A Reckoning with Ornithology’s Past

Kenn Kaufman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness is an important book from a widely admired voice in our community. It is also a timely book, uniquely situated to our moment. The Birds That Audubon Missed deals with the earliest generations of Euro-American ornithology, and how the personalities, presumptions, lacunae, and expectations of the men involved combined to render them incapable of seeing some of the species that were right in front of them—including some genuinely surprising ones such as Caspian Tern, Lincoln’s Sparrow, and Swainson’s Thrush. This is a book you should read and reflect upon and then discuss with your birder friends. You could bandy its ideas about at bird club meetings and thrash it out on bird walks as you marvel over the thrushes. The themes it covers are nestled within the tensions of our many identities, viewed through the lens of birds and birding, and illuminated by the distant mirror of nineteenth-century history. The Birds That Audubon Missed sparkles with joy and humor while stimulating the mind and is held together by the grace and skill of Kaufman’s personal, approachable style.

Birders, by definition, engage with birds—watching them, listening to them, studying them, considering their welfare and safety, and advocating for their protection. All birders live within larger human communities. Even the most misanthropic solitary birder relies on weather reports and the accumulated knowledge of past generations. Now we find ourselves in a moment when the birds we love are in peril, from climate change, habitat loss, and political indifference, while simultaneously our human communities are polarized over our history, the exclusions we’ve practiced, and the voices and peoples we’ve ignored. This has led to often heated discussions, specifically around the names of birds and organizations.

These difficult discussions are necessary and significant. They are an informal example of the “Truth and Reconciliation” forums established in South Africa at the end of apartheid. We need to talk, calmly and humanely, with our innate joy of birding turned way up and our defensive ego-posturing turned down. The birding community needs an intervention—a deeply human and philosophic intervention. Kenn Kaufman, in The Birds That Audubon Missed, delivers just that. Not because it is a perfect book—there is no such thing—but, rather, because The Birds That Audubon Missed contains it all: joy and moral reckoning, the intense eye for detail of the artist and the wide view of the historian.

John James Audubon was an imperfect person—as we all are. But there are degrees of deviation from the norm, and Audubon falls well below the bar on most of them. Yet the national society named after him has decided to retain his name—not forever, I predict—and many local branches and organizations are now having the debate. This makes Kaufman’s book particularly well-timed. Kaufman does not adopt either extreme, outright condemnation or indignant defense of Audubon. Instead, the book slowly, almost imperceptibly, lays out a balanced assessment of the man. This entails acknowledging the positives: the fame attached to his name, the way he towers above all other bird artists, and the subtleties and innovations of his painting techniques¹. The many moral lapses in Audubon’s character are also laid bare, from simple but omnipresent and self-serving exaggeration to envy-driven libel to greed and to scientific fraud.

The most significant of his many moral lapses though was Audubon’s callous disregard for human beings. He sold enslaved people whom he had traveled with from Kentucky to New Orleans because he needed the money. For those two unnamed men, this was a dreadful fate, not only because they were wrenched from their families in Kentucky forever, but also because the laboring conditions in the far south were wantonly brutal due to the climate and the size of the plantations. Kaufman literally arrests the reader here, after recounting this episode:

Wait. Stop right there. […] Those men that he sold off for a few dollars in New Orleans—they were human beings, with just as much intrinsic worth as the man who so cavalierly sold them. […] Bought and sold, taken away forever from their loved ones and the places they knew…it was monstrous. In that era, such a transaction had an everyday banality, but that doesn’t make it any less evil. p. 129–130

Having stopped us in our tracks, Kaufman uses words that are absolute— “monstrous” and “evil.” And he’s right.

Furthermore, with an emotional ambience distant from his usual awe and wonder, Kaufman had anticipated this moment in an earlier footnote, implicitly provoking self-examination of the reader’s moral compass in evaluating historical figures:

It is strange to me that people can look at an Audubon bird portrait, with every feather rendered in exquisite detail, and then be shocked to find out that he shot birds. Tell me how—in an era before binoculars and cameras—he should have painted all those details otherwise. Of course he shot birds. And sometimes all these early ornithologists shot far more birds than necessary, and I don’t like it, either; it doesn’t help to say that it was merely a reflection of the times. But there are some people today who can shrug off the fact that Audubon bought and sold slaves, and then be outraged that he shot birds, and they leave me mystified. p. 45

I can assure the readers of Birding, as an historian of the Abolitionist era, that there were active anti-slavery movements already in the U.S. by 1819, including some quite prominent African American voices in Philadelphia, a city that Audubon visited in that time. Moral arguments against slavery circulated in the press and in society before the full-scale Abolitionist movement began in the late 1820s. Audubon could not have been ignorant that his casual buying and selling of other human beings would be seen as morally dubious, albeit by a cognitive minority.

In distinct contrast to this, there was no articulated movement at the time against the shooting of birds for scientific study, for sport, or for food. Organized opposition to inhumane treatment of animals was just starting. Blatant public practices like bullbaiting, cockfights, and violent abuse of pack animals took most of the immediate attention of these fledgling groups; the shooting of birds by explorer-scientists was nowhere near the top of the agenda.

So, Kaufman got this right. To express anger and dismay over Audubon’s shooting of birds is to violate the difference between society then and now, and to impose our current mores on a past that couldn’t have comprehended our intent. But to dismiss what our era and Audubon’s would have understood as the greater moral failing involved in enslavement of one’s fellow human beings, when there was a cultural conversation in Audubon’s day around the evils of the practice, when even the founding documents of the U.S., the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, contain precepts that point toward slavery being evil—well, to do that is, as Kaufman says, incomprehensible.

Kaufman’s measured assessment emerges slowly; he says, and his tone supports this, that Audubon “is not a hero to me, not a role model.” But that doesn’t mean that we must throw out Audubon’s artwork [p. 338] or demonize him to such an extent that we deny his “real discoveries and contributions” [p. 303]. However, the evidence of his being what George Ord dubbed him—an “impudent pretender” [p. 147]—is strong: Audubon’s “lapses into dishonesty are undeniable” [p. 300], he practiced scientific fraud [pp. 148–153], and he attacked Alexander Wilson directly and indirectly—even after Wilson had died. We needn’t lose what Audubon actually accomplished through his artwork and fame. But in dethroning him from the statuesque status he has enjoyed for nearly two centuries, perhaps we can return him to the same relative anonymity held by other early American ornithologists: Alexander Wilson, Charles Bonaparte, George Ord, Mark Catesby, and John Bachman, all of whom had their strengths and weaknesses as scientists, explorers, and human beings. History can shape and goad us, keep the connection to past generations alive. But creating unassailable heroes is not the way to create change. When we, as birders, return to the birds themselves, we find the same shreds and shards of iconization in personal names and their attendant moral conundrums. Kaufman gently but inevitably leads the reader into the “Bird Names for Birds” controversy. One can discern his preferences, but he never becomes proscriptive in this book. His argument rests where we birders—as a community that relies on, and contributes to, the accumulation of scientific knowledge—would most wish it to be: in the realm of reason.

Kenn Kaufman is one of my favorite philosophers. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, and Kaufman’s wisdom begins with birds and from there taking wing to reflect on reality. Many years ago, in his Kingbird Highway, Kaufman won me over to seeing him as a philosopher when he articulated a life-hack:

Already a rebel in the quietest way, I had decided for myself that holidays or special days meant nothing if they were dictated by the calendar. Any day might be a special one—you just had to get outside and see if it was.

His best wisdom, as in this example, emanates from the springtime of childhood and adolescence, when our senses of wonder and curiosity have not yet been warped into cynicism or had their emotional fount dammed. The first full chapter, “The Undescribed World,” of In The Birds That Audubon Missed, evokes our instinctive human desire to learn: “Every newborn child has an innate drive to take in new information, to discover, to explore” [p. 19]. We figure out, through language, that everything has a name and a category and that knowing these words is valuable. For people who immerse themselves in nature—and Kaufman confesses “I am one of those lucky people”—“the wonders of nature never disappoint, and they never end” [p. 20]. Curiosity remains joyously insatiable, in a loop that feeds continued exploration.

Kaufman charts an insidious change when “ego and competition and even conflict” come in, when the distinction between “this is new to me” changes to “this is new to everyone” [p. 21]. It is another philosopher, Aristotle, who warned us that even small errors at the beginning can multiply ten-thousandfold later. Perhaps these claims of priority and discovery were that original error? Especially since these ego-driven pronouncements were built on exclusions and suppressions and on a loss of knowledge. Kaufman has a story to tell about the rivalries and egos of Audubon and his contemporaries, so he utilizes the inherent drama of their conflicts to enliven his writing. But as with so many themes in this book, Kaufman understands multiple perspectives.

One of the most challenging parts of the book for me concerns Kaufman’s desire to inhabit the explorer mode of the earliest Euro-American ornithologists. Kaufman acknowledges that indigenous Americans likely knew most of the species in the region—including some of the ones that Audubon and others missed. He relates my favorite instance of this, the story of Hölchoko (the Common Poorwill, or Phalaenoptilus nuttallii) and the fact that the Hopi knew of its remarkable hibernation for centuries, persisting through white disbelief and disregard for their experience [p. 22].

Kaufman lingers on the historic “gap” in which North American birds were

genuinely if temporarily unknown, waiting to be discovered or rediscovered. […] What a time it must have been. Looking back, it’s hard to avoid feeling a pang of envy[. I]n my own dreams I sometimes find myself back there, two centuries or more into the past, hiking through those grand forests, paddling down those wild rivers. In these visions the United States is still a young country, and I am younger still, seeing everything for the first time. p. 16–17

This is nostalgia for a literally Edenic/Adamic moment—an eager young man getting to name the animals. As Kaufman already acknowledged, the knowledge gap had been created by conquest and contemptuous disregard for existing wisdom. Most of the book relates how science itself was tainted with ambition and ego clashes from Linnaeus to Audubon and beyond. The motivations for exploration were most often money, fame, and continental pride after the French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had dissed North America’s natural world as unhealthy and weak. That Edenic moment strikes me as a battle of male egos, built on erasure of peoples and knowledge, rather than the unadulterated exploratory joy that comes with the human capacity for sharing knowledge².

Indeed, there are few things as awe-inspiring as the human capacity to pass along the received wisdom and knowledge of the generations before us. Language itself, oral traditions, religions, philosophies, libraries, schools and education, chronicles and journalism, and the very enterprise of science—all these massive enterprises span centuries. Maintaining and expanding them constitutes a sacred human trust. And in the realm of nature study, we can all be participants. This is where Kaufman picks up the theme. However much he has pangs of envy for the unexplored places, he knows that even that is a myth, and a dangerous one. Instead, he concludes that

in almost every…pursuit of knowledge, discovery has become a shared experience, a group adventure, a team effort…most who have explored the worlds of natural history have been embedded in networks of shared information. p. 365

Kaufman clearly acknowledges community-science when he adds that “the vast community of birders now plays a major role in mapping out where every bird species lives” [p. 360].

Knowledge needs to be filtered through broad-based discussion. One of the subthemes of the book, particularly prominent in the chapter on shorebirds (a group of birds in which the errors and ignorance of the early ornithologists were particularly magnified), is how our perceptions, prejudices, and expectations shape what we see. For instance, early ornithologists lacked an understanding of hemispheric migration, expecting European species rather than considering South American possibilities, thus missing Baird’s and White-rumped sandpipers [p. 249–253]. Now because of changes in technology, communication, record-keeping, and the sheer accumulation of knowledge, our perceptions and expectations about bird migration have changed and continue to change. To me this question of perception—a phenomenon which all naturalists must grapple with when we go to the field with our (likely incorrect or incomplete) expectations—is far more interesting than the professional jealousies and spats of the white male ornithologists of the nineteenth-century.

So, while we deal with our perceptions and expectations and reflect on how such limitations held back even the ambitious early ornithologists in their discoveries, we can embrace the philosophic landing spot for Kaufman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed. Being the American naturalist that he is, Kaufman returns to the language of the Transcendentalists and imagines himself, not as the eager young man, but rather as inhabiting a perpetual child-mind within the full networked possibilities of adulthood:

We remain as children, eyes wide, expecting miracles around every corner…we can all make discoveries, every day. At a deep level, I believe that something new to us, personally, can be just as important as something that’s new to everyone³. p. 20 & 366

The discoveries are there to be made, and The Birds That Audubon Missed retains its tenacious optimism, recognizing that while

sober realism is essential…idealism is important, too, and it’s a precious thing. […] Get outside and look around…there are birds out there…intense little sparks of life. […] Beautiful birds, in numbers beyond counting. We should celebrate this varied abundance that remains and fight to hold on to it for the future. p. 291–292

The Birds That Audubon Missed raises honest questions and honest confessions like Kaufman’s envy for the early ornithologists. He shares with us the excitement of discovery, but also the dishonesty it produced. While the book could have benefited from more marginalized voices to enrich its points—for instance, a full engagement with an article, cited by Kaufman, by J. Drew Lanham concerning the legacy of Audubon⁴—Kaufman’s blend of history, birding, science, reminiscences, and joy of life make for a book that can provoke us to discuss the past without dividing us from our shared biophilic source in our beloved “intense little sparks” of avian wonder.

¹I am not the reviewer equipped to deal with Kaufman’s “Channeling the Illustrator” interludes, being unable to draw convincing “V” representations of geese flying overhead.

²While there are a few white women in the book, including Maria Sibylla Merian [p. 46] and Maria Martin [pp. 185–186 & 202], their inclusion feels more tokenistic than organic. Needless to say, opportunities for white women to explore the backwaters were limited in the 18th and early 19th centuries, while Native women and Black women, both enslaved and free, were not respected as knowledge producers in this time period.

³In light of how Kaufman writes movingly of the loss of the Passenger Pigeon, not merely as a species extinction, but also as the loss of an incredible natural spectacle (“[The] level of abundance that was part of the defining character of this continent…the essence, even the meaning of the Passenger Pigeon was in its jaw-dropping abundance” [p. 283]), it is worthwhile to reflect on Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s breathtaking observation of the Passenger Pigeons in Illinois, from her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Fuller likens the drama to music: “One beautiful feature was the return of the pigeons every afternoon to their home. Every afternoon they came sweeping across the lawn, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged motion, more beautiful than anything of the kind I ever knew. Had I been a musician, such as Mendelssohn, I felt that I could have improvised a music, quite peculiar, from the sound they made, which should have indicated all the beauty over which their wings bore them.”

⁴J. Drew Lanham’s excellent 2021 essay, “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” (tinyurl.com/Lanham-Audubon), should be read alongside The Birds That Audubon Missed. Lanham’s essay must have come to Kaufman’s attention after The Birds That Audubon Missed had been largely researched and written, but it is gratifying that Kaufman cites Lanham’s essay positively [p. 332].