Cock wild pigeon.
Wood engraving made in 1829 after a study from life, by Jonathan Fisher.
In: Jonathan Fisher’s Scripture Animals: A Natural History of the Living Creatures Named in the Bible: Written Especially for Youth (Portland, Me., 1834).
From the fables of Aesop to those of La Fontaine (which Audubon read and carried with him), animals figure in moral instruction in entertaining ways. Bowdoin College parent the Reverend Jonathan Fisher, of Blue Hill, Maine, offered spiritual instruction to young readers using creatures mentioned in the Bible to communicate lessons of God’s will. In 1834, he published Scripture Animals, which includes his own wood engravings as illustrations. Fisher based his engraving of the male passenger pigeon on a drawing he had made from life. Fisher and his sons, including Josiah (Bowdoin 1828), hunted the pigeons in the 1820s when those birds still migrated through Maine in late August and early September. In the text accompanying this print, Fisher celebrates the wild pigeons as models of conjugal fidelity, mated for life.