John James Audubon
John James Audubon was a French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist. His combined interests in painting and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which were engraved in Scotland and England for a large-format color-plate book titled The Birds of America, and five volumes of accompanying text entitled Ornithological Biography.
Audubon's scientific contributions were considerable but controversial. He was accused of fraud, plagiarism, and scientific misconduct during his life as well as posthumously. As of 2025, the IOC World Bird List attributes him as the primary author of 23 bird species and 13 subspecies. This tally is an overestimate because it includes at least one ambiguous species that was recently stabilized with a neotype, and one subspecies that was based on a plagiarized image and fabricated data. Another of Audubon's new subspecies was based on a stolen specimen.
Audubon has also been widely criticized for buying and selling slaves, bodysnatching, and trafficking Native American remains. As of 2025, more than two dozen regional Audubon societies across the United States have changed their names. However, the National Audubon Society remains committed to their namesake, and many towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States still bear his name.
Early life
Audubon was born in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on his father's sugarcane plantation. He was the son of Lieutenant Jean Audubon, a French naval officer from the south of Brittany, and his mistress, Jeanne Rabine, a 27-year-old chambermaid from Les Touches, Brittany. They named him Jean Rabin. Another 1887 biographer has stated that his mother was a lady from a Louisiana plantation. His mother died when he was a few months old, as she had suffered from tropical disease since arriving on the island. His father already had an unknown number of mixed-race children, some by his mixed-race housekeeper, Catherine "Sanitte" Bouffard. Following Jeanne Rabin's death, Audubon renewed his relationship with Sanitte Bouffard and had a daughter by her, named Muguet. Bouffard also took care of the infant boy Jean.The senior Audubon had served in the American Revolutionary War, during which he was captured by the Royal Navy and imprisoned. After his release, he actively supported the Patriot cause. He had long worked to save money and secure his family's future with real estate. Due to repeated uprisings of slaves in the Caribbean, he sold part of his plantation in Saint-Domingue in 1789 and purchased a 284-acre farm called Mill Grove, 20 miles from Philadelphia, to diversify his investments. Increasing tension in Saint-Domingue between the colonists and slaves, who greatly outnumbered them, convinced the senior Audubon to return to France, where he became a member of the Republican Guard. In 1788 he arranged for Jean and in 1791 for Muguet to be transported to France.
File:La Gerbetière à Couëron 2.JPG|thumb|La Gerbetière, mansion owned by Audubon's father in Couëron, where young Audubon was raised
The children were raised in Couëron, near Nantes, France, by Audubon and his French wife, Anne Moynet Audubon, whom he had married years before his time in Saint-Domingue. In 1794 they formally adopted both the children to regularize their legal status in France. They renamed the boy Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon and the girl Rose.
From his earliest days, the younger Audubon had an affinity for birds. "I felt an intimacy with them...bordering on frenzy must accompany my steps through life." His father encouraged his interest in nature:
In France during the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Audubon grew up to be a handsome and gregarious man. He played flute and violin, and learned to ride, fence, and dance. Audubon enjoyed roaming in the woods, often returning with natural curiosities, including birds' eggs and nests, of which he made crude drawings. His father planned to make a seaman of his son. At twelve, Audubon went to military school and became a cabin boy. He quickly found out that he was susceptible to seasickness and not fond of mathematics or navigation. After failing the officer's qualification test, Audubon ended his incipient naval career. He returned to exploring fields again, focusing on birds.
Immigration to the United States
In 1803, his father obtained a false passport so that Jean-Jacques could go to the United States to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. 18-year-old Jean-Jacques boarded ship, anglicizing his name to John James Audubon. Jean Audubon and Claude Rozier arranged a business partnership for their sons John James Audubon and Jean Ferdinand Rozier to pursue lead mining in Pennsylvania at Audubon's Pennsylvania property of Mill Grove. The Audubon-Rozier partnership was based on Rozier's buying half of Jean Audubon's share of a plantation in Haiti, and lending money to the partnership as secured by half interest in the lead mining.Audubon caught yellow fever upon arrival in New York City. The ship's captain placed him in a boarding house run by Quaker women who nursed Audubon to recovery and taught him English. He traveled with the family's Quaker lawyer to the Audubon family farm at Mill Grove. The homestead is located on the Perkiomen Creek a few miles from Valley Forge.
Audubon lived with the tenants in the two-story stone house, in an area that he considered a paradise. "Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment; cares I knew not, and cared naught about them." Studying his surroundings, Audubon quickly learned the ornithologist's rule, which he wrote down as, "The nature of the place—whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs—generally gives hint as to its inhabitants."
His father hoped that the lead mines on the property could be commercially developed, as lead was an essential component of bullets. This could provide his son with a profitable occupation. At Mill Grove, Audubon met the owner of the nearby Fatland Ford estate, William Bakewell, and his daughter Lucy Bakewell.
Audubon set about to study American birds, determined to illustrate his findings in a more realistic manner than most artists did then. He began drawing and painting birds, and recording their behavior. After an accidental fall into a creek, Audubon contracted a severe fever. He was nursed and recovered at Fatland Ford, with Lucy at his side.
Risking conscription in France, Audubon returned in 1805 to see his father and ask permission to marry. He also needed to discuss family business plans. While there, he met the naturalist and physician Charles-Marie D'Orbigny, who improved Audubon's taxidermy skills and taught him scientific methods of research. Although his return ship was overtaken by an English privateer, Audubon and his hidden gold coins survived the encounter.
Audubon resumed his bird studies and created his own nature museum, perhaps inspired by the great museum of natural history created by Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. Peale's bird exhibits were considered scientifically advanced. Audubon's room was brimming with birds' eggs, stuffed raccoons and opossums, fish, snakes, and other creatures. He had become proficient at specimen preparation and taxidermy.
Deeming the mining venture too risky, with his father's approval Audubon sold part of the Mill Grove farm, including the house and mine, and retaining some land for investment.
Banding experiment with eastern phoebes
In volume 2 of Ornithological Biography, Audubon told a story from his childhood, 30 years after the events reportedly took place, that has since garnered him the label of "first bird bander in America". The story has since been exposed as likely apocryphal. In the spring of 1804, according to the story, Audubon discovered a nest of the "Pewee Flycatcher", now known as the eastern phoebe, in a small grotto on the property of Mill Grove. To determine whether the other phoebes on the property were "descended from the same stock", Audubon said that he tied silver threads to the legs of five nestlings: He also said that he had "ample proof afterwards that the brood of young Pewees, raised in the cave, returned the following spring, and established themselves farther up on the creek, and among the outhouses in the neighbourhood … having caught several of these birds on the nest, had the pleasure of finding that two of them had the little ring on the leg." However, multiple independent primary sources demonstrate that Audubon was in France during the spring of 1805, not in Pennsylvania as he later claimed. Furthermore, Audubon's claim to have re-sighted 2 out of 5 of the banded phoebes as adults has not been replicated by modern studies with much larger sample sizes. These facts cast doubt on the truth of Audubon's story.Marriage and family
In 1808, Audubon moved to Kentucky, which was rapidly being settled. Six months later, he married Lucy Bakewell at her family estate, Fatland Ford, Pennsylvania, and took her the next day to Kentucky. The two shared many common interests, and began to explore the natural world around them. Though their finances were tenuous, the Audubons started a family. They had two sons, Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse Audubon, and two daughters who died while still young, Lucy at two years and Rose at nine months. Both sons eventually helped publish their father's works. John W. Audubon became a naturalist, writer, and painter in his own right.Starting out in business
Audubon and Jean Ferdinand Rozier moved their merchant business partnership west at various stages, ending ultimately in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a former French colonial settlement west of the Mississippi River and south of St. Louis. Shipping goods ahead, Audubon and Rozier started a general store in Louisville, Kentucky on the Ohio River; the city had an increasingly important slave market and was the most important port between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Soon he was drawing bird specimens again. He regularly burned his earlier efforts to force continuous improvement. He also took detailed field notes to document his drawings.Due to rising American tensions with the British, President Thomas Jefferson ordered an embargo on US trade with Britain in 1808, hurting Audubon's trading business. In 1810, Audubon moved his business further west to the less competitive Henderson, Kentucky, area. He and his small family took over an abandoned log cabin. In the fields and forests, Audubon wore typical frontier clothes and moccasins, having "a ball pouch, a buffalo horn filled with gunpowder, a butcher knife, and a tomahawk on his belt".
He frequently turned to hunting and fishing to feed his family, as business was slow. On a prospecting trip down the Ohio River with a load of goods, Audubon joined up with Shawnee and Osage hunting parties, learning their methods, drawing specimens by the bonfire, and finally parting "like brethren". Audubon had great respect for Native Americans: "Whenever I meet Indians, I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the man naked from His hand and yet free from acquired sorrow." Audubon also admired the skill of Kentucky riflemen and the "regulators", citizen lawmen who created a kind of justice on the Kentucky frontier. In his travel notes, he claims to have encountered Daniel Boone.
The Audubon family owned several slaves while he was in Henderson, until they needed money at which point they were sold. Audubon was condemned contemporaneously by abolitionists. Audubon was dismissive of abolitionists in both the US and the United Kingdom.
Audubon and Rozier mutually agreed to end their partnership at Ste. Genevieve on April 6, 1811. Audubon had decided to work at ornithology and art and wanted to return to Lucy and their son in Kentucky. Rozier agreed to pay Audubon US$3,000, with $1,000 in cash and the balance to be paid over time.
The terms of the dissolution of the partnership include those by Audubon:
Audubon was working in Missouri and out riding when the 1811 New Madrid earthquake struck on December 16, 1811, followed by a moment magnitude 7.4 aftershock on the same day. Two additional earthquakes of similar magnitude followed in January and February 1812. When Audubon reached his house, he was relieved to find no major damage, but the area was shaken by aftershocks for months. The quake is estimated to have ranked from 8.4 to 8.8 on today's moment magnitude scale of severity, stronger than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 which is estimated at 7.8. Audubon writes that while on horseback, he first believed the distant rumbling to be the sound of a tornado,
He noted that as the earthquake retreated, "the air was filled with an extremely disagreeable sulphurous odor."