Account of Passenger Pigeon.
John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, or, An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1831).
Audubon published separately the textual descriptions that reffered to his illustrations. This was done in order to circumvent copyright laws that might otherwise have applied to the double elephant folio edition. As sets of prints without text, rather than “books,” Audubon’s etchings became exempt from the requirement that copies of books printed in England be deposited in various British libraries.
Audubon gives vivid early nineteenth-century accounts of the overwhelming spectacle of flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the sky for days. He compares the din of millions of wings and voices to the raging of a storm at sea or the roaring of Niagara Falls.
The copy displayed here, formerly held in Bowdoin’s Peucinian Society library, shows a penciled note under the description of the hunt of wild pigeons. It reads “no[?] rare sport” and hints that the writer may have hunted the pigeons among the Bowdoin pines, as did Nathaniel Hawthorne and his cronies in the 1820s.