Under a Wild Sky (26 page)

When a flock of passenger pigeons dropped out of the sky to feed, a great devastation ensued. The birds denuded and destroyed large sections of forest, and when a flock's presence was discovered, people would travel from far away to harvest the birds by the thousands.
Once, near the Green River in Kentucky, Audubon happened upon such a killing field. It was in a stand of old forest, with little understory, where a flock of pigeons had come to roost each night after foraging in the area by day. Audubon arrived on the scene about two weeks after the birds' first appearance. He found a section of forest three miles wide and nearly forty miles long, littered with broken branches and limbs that had sheared off beneath the weight of the birds. Smaller trees as big as two feet in diameter were broken off just above ground level. Dispersed across this blasted landscape was a band of hunters and farmers armed with guns and long poles. Wagons parked in lines waited to carry away the spoils of the hunt, and some of the farmers had brought their hogs to feast on the fresh kill. As the afternoon went by, piles of debris were readied, forming tall pyres to be set afire after dark, and these were augmented with smudge-pots filled with sulfur and torches made from tarry pine knots.

The sun set and the sky went black. At last Audubon heard a cry. “Here they come!” And with a roar of wings that was deafening, a torrent of pigeons poured into the forest, searching for places to alight. Soon what remained of the trees filled with birds that seemed to land on top of one another, their dark forms congealing into throbbing masses that rocked precariously above the earth until the limbs beneath them splintered and
gave way and came crashing down, sweeping away everything below and carpeting the forest floor with a tangle of fallen and crushed birds. The fires and torches were lit. An evil light filled the woods. The air was acrid and thick with smoke and pigeons flying in all directions, passing and repassing through their own shadows. People flayed at the birds with poles, knocking down hundreds. As men began firing into the flock, Audubon found the chaos so overwhelming that he could not even hear the reports of their guns.

The mayhem lasted through the night. Pigeons continued to arrive at the roost, though Audubon noticed that fewer came after midnight. In the gray light of morning, wolves howled along the edge of the forest as mounds of dead pigeons were shoveled into the wagons and hogs rooted through the corpses, the surviving birds flying off to another part of the world. Audubon, appalled yet transfixed by this scene, reminded himself that passenger pigeon populations could quadruple in a single breeding season.

In fact, Audubon thought it inconceivable that hunting—even the kind of slaughter he'd witnessed at the Green River—could diminish passenger pigeon numbers. Audubon believed that only the continued clearing of the North American forest threatened this remarkable bird, which seemed to him a mobile but permanent part of the American landscape.
Passenger pigeons in flight, high and untouchable, flowed through the sky like a single organic body. Audubon recognized that, despite their swarming numbers, passenger pigeons actually flew in a replicating formation—that is, each bird followed the one in front of it exactly. Anyone who has seen pelicans gliding in an undulating line along a beachfront has seen this graceful behavior, but in a flock consisting of hundreds of millions of pigeons rocketing through the air, the effect could be spectacular. When a hawk approached a passing flock of pigeons, Audubon said, the birds rushed together—like the current in a river being forced into a narrow gorge. The noise of their wings as the birds merged in the air was incredible. Folding into a column that appeared to be a “single mass,” the flock veered through a series of wild maneuvers, diving toward the earth before leveling at the last instant and thundering along close to the ground, then rising in a vertical ascent almost out of sight, then twisting, falling, and diving again. The pigeons careening through the air at the point of attack thus initiated an elaborate pattern that was sustained as all the birds following behind repeated the identical twists and turns when they arrived
at the same point—even long after the hawk had departed. This left a living sculpture arcing across the sky. As thousands and then millions of pigeons retraced the pattern, a sinuous line of birds writhed overhead like “the coils of a gigantic serpent.”

Audubon was always on the lookout for new species—or, as he called them, “non-descripts.” It was a confusing business. As the country was explored and settled, people encountered birds not yet known to Western science, although this in itself was not always easy to ascertain. Ornithologists on both sides of the Atlantic had often mistaken immature specimens or birds with plumage variations for distinct species. Scientific names competed with one another, as did a myriad of common names by which birds were known in different locales. Audubon's enthusiasm for discovering new birds was another indication that he was at this stage in his life interested in more than just making handsome pictures. Although his training in natural science was virtually nonexistent, Audubon was generally familiar with published bird descriptions and, much more important to him, was by now on the most intimate terms with American birds in the wild.
On a chilly winter day in 1814, while returning up the Mississippi River from a business trip, Audubon made an incredible discovery.

As Audubon huddled amid the cargo on deck to stay out of a cold wind, he was entranced by flocks of ducks and swans passing high over the river. The boat's skipper, a Canadian, noticed Audubon's attention to the birds and offered to watch the skies with him. Presently, a large bird sailed toward them, passed directly over, and continued on. The Canadian was excited. It was, he said, the Great Eagle, a rare species sometimes seen diving for fish on northern lakes—in the manner of an osprey, or “fish hawk” as they were then commonly known. The bird also occasionally followed hunting parties through the woods to feed on the remains of freshly butchered animals. The Canadian told Audubon that this eagle nested on rocky cliffsides. Electrified, Audubon listened closely to the captain while he followed the bird with his eyes until it shrank to a dark spot in the distance and vanished. Audubon was quite sure it was unlike any eagle he'd ever seen before and different from any that had been formally described. He did not see the bird again for several years.

It happened again near the Green River, where Audubon had gone with friends to catch crayfish and quite unexpectedly stumbled upon a mated pair of the mysterious eagle. The birds were tending a nest on a precipice near the river's confluence with the Ohio. Audubon first noticed a splotch of droppings at the base of the cliff and assumed he was standing below an owl nest. But one of his companions more familiar with the area assured him that this was the home of a pair of “brown eagles.” The birds were away from the nest. Audubon and his friends hunkered down to await their return.

Eagles, which undergo plumage changes as they mature and which are often seen only at a distance, can be difficult to identify. Audubon rarely had the use of binoculars or a telescope, and such equipment did not figure significantly in his fieldwork. It took long experience and good eyes to recognize the differences between eagles and several other large raptor species. Golden eagles and bald eagles were well-known as the prevalent eagle species in America. The term
brown eagle
was the common name for an immature bald eagle that did not yet possess its signature white head and tail. Alexander Wilson had complicated things by describing a species he called the “sea eagle,” though he indicated a strong suspicion that it was in fact a juvenile bald eagle. This was based, in part, on Wilson's observation of a captive brown eagle that in its fourth year acquired a white head and tail.

But Audubon's friend at the Green River said this particular pair of birds, which was feeding a brood of chicks in their nest, didn't seem to conform to any description of an eagle. For one thing, they appeared to be much larger than any known eagle. He said he had also observed them diving for fish on the river—something he had never seen the bald eagle do. Bald eagles, as everyone knew, only got fish by stealing them from fish hawks. Audubon assured his friend that bald eagles did not nest on cliffs either. (Neither of these assertions was true, as Audubon himself would eventually learn.) Barely able to control his excitement, Audubon looked to the heavens. Two hours crawled by. Suddenly a noise issued from the nest—the whining of the chicks at the approach of a parent. Audubon, heart thumping, craned around in search of the great bird he was already daring to hope was the same one he'd seen on the Mississippi. At last he saw it, a huge eagle gliding toward the nest with a large fish gripped in its talons. As it delivered the fish to its young, the bird hung precariously
from the edge of the rock almost in the manner of a swallow, with its tail spread and wings cupped against the cliff. Audubon was ecstatic. Presently, the second bird returned. It was even larger than the first—a sure indication, Audubon believed, that it was the female. She, too, carried a fish. But as she came near the nest, the eagle spotted Audubon and his companions and, with a shriek, dropped the fish and flew away with her alarmed mate. Audubon ran to retrieve the fish. It was a five-pound perch. Audubon made up his mind to come back the next day and shoot the eagles and their whole brood. But it was raining the following morning, and when he went back the day after that, the birds and their young were gone.

Two years went by. Audubon searched for the eagle in vain.
Then, while walking from Henderson one day to visit Dr. Rankin at Meadow Brook, Audubon saw a large bird flush from a hog pen. The bird landed in a tree overhanging the road ahead. Audubon, his hands shaking, charged his gun and walked slowly forward. The eagle casually studied him, even as Audubon raised his gun and sighted down its barrels. Audubon fired and the eagle fell dead on the road. Thrilled, Audubon grabbed the bird and ran back to show it to Rankin—who confirmed that he had never seen an eagle like it.

Audubon saw this eagle only a handful of times afterward—twice near Louisville a few months later, where he tried unsuccessfully to shoot another specimen, and again at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the fall of 1821, where he watched transfixed as a pair flew majestically past his boat, heading downstream. He never saw the eagle again in the wild, though he did eventually examine a similar bird in a museum in Philadelphia. Audubon's drawing of the bird he shot at Henderson was a heroic profile showing the eagle perched on a promontory overlooking a sailboat serenely cruising by far below. Claiming his right as the first formal describer of the bird, Audubon thought the species deserved a grand name. Calling it the “noblest bird of its genus that has yet been discovered in the United States,” Audubon proposed a name wreathed in glory—a name he said was synonymous with courage and the freedom that had blossomed in the New World. Audubon named it the Bird of Washington.

By the time Audubon published his description of the Bird of Washington, more than fifteen years after he had first seen the bird, it had morphed into an epic creature. Its flight, said Audubon, was quite different from the bald eagle's, and in fact it was so unlike a juvenile bald eagle
that Audubon dismissed the possibility out of hand—though he took satisfaction in pointing out Wilson's misidentification of that bird as a so-called sea eagle. Instead, Audubon compared the Bird of Washington to the white-tailed or “cinerous” eagle, which he called the “true sea eagle.” Apparently he was referring to one of the two Eurasian eagles that occasionally find their way into parts of North America. As if determined to complicate matters further, Audubon suggested that the white-tailed eagle in its juvenile phase was sometimes mistaken for an osprey. Even more perplexingly, he also gave “sea eagle” as an alternative name for the Bird of Washington.

Against this muddled backdrop of intermingled taxonomy, Audubon offered many characteristic differences in plumage, bill structure, and so forth between the Bird of Washington and the white-tailed eagle. One claim above all seemed to set the Bird of Washington apart from other eagles, however. Audubon gave a weight for the Bird of Washington of over fourteen pounds, a length of forty-three inches, and a wingspan of ten feet, two inches.
That's about 50 percent larger than the biggest bald eagle.
Not even the California condor, the largest North American raptor at well over twenty pounds, has that great a wingspan. Audubon thought it obvious that no other New World bird approached the magnificence of the Bird of Washington.
“All circumstances duly considered, the Bird of Washington stands forth as the champion of America . . . henceforth not to be confounded with any of its rivals or relatives,” Audubon wrote. “If ornithologists are proud of describing new species, I may be allowed to express some degree of pleasure in giving to the world the knowledge of so majestic a bird.”

Audubon appears to have been wrong. There are only two American eagles, the golden eagle and the bald eagle.
On closer examination—much of it by Audubon's critics—the Bird of Washington was widely dismissed as merely a juvenile bald eagle and not the undiscovered lord of the skies. However, this conclusion is also questionable, as nobody could ever explain the extraordinary size of Audubon's specimen. A printing error in Audubon's published account is doubtful—it's a stretch to think there would have been matching mistakes in the weight and the wingspan, the latter being given twice. The same would hold for Audubon's measurements in the field. It is all but inconceivable that Audubon would have recorded a wingspan of over ten feet if it were really closer to the six or seven feet typical of eagles. Nor does it seem plausible that he
could have mismeasured
both
the wingspan and weight—or that in doing so he would have been off by exactly the same factor.