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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Allison Stewart. It's time to read this month's get lit with All Of It book club pick. For May, we are reading Memory Piece by Lisa Ko. The novel follows three friends who were first drawn together in the '80s by their shared ambitions for art and technology. They want a future that's defined by freedom and activism and creativity, but as New York City changes over the decades their ambitions and their friendships also change. Author Lisa Ko will join us at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on Tuesday, May 28th.

Now, you can grab your free tickets and borrow an e-copy thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library. Give them a shout out. You can find out how. Just visit wnyc.org/get lit. We're excited to announce our musical guest for this month's event Lightning Bug.

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Band leader Audrey Kang will join us on the hills of the New York City Indie Rock Group's new album. It's titled No Paradise. You can catch her for an intimate set before she takes stage at Forest Hills later that week. Again, grab your free tickets for our May 28th event at wnyc.org/getlit. Okay. That's coming up in a week. Now, let's talk about birding.

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Even if you're not into birds, it's likely that you know the name Audubon. John James Audubon began studying and painting birds in the early 1820s. His landmark work, Birds of America is considered to be one of the 19th century's most significant books. For many people, Audubon is American birding but what's less known are the circumstances under which he came to prominence. The early half of the 19th century was a time of intense scientific exploration and ambition. Naturalists were competing in North America to identify and describe as many species as possible, but in order to come out on top Audubon needed to eclipse the reputation of his rival a man named Alexander Wilson.

He did so as my next guest writes by, "Stretching the truth beyond the breaking point, sometimes exaggerating, sometimes apparently making things up out of thin air." Joining me now is author, artist and naturalist, Kenn Kaufman. He dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to hitchhike around the country in a quest to see as many birds as possible. His new book is titled, The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in The American Wilderness. Kenn Kaufman, welcome to All Of It.

Kenn Kaufman: Well, thanks so much. I'm pleased to be here.

Kousha Navidar: It's a pleasure to have you here. In Birds of America Audubon illustrated 435 birds, but you take a look at the birds that he did not find. Why start there?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, that was the thing that really drew me into looking at this history in the first place. I've been interested or fascinated with birds my entire life and writing about them, writing books, trying to get people interested in observing birds in nature, but I became fascinated by the fact that there are a few really common birds in Eastern North America that he didn't cover in his work at all that were not described as science until later.

Kousha Navidar: How many bird species have been identified when Audubon was roaming around the US? How many species compare that to how many we've identified today?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, all the numbers are rough because classifications keep changing, but Audubon had promised the subscribers to Birds of America, he sold it on a subscription basis. He had promised them 400 different kinds of birds, and at the time there weren't that many known, so he really had to get to work to find some more. It was a process that lasted quite a few years and other people, other naturalists had worked on North American broods before that. He was going around looking for what they had missed, but he missed quite a few as well.

Kousha Navidar: It's so funny to think that in the 1800s, subscription service was still the best way that you could make a buck if you had content to share. That's pretty funny. What was so unusual or significant about some of the birds that he missed? You mentioned that they were pretty common. You might explain that he did not note the Swanson's thrush or the gray cheeked thrush. Is there a common thread with everything that he missed?

Kenn Kaufman: Not really one common thread. I mean, those two thrushes are both common migrants through here. They stop over in Central Park. They're found during spring and fall in every woodlot in Eastern North America. The big problem was that the confusion about the thrushes went back to the 1720s. An Englishman named Mark Catesby had written about the broods of the Carolinas, and he lumped all the brown thrushes into one that he called Little Thrush.

For one and a half centuries after that people were confused, because they were really five or six different kinds of brown thrushes. All of these guys, Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, they all struggled to try to fit these several kinds into one or two or three categories.

Kousha Navidar: I misspoke earlier. It's swainson's thrush. Let me just correct that right there. Listeners, if you're just listening we're talking with Kenn Kaufman the naturalist, the writer, the artist. His new book is The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness. One thing that you really focus on Kenn is how competitive the early 1800s were for the men, and they were almost exclusively white men who were trying to document the natural world. Why was it so competitive?

Kenn Kaufman: A big reason was that the system that we used for classifying birds, the person who gets credit for describing a bird is the one who does it first. It's not a matter of writing the best description or even finding it first. Just publishing first the name that you put on it has priority, and that was the immortality that they were going for. I mean, Alexander Wilson was already accepted as the great ornithologist.

Kousha Navidar: That was one of his big rivals, right? Alexander Wilson.

Kenn Kaufman: He had gotten there first and had published something called American Ornithology [laughs] from 1808 to 1813, and so in 1820 there's Audubon saying, "How do I compete with the ghost of Alexander Wilson?" He is trying to find more different kinds of birds. He's doing these huge, magnificent paintings of them. When he doesn't know about the habits of a bird, he'll just make them up.

Kousha Navidar: How much did he make up? Let's get into that, because it seems like he made some stuff up out of holt cloth, right?

Kenn Kaufman: That's right. I think there are only three or four of his birds that were just purely fiction, but there were a number of cases where he seemed all too willing to describe some slight variation as a new bird especially if he had wealthy patrons that he wanted to complement. Like he'd do another painting of a yellow warbler and call it something different. Like oh, this is Rathbone's warbler, this is Children's Warbler. Okay. Yes. It's like naming a building after someone after they pay for it.

Kousha Navidar: Just to ingratiate himself with rich people, was he naming the birds after them? How did he go about making this myth about himself?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, he was a great self-promoter. I mean, Audubon was a cross between an ornithologist and P.T. Barnum. Just so good at promoting his own work. He utterly failed to find a publisher for his work in North America, because other scientists at the time were wise to the fact that he was stretching the facts. He goes to England and there he comes in with his buck skin and so on. He is the frontiersman and everybody was all gaga over this guy, and he has these huge bird paintings. No one questioned his scientific facts, so he became a celebrity instantly in England. He got his work published and printed there, and then came back to the states and he was accepted as celebrity here as well.

Kousha Navidar: There's a story about the Bird of Washington that I thought was really interesting. Can you tell us about that one?

Kenn Kaufman: Yes. The Bird of Washington, he had just gotten started with publishing his Birds of America. The first 10 of these big color plates had been completed, but he was having trouble getting enough subscribers to keep it going. He had this bad painting of a young bald eagle, and he decided to include it as the Bird of Washington. Say it's 25% larger than a bald eagle, this magnificent creature, and he names it for George Washington. This was 50 years after the American Revolution, and the British had gotten over being pissed about it. They were fascinated with Washington and with the American wilderness, and here's this magnificent bird named for George Washington, so they just ate it up.

Kousha Navidar: What happened when he went back to the United States with this, and there is no bird like that. People just didn't question it?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, things were not really well known at that point, and lots of the top scientists suspected that it was invented, but they couldn't quite prove it. They may have been afraid that if they said, oh, this doesn't exist, then a specimen would turn up, and he was also so popular by that point that they [unintelligible 00:09:58] about it to each other.

Kousha Navidar: It's like there was more to lose by disagreeing than there was to just go along with it.

Kenn Kaufman: Exactly, exactly.

Kousha Navidar: It was at a systemic level almost, it just kind of-- Then how about migration? Did the lack of understanding about migratory patterns for birds play into that at all, that lack of understanding?

Kenn Kaufman: To some extent, yes. Some of the early naturalists had an idea that stuff was moving around, but they didn't really understand the patterns. Alexander Wilson, who plays a major part in this book as well, he would find some new bird and he would name it for the place where he found it, like the Tennessee warbler. It was just passing through Tennessee, it doesn't spend the summer there or the winter.

Kousha Navidar: Going back to Audubon, he didn't just play fast and loose with science. We've known for a while that he was also a racist and a white supremacist. We know that he enslaved, I think it was at least nine people. As you write, he never expressed the slightest regret about the practice and Audubon himself may have been of mixed race. As I was reading this, I was just trying to figure out how you square his legacy as a man who inspired generations of bird watchers with this underside of him. How do you make sense of celebrating a man like that or is that part of the point of the book?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, I didn't really see myself as celebrating him. Even the title suggests that he was missing things. I was just trying to provide a three-dimensional look at all of the characters in that time. They all had their flaws. My opinion of Audubon went downhill the more I worked on the book. As a person, as a scientist, definitely he was a troubled individual but when I tried to imitate his artistic style, I couldn't get anywhere close to it.

He was such a magnificent artist that I'd like to have a view where we don't decide that a person is either a saint or a devil, that we see them with all their flaws and all their good points and just rather than pass our own judgment, accept them for who they are without trying to hide their flaws.

Kousha Navidar: The painting seems to be a part where you do give a lot of credit to Audubon. Can you talk about it a little bit? One of the things you do in the book is to create portraits of some of the birds that Audubon never saw in his style. What was that process like for you?

Kenn Kaufman: It was a challenge. I've been painting birds for a long time, but my style was very different. I've been doing oil paintings with lots of light and shadow but Audubon had these very detailed portraits, every feather in place, up close, and in perfect light. I really struggled trying to do that. I couldn't get anywhere near his best work.

Kousha Navidar: What was it about his work that was so difficult to match? Was it something technical like the brush stroke or was it just his understanding of composition? Go into that a little bit.

Kenn Kaufman: A lot of it was the composition. He was not the first bird illustrator. He was not the first to do illustrations that were accurate but his compositions were really extraordinary. There had been so many of these bird illustrations that were just like a bird sitting there stiffly on a dead stick. This is what the bird looks like. Audubon has these things with like a hawk diving into the middle of a covey of quail and they're flying in all directions or here's seven Carolina parakeets clambering around on these open branches.

Even when it was relatively simple with just like a flower and a couple of birds, the way they were arranged was just really beautiful. As try as I might, I couldn't come up with compositions that were as pleasing as that.

Kousha Navidar: Is that a way that you feel, because you yourself are an accomplished painter and artist? Do you feel like that idea of composition of trying to imagine the bird in its natural setting is what makes painting such a good way of coming to better understand the birds that you're studying?

Kenn Kaufman: I think so. You have to look at the birds closely and take in their behavior and so on to be able to paint them. In Audubon's work, you can tell there are some birds he just painted from specimens. He hadn't seen them in life. His depictions weren't really accurate in terms of how they behave. There's a bird called the black-throated magpie jay that's only found in Mexico. He had a specimen that he thought had come from Oregon. He says, "Here's this Colombian jay." It's not accurate in terms of posture, but it's just a beautiful portrait. Just amazing. It was made into a US postage stamp once, even though the bird isn't found in the US.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. We've been talking about naming quite a bit in this conversation, and it seems like there's been a recent re-examination of John James Audubon, but also in the ways in which we name these birds. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of consensus yet around that. Can you go into it a little bit, the recent efforts to rethink what names a bird gets?

Kenn Kaufman: That's been a really interesting recent controversy. Audubon was going around naming birds after people, and eponym is a name where a species has been named after a person. Audubon was handing out eponyms like candy. We have all these birds named through characters that no one has heard of otherwise. In some cases, birds were named for people who had really sordid backgrounds. There's a bird called Scott's Oriole, named for General Winfield Scott. He had no interest in birds whatsoever, but he was in charge of the Trail of Tears episode in which vast numbers of the Cherokee people were taken from their ancestral homelands and sent off to the West.

So many of them died. He was in charge of this Native American genocide. The Scott's Oriole is common out in the American Southwest on Indian reservations. Of course, the people object to that. There are other cases like that. John Backman, he defended slavery. There are birds in the Southeast that are named for John Backman. We hadn't really thought about that in detail until recently but once you see it, you can't really look away.

Kousha Navidar: How are we going about the Birding Society at large, looking to rename these? Are we borrowing names from indigenous populations who have probably seen the birds far beforehand anyway? What future do you think is right for the way that we name birds?

Kenn Kaufman: Well, the official English names for birds are established by a group called the American Ornithological Society, and they've been doing that since the 1880s. Adopting indigenous names would be a challenge because there are so many different tribes who have had different names for these birds but we're moving in the direction of giving them more descriptive names. Scott's Oriole, it's this beautiful black and yellow bird that lives around Yuccas. We may wind up calling it the Yucca Oriole. The Backman's Sparrow in the Southeast, at one time it was called the Pinewood Sparrow, which is a perfect name.

Kousha Navidar: Dropping the eponym, like you're saying, lose the rich people that got to get the name of the birds and say where they're from. As we're looking to wrap up, I got to ask birding is such a big part of New York City culture too. Do you have a favorite New York City birding moment for yourself?

Kenn Kaufman: Oh, I have hundreds of New York birding moments. I've never lived here in the city, but I've been coming here every year for the last 40 years, doing consulting work for the National Audubon Society. I've probably spent a hundred mornings in Central Park. Every time it's just a magical experience. Here you are surrounded by the city, and here's this emerald rectangle there and there are always birds all over Central Park. Oh, I'm going to go there tomorrow morning. I just love it.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wonderful. Listeners, if you're interested in birding as well, take it from Kenn Kaufman, go out to Central Park tomorrow. If you'd like to learn more about the history of Audubon and the history of how we interact with this beautiful animal, the bird, you can check out The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in The American Wilderness. It is by Kenn Kaufman, the naturalist, the writer, the artist, and the wonderful person sitting right across from me right now. Kenn, thank you so much for joining us.

Kenn Kaufman: Well, thanks. It's been a pleasure.

 

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