Among the Night People

1780-1851 In the days when Louisiana was a province of Spain a little dark-eyed boy used to wander among the fields and groves of his father's plantation studying with eager delight the works of nature around him.

Lying under the orange-trees watching the mocking-bird, or learning from his mother's lips the names of the flowers that grew in every corner of the plantation, he soon came to feel that he was part of that beautiful world, whose language was the songs of birds and whose boundaries extended to every place where a blossom lifted its head above the green sod. To him, as he said years afterward, the birds were playmates and the flowers dear friends, and before he could distinguish between the azure of the sky and the [pg 15] emerald of the grass he had formed an intimacy with them so close and endearing that whenever removed from their presence he felt a loneliness almost unbearable. No other companions suited him so well, and no roof seemed so secure as that formed of the dense foliage under which the feathered tribes resorted, or the caves and rocks to which the curlew and cormorant retired to protect themselves from the fury of the tempest. In these words, recorded by himself, we read the first chapter of the life history of John James Audubon, the American naturalist and the author of one of the early classics of American literature.

In those early days his father was Audubon's teacher, and hand in hand they searched the groves for new specimens, or lingered over the nests where lay the helpless young. It was his father who taught him to look upon the shining eggs as 'flowers in the bud,' and to note the different characteristics which distinguished them. These excursions were seasons of joy, but when the time came for the birds to take their annual departure the joy was turned to sorrow. To the young naturalist a dead bird, though beautifully [pg 16] preserved and mounted, gave no pleasure. It seemed but a mockery of life, and the constant care needed to keep the specimens in good condition brought an additional sense of loss. Was there no way in which the memory of these feathered friends might be kept fresh and beautiful? He writes that he turned in his anxiety to his father, who in answer laid before him a volume of illustrations. Audubon turned over the leaves with a new hope in his heart, and although the pictures were badly executed the idea satisfied him. Although he was unconscious of it, it was the moment of the birth of his own great life work. Pencil in hand he began to copy nature untiringly, although for a long time he produced what he himself called but a family of cripples, the sketches being burned regularly on his birthdays. But no failure could stop him. He made hundreds of sketches of birds every year, worthless almost in themselves because of bad drawing, but valuable as studies of nature.