Migratory pigeon.
In: Thomas Campbell Eyton’s A History of the Rare British Birds, (London, 1836).
British collectors and ornithologists took great interest in the North American passenger pigeon. Many specimens were brought to England from the 1820s onward, including the live birds that Audubon carried with him in 1830 and 1834. Lord Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, successfully raised dozens of the species in his menagerie at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. The fate of this flock after his death remains unknown.
This woodcut, although probably modeled from a dead bird, displays the tense and wary posture also captured in some of the rare photographs made of captive pigeons from Charles Otis Whitman’s flock in Chicago in the 1890s (described elsewhere in this exhibition).