [50:50]
That survive down through the. The timelines. The way they do is that they have given us a way to access decades, sometimes centuries in the past. And I think his Audubon's writing is as compelling and as worthwhile as, you know, his art and rendering all these creatures. But his.
- [51:14]
His task, his.
- [51:15]
That he set himself, talked about Catlin before. Catlin, of course, wanted to preserve everything he could about American Indians before they were lost to time and history and.
- [51:25]
What Audubon's task was.
- [51:27]
He wanted to paint every animal, every mammal, and every bird that existed in North America. He wanted to get every one of them in his books. So he was trying to do a complete natural history. Of course, he. As we know, many, many things have been discovered since Ottoman's time, but for his time, he was pretty thorough.
- [51:50]
Randall
Want to run any more questions by me for approval?
- [51:53]
Randall, you think about that?
- [51:56]
Guest Expert
I think so. One of the things that I picked up on the article or in the episode is like, I think of Audubon as being this very clinical, descriptive, methodical artist and writer, but he also has this sort of flair for the dramatic, and he's got this personality that kind of reminds me of Buffalo Bill. And then I recalled that when we were working on our Boone project, the story about Daniel Boone barking squirrels is written down by Audubon, who claims to have met him.
- [52:34]
Randall
Filson?
- [52:35]
Guest Expert
No, no, this is from Audubon.
- [52:37]
Steven Rinella
Oh, that was Audubon.
- [52:38]
Randall
Yeah.
- [52:38]
Guest Expert
He claims to have met him when he went out west or when he went to Kentucky. But the dates for when Audubon claims to have met Boone don't really line up with when Boone was actually in Kentucky.
- [52:50]
Randall
Oh, I had in my head for a minute that was that John Filson dude.
- [52:53]
Dan Flores
No, Filson was the biographer.
- [52:55]
Guest Expert
Yeah, Filson's the biographer. But Audubon is where we get the.
- [52:58]
Randall
Story of buck squirrels.
- [53:00]
Guest Expert
And. And it doesn't line up like Boone.
- [53:02]
Randall
Wasn'T in the state that Audubon says he was in. Yeah.
- [53:05]
Guest Expert
And so. And there was, you know, it made me wonder, like, how are there other instances, we know, like, what other sort of colorful aspects are there to Audubon's character? Because remembering that anecdote made me think, like, maybe this guy did this more often than not in terms of inventing things that happened to him or.
- [53:31]
Dan Flores
Well, he was. Yeah, he he was egotistical. And so he wasn't beyond, I think, creating a story like that to, to sort of illustrate his, you know, his presence in the world, how he got around who all he met. I mean, he, you know, when you read about the years when he's in Europe, I mean, he, he claims to have met freaking everybody, you know, everybody who was in Europe. And so, yeah, it doesn't surprise me, Randall. I don't know that. That particular story about the Audubon writing about Boone barking squirrels. But yeah, the fact even claims they.
- [54:16]
Randall
Sat down and had a dinner of squirrels.
- [54:18]
Guest Expert
Yeah, he said, he said he sat on the riverbank with them for the afternoon. They got all they needed for dinner.
- [54:23]
Randall
Dinner.
- [54:24]
Guest Expert
Yeah, but. But there are characters like that sort of when you peel back the veneer, you realize that there's a lot of, you know, fabrication maybe or, or self aggrandizement.
- [54:38]
Dan Flores
Yeah. And I think Audubon was not, not.
- [54:41]
Randall
Above that at all.
- [54:42]
Dan Flores
As I, you know, said, he, he was not generous about other people. Anybody else who, you know, who had any kind of success. Ottoman tended to kind of denigrate their success.
- [55:00]
Randall
And so he wasn't even besides other painters.
- [55:03]
Dan Flores
Yeah, even besides other painters. But I mean, probably the most, you know, the most well known example of it is that meeting between him and Alexander Wilson. I mean, Alexander Wilson is the true beginning of American ornithology. This guy did nine. He was a Scotsman who had immigrated to America and he did nine volumes of books about American birds. I mean, he never went west or anything like that. But before Audubon was ever on the scene, Alexander Wilson was doing this. And he was not nearly as good a painter as Audubon was, but he was a pretty good scientific observer. And the scientists in America, that's. That's what they appreciated about him. But he and Ottoben met at one point. And when, because Wilson was traveling around the country, when you had a book like that, what you did was you sold subscriptions to it. And you without a publisher, a marketing and publicity departments to help you sell.
- [56:03]
Your work now you just went around.
- [56:06]
The country and you knocked on. Here's a town that's got two doctors.
- [56:11]
In it and a lawyer.
- [56:13]
Those people will have the money and.
- [56:15]
The educations and the interest to want a book about birds.
- [56:19]
And so Wilson was traveling through Kentucky and he walked into a hardware store apparently. And it was a hardware store that John James Audubon was running. And as Audubon tells the story, Wilson comes in and says, I'm selling subscriptions to a new book on birds. And of course, Ottoman has already been working on his own. He's already. And so Wilson opens up, you know, his portfolio and shows Audubon eight or ten of his paintings. And Audubon says, you know, he nods and everything and, yeah, that's really nice. And then he reaches out of the counter and pulls some of his own paintings out and puts them on the counter. And according to Audubon's version of things, Wilson was stunned into silence and gathered up his portfolio and turned around and.
- [57:12]
Marched out of the hardware store immediately. Wilson's version is he hardly even recounts having met John J.
- [57:21]
Randall
Let alone it being like a career ending moment for him.
- [57:24]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it's like that.
- [57:25]
Randall
So, you know, there's that in There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day Lewis's character has a line where he says, there's a competitiveness in me. I don't want anyone else to succeed but me.
- [57:38]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I think Audubon had that same feeling.
- [57:43]
Randall
All right, well, thank you, Dan.
- [57:44]
Oh, you bet.
- [58:02]
Steven Rinella
Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre order right now. Meat Eaters American history the Hidehunters, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery. How they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre order. Meat Eaters American history the Hidehunters, 1865-1883 wherever you get your audiobooks. And you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen. On October 14.