Bird Man

For half of his 65 years, John James Audubon did not appear to be destined for anything in particular. The bastard son of a French sea captain and a Santo Domingo Creole, he grew up in France when Jean Jacques Rousseau's back-to-nature notions were the rage. Sent to America to seek his fortune (as overseer of his father's estate near Philadelphia), young Audubon looked and acted like an absentminded candidate for the horsy set.

As he remembered it (in his journal): "I had no vices but was thoughtless and pensive, fond of shooting, fishing and riding ... as active and agile as a buck." He married a girl named Lucy and opened' a general store in Henderson, Ky., which flopped from the first. Audubon had to go hunting to fill the cupboard.

Reality on Wires. Audubon noticed far more than the game birds. He got in the habit of shooting birds of every species and toting them home to paint before their colors faded. When he should have been behind the counter in his store, Audubon was wiring crumpled, feathered things in lifelike positions to copy them. The family finances deteriorated, until Lucy took up schoolteaching to support their two children.

"Poor Mr. Audubon." When a British engraver agreed to copy his watercolors for publication, Audubon's fame & fortune were made. Said he in a letter from Edinburgh to his long-suffering Lucy: "It is Mr. Audubon here and Mr. Audubon there until I am afraid poor Mr. Audubon is in danger of having his head turned." With his big beak, feathery sideburns and piercing eyes, he looked, in his latter days, like a benevolent eagle.

Laymen liked his stuff, but such contemporary artists as Peale and Inman thought it was nothing much in the way of art. Ornithologists wagged their heads over misplaced feathers and mixed-up markings, pointed out that some of the birds' positions were anatomically impossible.

But time, which destroys many more artful and more careful men, has vastly enhanced Audubon's greatness. His work hangs in scores of U.S. museums. He has been the hero of a round dozen biographies --and of several efforts to prove that he was really the "lost dauphin" of France. Popular editions of his Birds of America have sold over 200,000 copies. The Audubon Societies have perpetuated his name through hundreds of bird sanctuaries, imperceptibly transformed the artist who used to kill as many as 100 birds a day for sport into a sort of scientific St. Francis. Last week 68 unbound prints from Birds of America were proudly installed in Washington's National Gallery.

Whether or not they were correct in every detail, Audubon's woodpeckers quarreled, his swallows nestled, his wild turkeys gobbled. Audubon had turned paper into air, and set birds free in it.

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