The Washington Sea-Eagle, and other Audubon Mysteries

A friend recently gave me an interesting gift. She does volunteer work for a nearby university that periodically sells old books to raise funds. These books (and videos) are donated. One such donation was a jacketless, hard-backed volume with "DAMAGED COPY" scrawled across the cover.

It was destined for the garbage when my friend looked at the title and saved it, thinking I might find it interesting.

I do indeed. This volume, not damaged at all, as far as I can see, is a facsimile of the first two volumes of John James Audubon's "The Birds of America."

Washington's sea-eagle (photographed by Margo D. Beller from Volume 1 of "The Complete
Audubon" published by the National Audubon Society.)

Audubon's original "Birds of America" was an "elephantine" folio - 435 life-sized (and thus extremely large) hand-printed portraits. Quite an effort that took years to finish. The pictures were sold by subscription but they were expensive to produce and so were costly to buy. Audubon, who'd failed as a businessman before turning to painting, knew a smaller edition would be a less-costly alternative. Seven volumes, containing 500 plates, were published in 1844. Audubon supervised the first edition. He died in January 1851.

For the 75th anniversary of the National Audubon Society (founded in 1905), Volair Ltd., the publisher, cut the number of volumes reproduced in 1978-79 down to five. According to the Preface, to "make this edition more compact and thus more manageable, each of the five volumes contains two of Audubon's volumes within a single binding. Not a single color plate has been omitted, not a word of text has been deleted from these timeless American classics."

So I have volumes 1 and 2. Within are some of my favorite birds and a few mysteries.

Many of the birds' names are not much changed now than they were in Audubon's time. The "Wilson's Flycatching-Warbler" is what is now the Wilson's Warbler. The Black-throated Green Wood-Warbler has lost "wood" from its name. The Mourning Ground-Warbler has lost ground and the Nashville Swamp-Warbler has lost the swamp.

Some of the birds go by different names now. The Short-Billed Marsh Wren is now the Sedge Wren. The White-bellied Swallow is now the Tree Swallow. Why the Cliff Swallow was also known as the Republican Swallow I can't imagine. The Traill's Flycatcher has been split into the Alder and Willow flycatchers. The American Redstart is listed with the flycatchers because of its similar habit of darting out to catch a flying insect and then going back to its perch. Now it is considered a warbler.

The buteos, now called "hawks," were called buzzards then so Volume 1 contains Red-tailed buzzards and Rough-legged buzzards, for instance.

Audubon's lifelike rendering of the Common Buzzard
(photographed by Margo D. Beller from the anniversary edition)

But then I find the "Common Buzzard." Audubon says the figure in the drawing above was shot (by someone else) by the Columbia River. I mentioned this to MH and he, in his methodical way, found the National Audubon Society, which has reproduced all the plates on its website, believes this to be a Swainson's Hawk because the entry includes a link to that page in the field guide. (William John Swainson was a British ornithologist who lived from 1789-1855 but he was not the one who named the hawk. To find out who did, click here.)

For me the biggest mystery, literally and figurative, is Haliaetus Washingtoni, the Washington Sea-Eagle.

According to Audubon, who said he first saw one of these in 1814, the adult male he painted is 3 feet 7 inches (42 inches) long with a 10-foot wingspan. That's a major-league bird! (By contrast, the wingspan of a bald eagle is between six and 7.5 feet and it sits 30 to 32 inches tall.) Few had seen this bird or even knew of its existence at the time he finally shot one to paint two years later. He decided he had discovered a new species and so named it for George Washington because, in his words, "as the new world gave me birth and liberty, the great man who ensured its independence is next to my heart...If America has reason to be proud of her Washington, so has she to be proud of her great Eagle."

The eagle looks Washingtonian (George was 6 feet 2 inches, much taller than the average man of his day), sitting tall and noble. The mystery, however, is if it ever existed.

According to the popular website Mental Floss, it didn't take long before "other naturalists began to question whether the bird was really a distinct species. [Audubon] was accused of taking sloppy measurements of his specimen and overstating the physical differences between his bird and other species. Washington’s eagle, as a species, was quickly discredited among scientists, the consensus being that the bird was either a misidentified bald eagle or a hoax and publicity stunt. Just a few years after Audubon’s death in 1851, the journal American Naturalist called it a valid species only among 'amateur ornithologists.'”

A black-throated green warbler by any other name is just
as nice.  (Margo D. Beller)

Could Audubon have misidentified, perhaps, a very large first-year eagle (immature eagles show no white)? British zoologist Dr. Karl Shuker, writing on his blog, points out Audubon had seen more than enough bald eagles and golden eagles in his travels to know something unusual when he saw it, especially a much bigger bird. Shuker goes into a lot of detail about the controversy over this bird and how others, including some in more modern times, claim to have seen one.

"Needless to say, of course, this is all highly speculative (especially with no apparent palaeontological support for such a bird)," he writes. "And yet...every so often, a report comes along that makes me wonder, what if?"

So on this day when we once celebrated George Washington's birthday, let us raise a toast to this majestic eagle, hope it wasn't overhunted into extinction and be thankful Audubon memorialized it.