John james audubon biography video theodore roosevelt
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Too many “scientific pedants in silk stockings” and “pur-blind Professors,” Webber complained, had “technicalised” the study of nature “into what may almost be called a perfect whalebone state of sapless system … so heavily overlaid by the dry bones of Linnaean nomenclature as to become a veritable Golgotha of Science.” Given the taxonomic complexity those “pedants in silk stockings” had imposed on nature, he insisted, ordinary people had become isolated from science, “repulsed, in dismay of its formidable hieroglyphics, from what is to them as a sealed book.” By contrast, “Our glorious Audubon,” the Hunter-Naturalist of the new nation, “lived and wrote like one of the people,” and he thus represented a distinctly American—and masculine—approach to natural history, a two-way relationship between the rugged naturalist of the still-wild American landscape and the ordinary folk of the new nation.
He looks at its founding by Roosevelt’s father, notes the many specimens donated by Roosevelt, and highlights contributions made to the museum in various capacities by other members of the Roosevelt family. “We had returned from a shooting excursion,” Audubon began, rather casually putting himself in company with Boone in the outdoors.
A generation or so ago, George H. Daniels’s American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York, 1968) did not even mention Audubon or Alexander Wilson, and Thomas Nuttall got only a brief biographical blurb. He was notable for his extensive studies of American birds and for his detailed (yet romantic) illustrations, which were engraved in Scotland and England for a large-format (double-elephant folio) color-plate (intaglio) book titled The Birds of America (1827–1838), and five volumes of accompanying text entitled Ornithological Biography (1831–1839).
His combined interests in painting and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. But Webber’s eulogy reflected its context—the American West in the middle of the nineteenth century—which, for Webber, could hardly have been an unconscious or coincidental choice.
When John James Audubon died, in 1851, he had many admirers, but probably none more ardent than a Kentucky-born adventurer and author named Charles Wilkins Webber.
He is most famous, of course, for his monumental (and now exceedingly valuable) mega-book, the four-volume compendium of 435 engraved plates, The Birds of America (1827-1838). He is a little less known for the companion book, the five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831-1839),a series of essays about ornithology, to be sure, but also about American places and people and, quite often, about Audubon himself.
However, the National Audubon Society remains committed to their namesake, and many towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States still bear his name (e.g., Audubon, Pennsylvania). It became a masterpiece. Indeed, Audubon worked (and frequently quarreled) with gentlemen of science of the both sides of the ocean, and he put great stock in his status in the scientific community: the engraved images in The Birds of America always carried the initials FRS and FLS—Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Linnaean Society—right after his name.
But beyond establishing his personal credentials, Audubon played a critical role in helping establish those of American science.
We can deconstruct the image easily enough: the eagle rising into the sky above a rugged, mountainous landscape, crying out as it clutches a bloodied rabbit in its talons, the powerful predator with its now-deceased prey. In death, he received a rugged-sounding eulogy from his Philadelphia friend and ally, George Ord, that would anticipate elements of Charles Wilkins Webber’s later celebration of Audubon as the Hunter-Naturalist.
As of 2025, more than two dozen regional Audubon societies across the United States have changed their names. 10). Audubon, with a Scottish naturalist, wrote a companion volume, The Ornithological Biography. It didn’t work. Soon after coming to America, Wilson made the pursuit of birds his passion for almost twenty years, and as Audubon did later, he tended to describe the American naturalist’s work in rugged-sounding terms, portraying himself as man of science struggling against the physical rigors required in research.
Audubon’s bird prints have been reproduced many times.