Under a Wild Sky (17 page)

Audubon believed that turkeys instinctively knew how much interaction with humans was safe. When the mast was thick on the ground and the birds assembled into massive flocks of both genders, they seemed fearless and would enter farmyards to continue feeding. Audubon felt that, under certain circumstances, turkeys could read his intentions. If, for example, he walked briskly through the forest, whistling to himself, he could pass within a few feet of a hen on her nest without the bird making a move. But if he attempted to sneak up on a nest, his stealth seemed to alarm the hen and she would run or fly off before he could get close. Still, turkeys' habits sometimes betrayed them. Audubon said that when turkeys nested on islands in the river—which they did often—he had only to discharge his gun and all the birds would run to the nearest snag of timber, where they would cower but remain, even as he walked up to the pile. It was a simple matter to shoot them where they stood, blinking stupidly at his gun barrels.

Like many birds, turkeys reserve their most extravagant behaviors for the mating season. In Kentucky, Audubon found, this period could begin as early as February. A female typically initiates the lovemaking by separating herself from the males and then calling to them. Turkey cocks converge on the place from which the call originates and begin to strut, tails fanned, chests puffed out and necks curved backward over their shoulders. Should they fail to entice the hen at once, the males soon find one another and fall into combat. Sometimes a weaker or younger bird is killed. Audubon was surprised to see that when this happens, the victor completes the subjugation of his rival by standing atop its dead body and “caressing” it in the same manner in which he holds onto a female during copulation. Audubon told the story of a hunting trip during which he got near enough to a crowd of strutting cocks that a single shot from his gun killed three. Instead of flying off, the remainder strutted and danced around the fallen birds and only departed when Audubon emerged from his hiding place and waved them away.

Once mated, Audubon said, a female turkey remains with the cock through the breeding season. Males, on the other hand, are promiscuous and gather large harems of faithful hens. After they lay their eggs, the
hens avoid contact with the males. Audubon believed this was to keep them away from the eggs, which he thought a cock would destroy “for the purpose of protracting his sexual enjoyments.” Audubon was appreciative of the turkey hen's devotion to her young, which she attends to single-mindedly immediately before and after hatching. A hen on a nest of eggs ready to hatch will not move from it under any provocation, Audubon said. It was even possible to erect an enclosure around a hen thus engaged. Hens are especially cautious about the weather, and go to great lengths to keep their chicks dry, as a soaking of their down-covered bodies is usually fatal. After the mating period, Audubon said, turkeys enter into a summer molt, when they are flightless and become emaciated and are not worth shooting or eating.

In those days, according to Audubon, the turkey's chief predators, besides humans, were owls and the lynx, a cat now virtually extinct in America. Lynx were great ambushers. Once a lynx spotted a flock of turkeys moving through the forest, it would scout the flank of the group to determine its direction of travel, then bound noiselessly ahead to lie in wait, taking the first bird that wandered too close. Owls were stealth aerialists, descending on roosting turkeys with their great silent wings stiffening just before the lethal collision. Turkeys, Audubon was amazed to see, had an interesting defense against owls. A turkey spotting an owl soaring toward it tipped ahead slightly while bending itself backward and fanning its tail at a slightly elevated angle, so that its back formed a kind of curved ramp. An owl crashing down on a turkey in this posture often ricocheted off in confusion and then departed in search of a less wary bird.

Audubon was captivated by the richness of America's wild procession. Once, having set a cage trap for turkeys, he was thrilled when he went out to inspect it one morning and found a healthy black wolf lying inside. It was a different time. Turkeys were so easily gotten, he said, that in the Louisville market they could be purchased for pennies—less than the cost of an ordinary chicken. A really big, “first rate” turkey of thirty pounds fetched only a quarter.

Audubon felt—correctly—that these kinds of close observations from the field were the essence of ornithology, and were much superior to the study of specimens far removed from their natural habitats. What he lacked in formal training, Audubon compensated for with years of actual experience among the birds. Long after all this, when Audubon
began to publish his bird drawings, it was the turkey that he had engraved first.
One of his fans among the English gentry so admired his portrait of the great bird that she asked him for a miniature of it—which she then had copied onto a seal as a present for the brash American. For many years after, anyone receiving a letter from John James Audubon found it sealed with a large blob of red wax bearing the impression of a strutting turkey cock.

Audubon's zest for killing wild animals is jarring to modern sensibilities, especially to people who cannot reconcile hunting with the idea of conservation—the latter a cause now closely associated with the name Audubon. Today, most hunters, of course, regard themselves as conservationists, and their sport has become an essential tool in the management of game and in raising money to preserve wildlife. But Audubon was a premodern man. He hunted, as everyone did then, to put meat on the table. He also hunted for sport. At one time or other, Audubon killed specimens of all but a handful of the more than four hundred species of birds he ultimately painted, plus most of the quadrupeds of North America, from squirrels to alligators to moose.
He recognized and often speculated about the impact overhunting could have on wildlife populations. But he was never deterred.
He sometimes said a day in which he killed fewer than a hundred birds was a day wasted.

Audubon's skill with a gun was considerable. Although birds were more numerous and perhaps more easily approached in those days, the weapons at Audubon's disposal were quite inferior to contemporary sporting guns. Audubon carried both a rifle and a shotgun, though presumably not at the same time. Rifles, used mainly on deer, bears, and smaller mammals, were of little practical use in taking birds except for large species that presented a sizable and relatively stationary target. When loaded with a ball, shotguns could also be used in this way, though they were far less accurate than a rifle with its grooved barrel that was designed for the purpose. Audubon killed most of his specimens with a shotgun, which discharged a cloud of shot more likely to bring down flying birds. He no doubt used the smallest size shot he could to minimize tissue damage. The technique works wonderfully: Brought down at a fair distance with fine shot, even a small bird will show little or no outward evidence of its wound.

Shotguns in Audubon's time were configured more or less like their modern counterparts.
They typically had two barrels, mounted side by side, each about thirty-four inches in length and something under an inch in diameter. A modern shotgun in 12 or 16 gauge would be somewhat shorter but otherwise look much the same. There was a big difference, though. Audubon's guns were muzzle-loaders. Unlike modern shotguns—which fire a shell that contains fast-burning powder, plastic wadding, shot, and a primer all in one piece that is loaded into the breech—shotguns back then had a closed breech. They were loaded from the front end, first with a measured charge of black powder, then with shot wrapped in linen wadding that was rammed down the barrel with a rod. A flint-loaded “lock” at the back end of the barrel ignited the main charge when the trigger was pulled and the hammer fell and produced a spark.

Care had to be exercised in handling the muzzle-loader. Accidentally discharging the first barrel while loading the second could cost you a hand.
A more life-threatening—and maybe more common—mistake was the inadvertent loading of two charges into the same barrel, which could turn a shotgun into a small bomb. It took time to load such a weapon, plus a healthy respect for the dangers involved. It also took time to shoot one.

When a modern gun is fired, the discharge is immediate—indistinguishable, really, from the act of pulling the trigger. But there was a time delay between squeezing the trigger on a flintlock and the gun actually going off. First the spark ignited a primer, which smoked and burned and then lit the main powder charge, which in turn burned much more slowly than modern gunpowders. When Audubon pulled the trigger on his gun, it clicked, sparked, smoked, issued a flash of light near the breech, and finally, after a brief eternity, fired.
Around 1825, percussion firing caps came into general use, replacing the flintlock in providing the primary ignition. These shot a little faster, though the main advantage of the percussion cap was that it worked in the rain.

Wingshooting, that is, taking birds in the air, requires timing and a sense of speed, distance, and angle that can be acquired only through experience. To the uninitiated it seems a loud and cruel pastime. To the hunter, there is something ineffable yet almost physical in the pleasure of taking a bird from the air. The tang of fall on the wind, the swing of the gun, its powerful slam against the shoulder, the long, slanting parabola of
the stricken bird falling to earth—all of it is an experience that, for some, begs repeating.

Using a gun that is slow to shoot changes the geometry of wingshooting. Nineteenth-century hunters presumably accommodated themselves to the individual proclivities of their guns. Still, some challenging species—fast-flushing upland birds like grouse, or certain puddle ducks that leap vertically into the air and are away in almost the same instant—must have presented Audubon with many a difficult shot. No doubt he was happy when he did not have to take a bird on the wing. Nowadays it's considered unsporting to shoot a bird perched in a tree, or one sitting on the ground. In Audubon's time it was merely the mark of an efficient woodsman.

Audubon's eagerness to shoot the very birds he loved is today sometimes excused as an unfortunate necessity—a function of having no camera, no modern optical device with which to “capture” his subjects unharmed. It was, the argument goes, a different era, with a different, less enlightened ethos. This is wrong. Many things
were
different in Audubon's time, but field ornithology has in truth changed little since then.
Modern ornithologists still collect bird specimens all over the world. They still shoot them with shotguns. Many of these same scientists are both conservationists and avid bird hunters.

On short forays into the woods, when he could return home the same day, Audubon would have needed little equipment other than his gun, powder, and shot. He usually had along a game bag to carry his birds in. For longer excursions, Audubon had to consider how best to achieve his main objective—making new drawings. There were two options. He could take his drawing equipment with him, or he could preserve the birds against spoilage and carry them back.

One of the telling facts that argues against Audubon's claim of having studied under the French master Jacques-Louis David is that David, who was principally a portraitist, worked in oils.
Although Audubon spent many hours struggling with oil paints later in his career—especially after his reputation grew and he thought he could knock off duplicates of his birds for a profit—the medium always confounded him.
In Kentucky, where his technique matured, Audubon stuck to the media he already knew: watercolors, pencil, and pastel chalks, which he called crayons. A traveling kit for this work would have been quite manageable. But
Audubon would have been limited to working on smaller species in the field because he always drew the birds full-sized. For the bigger birds, Audubon bought the largest paper available, a truly enormous size called “double elephant,” which measured about twenty-seven inches by forty. These sheets would have been unwieldy for foot travel, or even on horseback—though conceivably they could have been rolled into tubes. But there was the additional matter of the boards—one to which the bird could be wired for posing, and a second to hold the paper—and these would have been more cumbersome to carry.
Audubon most likely never used an easel, as it is easier to work with watercolors on a flat or nearly flat surface.

Audubon traveled light. He didn't go in for fancy camps.
He liked to sleep in the open, or, when forced to by inclement weather, in lean-tos he fashioned in the woods. It seems likely that Audubon would have hauled his full complement of drawing equipment with him on only his most ambitious trips—where he could set up a base camp at a friend's cabin, or when he could ship his gear ahead by trunk. Otherwise, he either hustled home with his birds or skinned them on the spot.

Bird skinning was a technique well-known to naturalists in Audubon's time, and one still in general use by ornithologists today. It's not as crude as it sounds. A bird “skin” is not a flattened pelt of feathers, but rather something that looks quite like the whole bird. It's a simple form of taxidermy, really, in which the bird's innards are removed and replaced with inert material. Audubon probably stuffed his with straw, or cotton when he could get it. A well-skinned bird is a vivid, three-dimensional version of the real thing that looks like—a dead bird.
Several collections of Audubon's bird skins still exist, and many of his specimens look as if they might have been on the wing only yesterday.

Skinning equipment was an even smaller burden than drawing gear. All Audubon needed was a scalpel or sharp knife, perhaps a pointed scissors, and a needle and thread.
Methods varied—everyone tended to skin the way whoever taught them did it—but the general procedure was simple enough. A freshly killed bird was slit open along its abdomen, sometimes on the back or under a wing, though Audubon seemed to prefer opening the stomach with a long incision beginning immediately below the breastbone and continuing down to the tail. Using his fingers, Audubon removed the viscera and then gently pried the skin away from the ribcage. He disjointed the leg and wing bones. Using the point of his
knife or scissors, he patiently separated the flesh within the wings and legs from the bones. All bones but the very tips of the wings and those inside the feet were extricated in this way. Removing the esophagus, tongue, and eyes allowed the skull to be carefully emptied and left in place. As he worked, Audubon inverted the skin as it pulled away from the parts he was removing, so that when he finished, the bird was literally turned inside out, like a sock rolled off a foot.