Outside my kitchen window, a scarlet cardinal and his dusky mate crack sunflower seeds. The visitors to my five birdfeeders change by the minute: goldfinches turn upside down to dip into thistle, hummingbirds buzz in and out sipping nectar, and a downy woodpecker chips away at my suet and peanuts. Once in a while the feeders clear out in a sudden swoop of wings for no apparent reason—then I spot the sharp-shinned hawk sitting on our porch rail, attracted to my feathered smorgasbord for hungry reasons of her own.

It's easy to get hooked on watching birds: so many colorful personalities, so much evidence that Someone pays attention to details. But for John James Audubon during the first half of the 19th century, birding was more than a hobby. Birds were the driving passion that shaped his life and that of his family. Audubon's prolific drawings and writings would eventually transform the way we view the natural world.

Mention the name Audubon and most of us can conjure up the image of the doubled-over hot pink flamingo, perhaps the most famous print from his magnum opus, The Birds of America. His "elephant folio" consisted of life-sized paintings of 435 birds, published in installments on oversized paper, and then bound into a final book by the subscriber over a ten-year period. It was an unprecedented undertaking that has never been matched.

Aubudon's name is also linked in most minds with conservation. Although he was a prolific hunter, killing thousands of birds, dissecting them for his work (he often ate them as well), and selling them alive and dead for profit, his dawning realization that the natural landscape he loved was vanishing would set the stage for the conservation-minded Audubon Society that bears his name today.

The lively and flamboyant Audubon is the stuff of which legends are made, which is why you can find numerous biographies chronicling his life and work. Especially absorbing are four recent books: John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Rhodes; Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and The Making of the Birds of America by William Souder; John James Audubon: Writings & Drawings, edited by Christoph Irmscher for the Library of America; and The Audubon Reader, an anthology of Audubon's writing, compiled and edited by Rhodes. The biographies painstakingly follow Audubon's life and work on The Birds of America, while Irmscher's portfolio of drawings and writings and Rhodes' anthology offer insights into Audubon's heart and soul and first-hand observations about the times in which he lived.

So much has been written about Audubon because there is much to be said. In both the Souder and the Rhodes biographies, he is shown as a brilliant man whose life was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies.  He's portrayed as a ceaseless perfectionist who destroyed much of his early work because he saw it as imperfect, yet a consummate liar whose tall tales cast a cloud over some of his scientific observations. Fibbing was as natural to Audubon as breathing it seems; the biographies show Audubon's presumably false claims to artistic training, and his deep shame over his illegitimate birth in Haiti to a French plantation owner and a chambermaid.

Audubon was a man who sprinkled references to God in his writing but had a pact with his wife to never talk about religion; who was confident in his calling yet prone to depression. He had a brilliant mind, yet he died of dementia. By turns he was a rascal who had an active social life and an industrious worker; a flirt and a family man; fond of the perquisites of civilization but able to live off the land. In short, both biographies present Audubon as a "character": the sort of person you might enjoy having a beer with, but you wouldn't want your sister to marry.

And if Audubon was no saint, Rhodes and Souder portray Lucy Bakewell, his wife of 43 years, as a feisty one. Behind Aubudon's work was a woman who followed him west from her comfortable home, endured his long absences, business failures, and continual lack of money, and worked to support and care for her children, often for years without Audubon's assistance. Deeply in love with Lucy but terribly careless with her feelings, he had at least one well-documented affair of the heart, but whether physical as well as emotional neither biographer is sure.

Although Audubon failed at various business ventures, his success with The Birds of America shows that he was a shrewd businessman when circumstances were right and his passions were ignited. Imagine a naturalist today going out to the field, studying his specimens, executing the artwork (under primitive conditions), conceptualizing a project whose size and scope had never before been attempted, and selecting the engravers. Then, imagine the same naturalist raising funds from scratch to fund the project by selling his paintings, exhibiting his work for a fee, selling subscriptions to the sets of prints, and hawking skins of specimens he shot to raise more funds.  Audubon was artist, author, project coordinator, liaison, fund-raiser, publicity department, and marketing department all rolled into one, on top of which he personally serviced the accounts of those who purchased his work. It boggles the imagination. (Audubon and his sons later produced a smaller "Octavo" edition, done with lithography, that would be a financial boon to the family.)

Rhodes excels in offering personal details about Audubon and placing him in his time, from the day he first set foot in America at the age of eighteen. "Studying the birds was how he mastered the world, and himself," writes Rhodes. This is a muscular biography, full of information pulled from Audubon's letters and journals and seamlessly woven into the narrative. By contrast, Souder begins with Audubon's arrival in Philadelphia as a 39-year-old; his chronicle of the peripatetic artist and entrepreneur is distinguished by a wry and subtle wit.

After reading both biographies and Audubon's own writing in the anthologies, I went to see several of The Birds of America prints for myself at the Morton Arboretum's Sterling Library in Lisle, Illinois. A gracious librarian arranged an appointment for me to view four original prints from their collection (stored in a vault for safekeeping). I had the afternoon to sit in their viewing room and contemplate them: two of loons, two of swans.

The sheer size of Audubon's prints stunned me, even prepared as I was from my reading. The loon and swan prints were all horizontals, roughly one-and-a-half feet tall by three feet long. Imagine the challenges Audubon faced with really large birds such as the whooping crane, the tallest American bird, which he completed by doubling the crane over as it fed on a baby alligator; or that classic hot pink flamingo mentioned earlier. It is difficult to envision how Audubon carted these paintings all over the wilderness, and then how he fulfilled subscriptions for these huge pieces at a time when there was no FedEx or special packaging services. (His biographers note that the paintings were sometimes misplaced, or even eaten by rats.)

The Library of America anthology includes a compelling journal entry on the trumpeter swan I viewed, a curious mix of Audubon's penchant for scientific observation and personal awe. After offering a detailed essay on the bird's habitat, characteristics, and movements, Audubon writes, "Imagine, Reader, that a flock of fifty Swans are thus sporting before you, as they have more than once been in my sight, and you will feel, as I have felt, more happy and void of care than I can describe."

In the viewing room, I paged through the library's edition of John James Audubon: The Watercolors for the Birds of America, comparing the original paintings before and after engraving. It's an education in how much the engraver influenced Audubon's work. The trumpeter swan, for instance, fills the frame, its size a powerful force (with wings extended, the swan can be as long as 10 feet, weighing close to 40 pounds). The print in front of me showed the swan partially submerged in the water, a single foot splayed behind, its neck doubled back to capture a moth. Audubon's original painting as seen in the book is beautiful, but the water was a fairly flat blue with no highlights or ripples, the space around the webbed foot is blank, and there is no insect in the picture, as appears in the finished engraved print.

Audubon used two engravers, first William Home Lizars, then (after a work strike), Robert Havell, Jr. Both biographers present Lizars as a competent engraver, but Havell was the genius whose contribution can't be overstated. A confident and talented artist in his own right, he wasn't afraid to make additions or cut and paste birds from one drawing into another to improve Audubon's composition. It was Havell's use of aquatinting that gave Audubon's birds their subtle shading and depth.

While at the library, I also viewed two prints of the Common Loon (or as Audubon called it, "The Great Northern Diver"), which I was familiar with from backpacking and canoeing the North Boreal forest areas. Audubon's journals note that he ate loon, which he found "tough, rank, and dark-colored."  In entries in John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings, you'll find casual asides on the Louisiana heron ("the flesh of the young birds affords tolerable eating") and the anhinga ("the flesh … is dark, firm, oily and unfit for food, with the exception of the smaller pectoral muscles of the female, which are white and delicate"). As the biographers show, it was normal in Audubon's day to find exotic birds in markets for consumption. Imagine—filet of cardinal! It's impossible not to wince when you read about Audubon shooting ivory-billed woodpeckers or the now-extinct Carolina parakeets.

When Audubon embarked on a collecting trip to Labrador in 1833,  he seemed to begin to understand that casual slaughter might threaten the very birds he'd devoted his life to portraying. His Labrador journal, as presented by Rhodes in The Audubon Reader, recalls the "enormous destruction of everything here but the rocks," and he writes of the massive gannet slaughter: "the men strike them down and kill them until fatigued or satisfied … five hundred and forty have been thus murdered in one hour." Rhodes devotes a chapter to this Labrador trip, noting Audubon's mounting alarm as he saw thousands of wild bird eggs collected for retail sale; "nature herself is perishing," he wrote, calling for "some kind government … to put a stop to all this shameful destruction."

Souder glosses over the whole Labrador trip in a brief paragraph but includes a horrifying scene in which Audubon amusedly watches a farmer maim three wolves and throw them to a pack of dogs. The wolf scene doesn't merit mention in Rhodes' biography (although the Library of America includes it in its anthology). Although much of the information overlaps between the two biographies, each sheds light on different facets of Audubon's personality and character.

Artwork aside, the sheer volume of Audubon's body of letters, journals, and writings on birds is staggering. The handsome Library of America volume runs close to 1,000 pages, yet even so it contains only 45 entries from Audubon's five-volume Ornithological Biography.

While Irmscher declines to modernize or censor, Rhodes modernizes Audubon's spelling and punctuation and deletes any material he feels is overly specialized, such as formal anatomical descriptions. Rhodes also writes introductions to many of the selections, which lend valuable context. Because Rhodes tried to minimize overlap with the selections in the Library of America volume "so that more of Audubon's work might be returned to print," the two anthologies complement rather than duplicate each other. Taken together, they paint an astoundingly rich picture of a life, a new country, and the natural world during the first half of the 19th century.

It's distressing to realize that in 1863, after Audubon's death, the New York Historical Society purchased 430 of his original watercolors from Audubon's destitute widow Lucy for about nine dollars each. Many of the copper plates for The Birds of America were melted down for scrap. But much has survived for our instruction and delight. As Rhodes says, simply: "No one has ever drawn birds better."

Cindy Crosby is the author of three books, including By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete), and editor/compiler of the forthcoming Ancient Christian Devotional (InterVarsity Press).

Books mentioned in this essay:

1. Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of An American (Knopf, 2004).
2. William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and The Making of "The Birds of America" (North Point Press, 2004).
3. Richard Rhodes, ed., The Audubon Reader (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2006).
4. Christoph Irmscher, ed., John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings (Library of America, 1999).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.