BUT...YOU'RE EXTINCT!
Ecology and the Art of John James Audubon

It had been another long day in the bottomland swamp forest of Arkansas and David Luneau, associate professor at the University of Arkansas, was tired, wet, and hungry. He’d been at it since dawn, but before he could call it a day he still needed to check the area where he’d placed two remote cameras. He was a patient person, but day after day, it had been more of the same.

Luneau, along with numerous teams of scientists and volunteers, had been searching in earnest for some months now, based on several credible reports that an Ivory-billed Woodpecker had been spotted in the area. Many discounted the reports. After all, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was believed to be extinct, a victim of extensive logging and clearing of virgin forest in the South between the 1880s and mid-1940s. There hadn’t been a confirmed sighting of the bird since 1944. Besides, the Pileated Woodpecker was superficially similar, and common to the area. It was an easy, understandable mistake.

But there were also those who thought that maybe—just maybe—this magnificent bird might still exist. Luneau was a believer. He knew the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was here; he could feel it. What he needed was proof. Proof that this bird, which had so impressed Audubon that he likened it to a Van Dyck painting, had not disappeared forever from the face of the earth. Luneau figured his best chance was to capture the bird on film. In addition to his remote cameras, he’d mounted a camcorder on the front of the canoe. It was pointed straight ahead and zoomed fully out. He kept it running constantly.

Wearily, Luneau cut the motor on his canoe and bent down to pick up a paddle. When he looked up again, he saw the tail end of a black and white bird fly away. “I knew instantly that it was a woodpecker,” he explained later, “and all I was interested in was seeing whether the white on the wings was leading or trailing.” If it was leading, or on the front part of the wing, the bird was the relatively common Pileated Woodpecker. But if the white was on the back part of the wing (trailing), then Luneau knew he would have found the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker! To his great frustration, the bird flew away before he could get a side view of the wing pattern. Then Luneau remembered the camcorder. He popped out the tape and said, “At least we have something to look at when we get home.”

On first viewing, the video seemed too blurry to provide conclusive proof, but after he and other scientists took measurements of the bird as recorded on the video, Luneau was convinced it was too large to be a Pileated Woodpecker. Then Marc Dantzker, the video curator at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (the study of birds) took the tape through a process known as de-lacing, which sharpened the images. A frame-by-frame analysis showed a bird with a distinctive white pattern on its back. During the 1.2 seconds of flight recorded, the video revealed eleven wingbeats showing extensive white on the trailing edges of the wings.

“The bird captured on the video is clearly an Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” said John Fitzpatrick, the director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. “Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives.”

Visit the University of Arizona Museum of Art now through August 7 and view the exhibition, Audubon: The Birds of America, consisting of over 50 plates, including the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

John James Audubon
1785-1851
The son of a French Father and Creole mother, John James Audubon was 18-years old when he came to the United States. In 1804 Audubon was curious about whether a pair of eastern phoebes were the same pair from the previous year. Something of a character, Audubon dressed as a frontiersman in buckskin and a coonskin cap. He told many fantastic stories of his adventures to boost the sales of his work, some of which may actually be true! There is no question, however that his contribution to both the fields of art and science is significant.. He fixed a “light silver thread to the left of each, the first recorded instance of the now common practice of birdbanding (The next year, two of the phoebes that returned still carried the silver threads )Fascinated by birds all of his life, he traveled widely, studying and drawing almost 500 species of birds. Self taught as both an artist and a scientist, he improved his art and kept careful field notes as he traveled. Unlike other artist of his time who posed birds in very unnatural settings, Audubon took great pains to show them naturally and in action as he hunted and traveled. In his quest to accurately reproduce the shades and hues of the feathers, he experimented with a variety of techniques and media, using pencil, ink, pastel chalk, oil paint, and watercolors, sometimes combining them in a single painting.

Birds of America consists of 435 plates which were published between 1827 and 1838. No more than 200 copies were printed, which sold for $1000 each. Because the birds were rendered life-sizes, the book had to be published on the largest paper available, called an elephant folio; it was 39 ½ inches by 29 ½ inches. Audubons paintings were reproduced by engraving and colored in by hand.

Audubon wrote that he wanted his drawings to bring birds back to life, “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person.”
“Nothing would ever answer my enthusiastic desires to represent nature, than to attempt to copy her in her own way, alive and moving!”
Audubon wrote that “a true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”

Tune-up Your Mind
Look for these books and related materials:

The Boy Who Drew Birds by Jacqueline Davies
Audubon: Painter of Birds in the Wild by Jennifer Armstrong
Into the Woods: John James Audubon Lives His Dream by Robert Burleigh
Atlas of Extinction published by Grolier Educational
The Best Book of Endangered and Extinct Animals by Christine Gunzi
Gone Forever! An Alphabet of Extinct Animals by Sandra and William Markle
She’s Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head by Kathryn Lasky
How Artists See Animals by Colleen Carroll
Animals Observed by Brigitte Baumbusch

Details
The University of Arizona Museum of Art
Located on the UA campus, near Park Avenue and Speedway Blvd.
Information: (520) 621-7567
http://artmuseum.arizona.edu
Admission: Free
Hours:
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tuesday – Friday
Noon to 4:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
Closed Mondays and University holidays
Prices and hours are always subject to change. Verify before you go.

Visit the Audubon: The Birds of America exhibition now through August 7

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