I was introduced to birding by an Australian friend who once visited me in China.
Although he had traveled the world as an avid bird-watcher for 30 years, he had never before visited China. During his week-long stay at our home, he tagged nine new species to his personal Life List, bringing his total to an astounding 991! He reached his 1,000-species milestone a week later in the Philippines, and I still to this day can recall the passion for birds I saw in his eyes as we drove through the hills of our island. I bought a pair of Celestron binoculars that very week and have been hooked on birding ever since (well, as am amateur—my own Life List has remained at 422 for months now!).
I have tried to read books on ornithology over the years, but they all tend to sap me of my passion for just watching the dumb things. I don’t really need to know the names of different neck feathers or understand the structural difference between waterfowl and chickadee skeletons. And I certainly don’t need to memorize human onomatopoeia for the care-free male American Goldfinch in early Spring: “too-wee-too-wee chick-a-chick-a-argh!”
I want something more personable, more entertaining. I have long had on my shelves the 600-page biography On the Road with John James Audubon by Mary Durant and Michael Hardwood. I have often thought to take it off the dusty shelves to read more about the life of early America’s greatest naturalist, but its size has dissuaded me.
Thankfully, Frenchmen Fabien Grolleau and Jeremie Royer have come to my rescue with this intensely creative and colorful graphic biography of Audubon. I feel a bit bad, though. Audubon spent nearly 50 years discovering, hunting, studying and painting his birds. These artists probably spent multiple years writing, sketching, drafting and coloring this book. And here I am, devouring its pages in a single afternoon. It’s not right, I tell you! It’s like my wife, who slaves away for hours making up a delicious Chinese meal, which I and the guests then consume in fifteen minutes or less. It doesn’t feel right, but I find some solace in knowing that my pleasure in enjoyment of these things at least counts for something!
The authors of this graphic novel admit to taking some creative license in their depiction of Audubon’s life, yet their process was as creative as Audubon’s itself. They took the skeleton and meat of the tale directly from Audubon’s own journals, allowing for perhaps 90% accuracy in their retelling. Upon this structure, however, they added their own touches, ruffling the feathers and tweaking the poses of the characters, much as Audubon himself did with his bird carcasses and wire.
Audubon recreated life from those smelly piles of meat, animating the dead in poses of action, and in the end, it brought him worldwide fame. Anyone willing to sneer at such artistic ability in either the naturalist-painter or the graphic-artists would not enjoy this amazing book. Instead, they should go back to the stilted scientific textbooks of their antiseptic classrooms and enjoy the hum of their air-conditioning while trying to read the flamingo language.
Not for me. This book inspires me to get back outside with my binoculars and camera and to catch sight of all the amazing birds that surround us here along the upper Mississippi.
Ah! There’s the Oriole couple outside our kitchen window enjoying the orange we sliced for them this morning! I won’t tell you what they just said to each other. I can’t. I don’t speak Oriole, and neither has any human ever. But I can watch them, as John James Audubon did a few centuries ago. And maybe, if I’m lucky, I can try my hand at drawing them too.
©2021 E.T.
Check out my own bird artwork at my hobby site, Hobbies With Elliot: