Stillness, and the life and death of birds

"My Style of Drawing Birds” does not, in its first four pages, tell us much about Audubon’s style of drawing birds; it tells instead of his determination of a means to make birds drawable. It is not enough to simply kill a bird and draw it dead; such ornithological portraits are “neither more or less than . . . Stiff unmeaning profiles”, and even hung upside down “to shew their every portion” only produces “some pretty fair sign Boards for Poulterers!”, emphasizing their deadness (759). Audubon determines eventually that he must “attempt to Copy [nature] in her own Way, alive and Moving!” and apparently makes a brief attempt to draw living birds, but he finds that he cannot finish his sketches (760), and goes back to collecting dead specimens, which he eventually learns to string up with wire into natural-looking – that is to say, alive-looking – positions (761).

There seems a certain circular waste of labor in going to the trouble to kill a bird so that one can “represent them in . . . a Natural position” (763), making them look as if they were living again. What the bird-hunter/stuffer/painter gains in this is perhaps not so much control over the bird, since it is the bird’s “Nature (as far as habits Went) that he wants to represent – he is not attempting to make the bird do anything it would not do by itself – as it is the birds’ stillness, which is impossible to achieve while it is living. When the bird is still it is drawable; it is also approachable, and studyable. Audubon can “Stud[y] it whilt thus placed as a ‘lay figure’ before me, according to its Specificity”, learn the forms of its “bill, nostrils, head, eye, leg or claws, as well as the Structure of its Wings and Tail” (763), the better to represent it. Yet Audubon concedes also the importance of observing his birds alive, in their “form and Habits,” to discover that Pewees sit pensive and upright, while “Gallinaceous Birds . . . were possessed of equally peculiar positions and movements” and “herons walked with elegance and stateliness” (762). Audubon can’t represent a still, drawable nature without experiencing it in its unstillness, to find out what it does, so that he can artificially do it (to his birds) himself.

Consider the case of the “Ruby-throated Humming Bird”: Audubon gushes effusively on the beauties and familial habits of “this lovely little creature,” this “glittering fragment of the rainbow”; he describes it in terms of magic and fairy wings (248) and revels in its delicate feeding habits .He is enamoured of the bird’s movement, “from one flower to another like a gleam of light, upwards, downwards” (249) and even more so by its mating habits and family life, anthropomorphizing like crazy here in particular. After all of this enthusiastic description of the living hummingbird, it’s jolting when he turns briefly to the subject of killing them, and then to his strategy for representing them – “in various positions, flitting, feeding, caressing each other, or sitting . . . and pluming themselves. The diversity of action and attitude thus exhibited may, I trust, prove sufficient to present a faithful idea of their appearance and manners” (245). He is untroubled by the violence he’s done on these bird whose parental feelings he has just finished admiring, and once he’s arranged them into their lifelike poses, describes them using the verbs of their previous action, despite that they are now still. It’s as if he doesn’t quite see them as dead.