Under a Wild Sky (23 page)

The Audubons kept an unusual house. Their rooms were filled with music and books and lively talk of commerce and nature. Outside their door, the grounds were overrun with a motley assortment of beasts.
When Audubon found a very young turkey cock separated from its broodmates in the woods and brought it home, the bird became tame—and popular with people in the village after it developed a penchant for following anyone who spoke to it. The turkey grew large, refused to commune with Audubon's domestic turkeys, and could be seen silhouetted against the sky each evening on the ridgetop of the Audubon house, the only place it would roost. During one of the turkey's absences into the forest, Audubon happened upon it while out hunting. He would have shot it had not his dog recognized the bird, which sat unperturbed while the two of them walked up to it. Lucy tied a red ribbon around the bird's neck to alert local hunters that it was not a member of the wild flock. But it was eventually killed by a man who didn't see the ribbon until he picked up the bird. The man apologetically brought the turkey to Audubon, who probably ate it.

Prior to its demise, the turkey had for a time shared the Audubon compound with a trumpeter swan.
Audubon was not fond of swan meat—only the cygnets were palatable, he said—but he hunted them enthusiastically. One day he wounded a large male, shooting off a wingtip. Unable to fly, the bird landed on a pond where, after some exertion, Audubon managed to capture it.
Knowing the huge white bird would amuse Lucy and the boys, Audubon carried it home—though not without a struggle, as it was a two-mile hike and the swan, which was strong, did not go willingly. Audubon cut off the damaged wingtip and confined the swan in a fenced area. The family named it Trumpeter. After a while it got used to captivity, though it could never quite be described as “tame.” The swan often escaped and would noisily chase after Audubon's other animals—as well as the children, the servants, and any of the townspeople who got in its way. On a rainy night after almost two years with the Audubons, Trumpeter walked out a gate that had been left open and was never seen again.

There were more birds in Audubon's time. How many can only be guessed at. It's natural to think of all wild animals as less numerous now than they were before waves of human settlement swept over the continent. But this is not true in all cases. White-tailed deer, for example, thrive in areas converted to agriculture and also in the suburbs. There are more of them now than at any time in history. Wolves and bears and bison are increasing in number again and expanding their ranges. Bird populations are especially fluid, both from one season to another and over long periods. In the past two centuries, the forest in the eastern half of North America has been logged off and regrown several times. In each phase, the number of birds and the composition of species have changed.
When Audubon lived in Kentucky, birds that require large, uninterrupted expanses of forest to breed in—like warblers—were more numerous.
But the brown-headed cowbird, one of a number of “edge” species now more common across North America, was probably less populous then because it prospers along the interface between forest and land that has been cleared. Some species of birds have been introduced to North America from Old World and Asian stocks since Audubon's time.
There were no house sparrows or starlings in America when Audubon lived. Now they're everywhere.
Audubon never saw a ring-necked
pheasant, the spectacularly beautiful Eurasian import to the northern prairies in the late 1800s that has since become one of America's most sought-after game birds.

Waterfowl, which crowded the autumn skies over North America two hundred years ago, are today much reduced, their numbers a mere remnant of what they were before market hunting and widespread destruction of wetland breeding habitat took place. No one alive today can really imagine what the former immensity of birds in America must have been like to see. The best descriptions there are to go on are those of naturalists like Wilson and Audubon.

Audubon was captivated by all birds. But ducks seemed to affect him with unusual power. He spent countless fall days, in the cold and dark on either side of dawn and in the ochre of dusk, haunting the sloughs and oxbows along the Ohio River near Henderson, studying and shooting ducks that streamed into Kentucky as winter descended in the North. Sometimes he went with his brothers-in-law, Tom and William, renewing their shared passions from earlier exploits on Perkiomen Creek. Other times, Audubon was a solitary figure in the murk of a duck day. He was never happier than when he was lying in wait with his dog and gun on a reedy shoreline as ducks materialized out of the gloom and settled on the water. Ducks, with their powerful, steady flight and splashy landings and takeoffs, were a parade of aerial variation. Audubon was beguiled by their behavior and by their multitudes. Because hunting was central to his ornithology, Audubon never made much of a distinction between sport and science, and, when it came to ducks, his blood ran hot. Here's how he described hunting the green-winged teal, a small, speedy duck that arrived in the Kentucky wetlands early each autumn:

He sees advancing from afar, at a brisk rate, a small dark cloud, which he has some minutes ago marked and pronounced to be a flock of Green-winged Teals. Now he squats on his haunches; his dog lies close; and ere another minute has elapsed, right over his head, but too high to be shot at, pass the winged travellers. Some of them remember the place well, for there they have reposed and fed before. Now they wheel, dash irregularly through the air, sweep in a close body over the watery fields, and in their course pass near the fatal spot where the gunner anxiously awaits. Hark,
two shots in rapid succession! The troop is in disorder and the dog dashes through the water. Here and there lies a Teal, with its legs quivering; there, one is whirling around in the agonies of death; some, which are only winged, quickly and in silence make their way toward a hiding-place, while one, with a single pellet in his head, rises perpendicularly with uncertain beats, and falls with a splash on the water. The gunner has charged his tubes, his faithful follower has brought up all the game, and the frightened Teals have dressed their ranks, and flying now high, now low, seem curious to see the place where their companions have been left. Again they fly over the dangerous spot, and again receive the double shower of shot.

Audubon wrote this many years after the fact, and in a country far from Kentucky. But the vividness of the scene was undiminished by time. This is the kind of story duck hunters like to tell over and over, so that the reliving becomes inseparable from the original experience. It was not surprising that Audubon could recall decades later the chill of the morning air on a Kentucky marsh, or the fact that it was not unusual in those days for a single hunter to kill more than seventy teal in an outing.

Many a hunt lingered forever in Audubon's thoughts. And while he adopted a sometimes heartless posture in writing about them, Audubon was always precise in his observations about a given species' behavior and appearance.
Once, while watching mallards feeding on a pond, he saw two of them shot with a rifle through an odd chain of events. Some of the ducks were dabbling in the shallows, scooping up plants and small aquatic animals from the bottom muck. Their feet churned and their tails rode straight up in the air. Others ducks executed small leaps from the water to pull down seeds from the reedtops. Anyone who had hunted mallards was familiar with their ability to leap almost vertically into the air from the water, but Audubon must have been one of the first naturalists to have recorded this kind of jumping for food. While watching this unusual performance, Audubon also noted that a few of the “older” birds had waddled into the forest to help themselves to acorns and beechnuts littering the ground. Suddenly a shiver passed through the flock and their contented mewlings ceased in unison. Wary, necks stiffened and heads turning nervously, the ducks listened to the sound of footfalls in the woods. Just as they were about to take flight, the ducks saw that it was only a bear
snuffling through the mast. For a moment, the birds were at ease again—until the bear without warning bolted and disappeared among the trees. Presently, another figure appeared, this one darting from tree to tree in an effort at concealment. It was an Indian, whom Audubon at once perceived had been trailing the bear. Now the Indian was left to consider the lesser quarry floating in a huddled mass some distance from shore. Audubon was sorry for the Indian's dilapidated gun and the ragged blanket that was his only clothing. But he admired the man's sure actions, which he sat and watched for some time. He wondered if the mosquitoes, still hungry at the last of their season, were tormenting the Indian as he slowly brought up his gun. He wondered if the ducks would flee at the last second. An instant later smoke flashed from the rifle and the report traveled across the pond as the flock sped into the air, leaving behind two birds dead and upside down on the water. The Indian waded cautiously into the pond to retrieve his dinner, testing the depth of the water and the firmness of the bottom as he went. A short while later, as Audubon still looked on, the Indian kindled his fire and plucked his ducks, setting aside a feather or two with which to clean his gun before finishing up his meal and melting back into the forest.

Audubon could not decide whether with some birds it was more amusing to shoot them or only watch them. He loved woodcock. The woodcock is a medium-sized, snipelike bird with a plump body, strong stubby wings, a long bill, and large eyes that sit high up on either side of its head. Woodcock feed on worms and are migratory—though, as Audubon observed, they fly not in flocks but in long lines of individuals that arrive at one place so rapidly—and often at night—that their sudden appearance en masse can make it seem as if a large number were traveling as one.
Audubon liked to stand on the bank of the Ohio in the evening when the woodcock were coming through and listen to them whiz by one by one, their dark forms flying over the broad river like rockets. The birds' preference for boggy areas and their rapid, erratic flight made them difficult to hunt. The hunter inexperienced with woodcock, Audubon wrote, shoots too fast or not at all, in which case “the game is much better pleased than you are yourself.”

As he had at Louisville, Audubon threw himself into the local pastimes. He was no snob.
One of his favorite pursuits at Henderson was
trot-line fishing for catfish—a sport, if it could be called one, that required no skill at all. Audubon, usually with a friend or two, would run a thick, cotton line some two hundred yards long out into the Ohio. The end was weighted down with a large stone. A hundred shorter lines were fastened to the main line at intervals, and each of these had a hook at its tip. For bait they used live toads. In May, prime catfishing season, toads were in such abundance around Henderson that it was easy to catch a basketful. This, even Audubon admitted, was quite a few damp, warty toads in one place—enough to make a lady swoon, though he reported that this was not a problem in Henderson, where there were no “tragedy queens” or “sentimental spinsters.”

The toads were hooked through the skin of their backs so that they would wriggle enticingly once submerged, though catfish are fond enough of dead flesh that it would seem a small matter whether the bait was alive when it went in the water or how long it stayed that way. The trot-line was left in place for hours at a time. Or days. The fish were periodically hauled in and the lines re-baited. In times of high water and difficult currents, Audubon sometimes baited a single line and cast it into the river, tying his end to a springy tree branch and leaving it to do the work. Audubon enjoyed all this, he said, because it required none of the patience of other styles of fishing. He could bear fishing for trout with a rod, Audubon wrote, only if he could count on catching at least “fifty or more in a couple of hours.”

But even in such humble activities, Audubon was a determined naturalist. The same account in which he described this lazy man's technique included a meticulous morphology of the catfish they caught:

The form in all the varieties inclines to the conical, the head being disproportionately large, while the body tapers away to the root of the tail. The eyes, which are small, are placed far apart, and situated as it were on the top of the forehead, but laterally. Their mouth is wide and armed with numerous small and very sharp teeth, while it is defended by single-sided spines, which, when the fish is in the agonies of death, stand out at right angles, and are so firmly fixed as sometimes to break before you can loosen them. The catfish also has feelers of proportionate length, apparently intended to guide its motions over the bottom, whilst its eyes are watching the objects passing above.

Audubon was a close student of the Ohio River itself. The river had its own personality, and the mood of its waters varied with the season.
Audubon was especially interested in spring flooding. Melting snows caused the river to rise every spring, of course, but Aububon noticed that in some years when the snow in the Allegheny Mountains was unusually deep and the weather turned suddenly warm, heavy spring rains were also more likely—and that this combination produced floods in which the river rose and overtopped its banks. Henderson, famously high, never went under. But great expanses of the lowlands in the river valley did, and these areas Audubon eagerly explored by canoe. Paddling over the sluggish, silt-laden waters of the floodplain, Audubon gaped at the animals trapped on ridges of land that now became islands or waiting out the deluge in the highest trees. He saw many deer, bear, cougar, and lynx. Poor backcountry hunters often took this occasion to shoot the stranded animals for their pelts, leaving the carcasses to rot. It was like being in a different country while the water covered the land. Someone told Audubon about a cow that had swum out the window of a house that was built more than sixty feet above the river, while the family that lived there remained in the upper story.