Backyard Birding

Lieutenant Jean Audubon introduced his son, John James Audubon, to an early love of nature and especially of birds. He brought back specimens from his voyages, calling special attention to their behavior, their form and their seasonal habits. As Audubon writes in his journal, “He excited me to make me study them.”

When Audubon began school, he was perpetually truant, preferring answering the call of the open field rather than his school master. He returned home with his school basket filled with birds’ nests, birds’ eggs, lichens, flowers and pebbles. His father was much pleased with his son’s curiosity and collections…until he found out what work had been neglected to obtain his specimens.

Yet as a child, he began drawing the birds of France, collecting around 200. Disappointed with the products, he went to his father who gave him a book of illustration.

Although the pages were not what I longed for, they gave me a desire to copy Nature. To Nature I went and tried to imitate her. But for many years, I saw that my drawings were worse than the ones I regarded bad in the book.

The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear. To have been torn from the study would have been as death; my time was entirely occupied with art.

In our studies of Audubon, we have three sources:

Capturing Nature, The Writings and Art of John James Audubon, which is an edited selection meant for children.

The Original Water-Color Paintings by John James Audubon for The Birds of America, which is a massive book. My daughter has sat for hours studying the illustrations, amazed at the detail involved in each of the plates.

A nature notebook. Here, she is collecting her own watercolors of the natural world around her. Here is her first painting. It is perhaps not quite as realistic as Audubon’s flicker (above), but it is most definitely a yellow-shafted flicker.

Nurturing a child’s interest for the natural world often takes only the time to express one’s own interest and enthusiasm for the subject. Perhaps it will turn into a life time hobby, a commitment to conservation, or something greater. This can be clearly seen in the childhood of John James Audubon.

birding, backyard birding, birdwatching, Audubon