Birds on a wire

摘要

Countless journals have told of the beauty and danger of early America's wilderness. Far fewer have included attempts to sketch it Thank goodness, then, for the perseverance of John James Audubon, the bastard son of a French naval officer, who came alone to America as a teenager in 1803. Audubon's genius was for drawing birds. But in the days before cameras, first he had to kill them. After marvelling at the grace of, say, a white pelican gliding after a school of fish, he would take aim with his hunting rifle, using fine shot so that the bird was not blown to pieces in the process. He then fixed wires to prop up his quarry in an animated pose. There is irony in the fact that one of America's leading conservation groups is named after him.