Audubon's famous bird-banding story falls apart under the dates
John James Audubon is often called America's first bird bander. In 1834 he described tying silver threads to the legs of five young eastern phoebes at his Pennsylvania farm and finding two of them nesting nearby the next spring. Dated drawings contradict where he said he was, and the numbers look too good.
The tale appeared in his Ornithological Biography some thirty years after the events it describes. Original drawings of European birds show that during spring 1805 he was actually in France, an ocean away from the farm where he set the episode. Beyond that, the return rate he claimed, two birds out of five, is wildly out of line with modern studies. One tracked 549 banded nestlings and saw 1.6% come back; another, 217 nestlings and 1.3%. Doubts about his honesty go beyond this story. Today's official world bird list credits him with 23 species, but one of his subspecies rested on a plagiarised picture and made-up data, and another on a stolen specimen.
He was born Jean Rabin in 1785 on his father's sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. His mother, a young chambermaid from Brittany, died when he was a few months old. His father, a French naval officer, brought him to France and, with his wife, formally adopted him. The boy loved roaming the woods for nests and eggs, and made rough sketches of them. Groomed for the navy, he found he got seasick and disliked mathematics, and failed the officer's exam. In 1803 his father got him a false passport to dodge Napoleonic conscription, and at 18 he sailed for America, rechristening himself John James.
Yellow fever struck as soon as he landed in New York; Quaker women nursed him and taught him English. At Mill Grove, the family's farm near Philadelphia, he hunted, fished, drew and set out to paint birds more realistically than other artists, often burning older drawings to push himself. He married Lucy Bakewell, daughter of a neighbouring estate owner, in 1808 and moved to Kentucky, running a store in Louisville.
That drive produced The Birds of America, issued between 1827 and 1838 as engraved colour plates in the huge double-elephant format, printed in Scotland and England. His reputation has since taken hits for slaveholding, bodysnatching and trafficking Native American remains, and more than two dozen regional Audubon societies have dropped his name.
Source: John James Audubon
