But beyond establishing his personal credentials, Audubon played a critical role in helping establish those of American science. As much as he drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms. Much like Thomas Jefferson a generation earlier, Audubon sought to declare America’s scientific independence from the Buffonian insistence on the inferiority of American species. In The Birds of America, Audubon offered a dramatic celebration of the new nation’s avian species, and in doing so he engaged in an act of scientific possession. He did not simply present his birds as stiff specimens for close ornithological examination; he gave them life and location, creating engaging images embedded in the American landscape. “The Birds of America” implicitly meant “The Birds of the United States.” Audubon never used the term “Manifest Destiny”—a term that entered the American political lexicon in 1845, when Audubon was well past his writing prime—but he stood squarely at the intersection of art and science at a time when natural history became entwined with national history. He was much more than a passive spectator in that process: in the first half of the nineteenth century, no one in the world of American art or science did more to stimulate a national conversation about nature in the United States.
In that regard, Audubon also embodied another important notion: that the American scientific community was by no means an entirely enclosed community, nor could it claim isolation from the rest of society. In Audubon’s America, science had not yet become subdivided into academic disciplines and institutionalized in university departments. Indeed, the study of natural history in academic repositories seemed only a far-distant second to the dramatic discoveries still available in a largely uncatalogued continent. Thomas Nuttall, Audubon’s fellow natural historian and eventual ornithological ally, perhaps best expressed the contrast. He fidgeted with frustration while holding position of curator of the botanic garden at Harvard, describing his experience there as “vegetating” among the plant collections. As soon as he had a chance, he headed west with the Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth expedition of 1834, going all the way to the Pacific Northwest and then on to Hawai’i, collecting specimens all the way. In fact, he became memorialized in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast as “Old Curious,” the naturalist who walked along the beach “in a sailors’ pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells.” The real sailors considered him eccentric in his commitment to collecting, but in his appearance, if not his behavior, he blended in among them.