The mystery of Washington's Eagle

hi I'm the history gunner I have a degree in history and I love history and if you love history do this is the channel for you when you think about exciting history the history of Ornithology the study of birds doesn't necessarily come first to mind but passion is a wonderful thing and brings an excitement of its own as poet Maya Angelou once said a bird does not sing because it has an answer it sings because it has a song John J Audubon had such a song this is a story of a man's passion of one of the world's most valuable books and of a magnificent lost bird and it is a story that deserves to be remembered our bond story started as all great stories do with being captured by pirates I'm actually not joking John J Audubon's father was a sea captain and a privateer and at one point he was actually captured by pirates and it's not really relevant to the story but I just couldn't leave that part out John J Audubon was born in Haiti and he moved as a child with his family to France eventually he emigrated to that in states where he tried to make a business on some land that his father had bought here he worked as handed a number of businesses with varying success but his true love was the combination of art and nature and while other pursuits of a need to feed his family kept him from pursuing his dream as much as he wished at the age of 35 he decided to undertake an extraordinary project to document by painting every species of bird in America urban traveled the American West and the first half of the 19th century hunting birds and paying other hunters to bring him specimens it was a time when the backwoods of America were not just dangerous and wild but when the birds were so plentiful that a single flock of the now extinct passenger pigeon could take three days to pass overhead and might have included tens of billions of birds it's a time when the forswear endless and settlers especially European ones were few and far between Autobahn was trained in both art and taxidermy he developed innovative methods of using wire and strain come out taxidermy birds in natural poses and he would mount his specimens on a grid so that he could accurately represent their proportions he eschewed oil painting which was the most common type of painting in the day and instead preferred a mix of watercolours charcoals and pastels he engaged talented landscape artists who would paint the landscapes and the plants that are in many of his pictures and unlike most works of Natural Science in their time he posed the birds in natural poses against natural settings engaging in natural activities it was not an easy task and it didn't pay particularly well at times to make ends meet he had to take artistic commissions or take work teaching art but his 12 year opus work is nothing short of astounding first published in 1827 the birds of America identified 25 new species and twelve new subspecies of birds and included prints of at least six species of birds that are now extinct it is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever produced the four volume work was reproduced using both copper plated etching and engraving and each of the prints was then hand colored using watercolors Audubon paid for this expensive printing process by selling subscriptions subscribers would pay as they go for prints that were produced each month among his subscribers were King Charles the tenth of France Adelaide the Queen consort of England and famous American politicians Henry Clay and Daniel Webster it's estimated that there were only about 200 original copies of this extraordinary work and of those only around 120 are known to still exist today and in that work there is an enduring mystery Falco washing Tony or Washington's Eagle our mom named the species which he presumed to be newly discovered after George Washington it was an exceptional bird a uniformly red brown sea eagle over three and a half feet tall with a ten-foot wingspan that was more than 25% larger than the other two species of known American Eagles the bald eagle and the golden eagle Audubon noted sighting the bird just five times and his extensive travels and claimed to have shot one for taxidermy which he used to document it's astounding dimensions and many characteristics that distinguished it from other known eagle species but the problem is that modern ornithologists don't agree that the bird exists or in fact ever existed there were other ornithologist who claimed to have had sightings and there were a few specimens that people claimed were collected but none of those specimens can be found today they've all been lost sold into private collections without record destroyed by fire in museum records but the sample cannot be found and there has not been one confirmed sighting in the modern era ornithologist generally considered to be a misidentification either of an exceptionally large golden eagle or of a juvenile bald eagle who at different times in the development have brown rather than white heads but neither of these explanations fit first of all the bird was known to catch fish making it clearly a sea eagle as opposed to the golden eagle which is a true eagle and it lacked the distinctive extended leg feathers that distinguish golden eagles it was described as having uniformly brown feathers and bald eagles even in those stages where their heads are not white would have modeled colors with some white feathers mixed in in any head distinguishing factors in terms of the color of its beak and the scaling of its legs as well as in behaviors like nesting on the ground on cliffs eyes instead of up in trees that simply do not fit the other two Eagle species in Audubon was not the only one who claimed to have seen them other ornithologists claimed to at least have sightings of the bird and of course this is John J Audubon who would have witnessed hundreds of eagles have been quite familiar with the other two species but if it's a real species how did it just disappear well maybe it didn't it was always known to be an extremely rare species and its habitat is not heavily populated as we've seen it can be confused for Golden Eagles and bald eagles and its sheer size means that when someone did see one that sighting might have been written off as an exaggeration in the end the man who had trouble feeding his family did okay for himself the birds of America earned him enough money that he could buy a 20 acre estate in New York he continued his scientific endeavors he documented 36 species of birds on a trip to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1833 in 1848 he started two ensigns of Alzheimer's disease and he passed away in 1851 his contribution to our understanding of bird Anatomy and bird behavior was far-reaching his book was quoted three times in Charles Darwin's the Origin of Species he won numerous awards in honors including election to the prestigious Royal Society which would have been the highest honor for a scientist of his day and there are several parks preserves museums galleries schools and even a thirteen thousand two hundred twenty six foot tall mountain peak in Colorado named after John J Audubon his seminal work the birds of America has become one of the most valued books in the world of the hundred and twenty copies known to exist only about 13 or in private hands one sold at auction in London in 2010 for eleven and a half million dollars according to economist magazine five of the top ten highest prices ever paid for a book at auction were copies of the birds of America but don't fret many of the other copies that are institutionally owned are in universities in the United States and Europe where they are frequently put on display and the University of Michigan has put all 425 plates onto their website where you can view them today today autobahns name is nearly synonymous with bird conservation in 1895 a fan of his used his name when he created a society dedicated to bird conservation and today the National Audubon Society which is dedicated to the conservation of birds and their tatts has more than 500 local chapters ornithologists have still not agreed to the existence of Falco washing Tony but there have been a few immature sightings in recent years and there are some scientists that are still making the byrds case I for one truly want to believe I look out my window every day hoping to see Washington's Eagle sitting in a tree I hope that because it's such a good story it is a symbol of a man and his passion of a lost frontier of a time in history when the flocks of birds were so big that they blocked out the Sun and I want to believe that all good stories are true I'm history guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my serious five minutes of history short snippets a forgotten history five to ten minutes long if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on your left give any questions or comments would like to make a suggestion for another topic for the history guys feel free to write that in the comment section and I will be happy to respond if you'd like five minutes for forgotten history all you need to do is put subscribe [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 141,565

Rating: 4.9718843 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history guy, us history, audubon, ornithology, mystery, washington's eagle, history guy

Id: koaaWJo9X0g

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2017