John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color.
Such reconsiderations are timely and important. In the foreword to Audubon at Sea, a new anthology of Audubon’s works about aquatic birds that I coedited, the artist and activist Subhankar Banerjee describes the reconsideration of Audubon’s failings as “part of a vigorous and necessary debate about a shared, sustainable future.” Those continuing to argue that the National Audubon Society rebrand itself—the way local chapters and a regional association of naturalists have already announced they will—do so in the hope that such a gesture would spur greater diversity among nature enthusiasts. Given his seemingly no-holds-barred killings of birds, some would argue that Audubon has always been an awkward fit for a conservation society anyway. That said, the founders of the Audubon Society and its local chapters never sought to honor the man but the fragile beauty of the birds he depicted.
I first encountered Audubon’s work about 30 years ago, becoming hooked instantly on prints that showed birds as I had never seen them before, so unlike the static profile outlines in my father’s well-thumbed handbooks. To me, many of Audubon’s plates were self-consciously violent pictures, made by a man who knew violence himself and had participated in it: sharp, yellow beaks open in agony, bony talons raised in attack or defense, eyes widened in horror at being discovered, shattered eggs dripping yolk, a broad wing stretched in the panic of getting away, at least for now, from what will happen anyway sooner or later, some unheralded, unspectacular death deep in a thicket, a pile of feathers on a rock, blood oozing from an unseen wound, once-vibrant colors fading rapidly as the light fails and the body stiffens. Audubon’s birds sing and scream, kill and get killed, eat and defecate. One of his best-known compositions, of the majestic wild turkey, displays (unnoticed even by those who study his work) a pile of poop in the lower left corner.