Fish and Fowl

John James Audubon, American Patriot and Hero

One spring day a few years ago I stepped out into my back yard and saw some large whitish thing, roughly football size, lying on the grass.  It was a large fish.  It appeared to me to have been gutted and beheaded, halfway on a journey to becoming two generous filets.  I was puzzled.  Just then I became aware of a large shadow moving across the grass, along with a kind of hooshing noise above me.  A bald eagle alighted on a dead branch of a larch tree some forty yards away, looking down menacingly at me or the fish or both.  I rather divined what was happening.  In the first place I was laying eyes on the eagle reported to have taken up residence down by the lake.  More accurately, that eagle was laying eyes on me.  That was plenty exciting in and of itself.   Secondly, the eagle had to be responsible, somehow, for the fish on my lawn.  This likely supposition gained greater strength yet when, after I had absented myself for ten minutes to attend to a chore, I returned to the yard to find neither fish nor fowl.

            This was not an experience soon if ever to be forgotten, but it was brought back to me in a delightful way by some reading I was doing over the weekend.  Alice Ford, the biographer of Audubon, put together a marvelous volume entitled Audubon by Himself, a kind of bricolage autobiography cobbled together from a variety of the ornithologist’s large and disparate body of writing.

Audubon describes a “stake out” below a cliff side above the Green River “near its junction with the Ohio”.  He and a birding companion lay in wait for impatient hours in hopes of spotting the adult eagles returning to the nest they had noticed there, in which there appeared to be at least two babes left on their own.  At last the male parent arrived, bearing a fish for his young.   He was soon followed by his mate—his peer in piscatorial prowess, but his superior in size and sharpness of eye.  A keen human-spotter, she caught sight of the imperfectly concealed birdwatchers below.  “She dropped her prey with a loud shriek to the male, and together they hovered over our heads and kept up a growling cry to intimidate and foil our suspected designs...We picked up the fish that the mother had let fall, a White Perch of about five and a half pounds, its head broken in, and its back torn…”

            This anecdote, which in a flash illuminated my own mysterious experience nearly two hundred years later, leads Audubon to some surprising remarks regarding the bald eagle.  The slow but apparently decisive recovery of our national mascot, which until recently seemed doomed to extinction in the ecological maelstrom of contemporary America, has me and most other armchair naturalists filled with pious joy.  It is rather sobering to hear the following from Audubon:  “I grieve that [the eagle] should have been selected as the emblem of my country, and agree with Franklin that it is a ‘bird of bad moral character’…. not a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, all officers of the Continental Army, who drove out the British ‘King Birds’ from our country, although these are perfectly suited to represent those French knights called Chevaliers d’Industrie.”

            This literary flight may require some explication.   For Audubon, born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the recourse to zoological political allegory`, such as that of Gulliver’s sojourn among the Houyhnhnms, was perhaps nearly instinctual. If Bernard Mandeville could write a major work of political theory called Fable of the Bees, Audubon could find his own fables among the birds.  For him, It was always more than just zoology.  As a lad, he had been encouraged to study the birds by his enthusiastically ornithological father.  “He excited me, to make me study them and to raise my mind toward their great Creator.”  And of course he had more than a patina of classical learning.  Most people who have thought about it at all probably think, as I once did, that Cincinnati, OH, must have been named after the Roman farmer-general, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who under importunity set aside his plowshare to take up the sword, only to return to the land the moment he had secured victory for his compatriots.  Of course the city was so named, but only at one remove.  Why the plural form?   I learned the answer to that question a few years ago when I gave an after-dinner talk to theNew Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  The members of this Society, of which there are autonomous chapters in all the colonial states, must demonstrate a direct line of ancestry to an American officer of the Revolution. The Cincinnati were veterans of the officer corps of the Continental Army, a group very numerous among the Virginians and Carolinians who were the principal pioneers in the Ohio Valley.  They named the largest city on the river after—themselves.   Some of them were redeeming land grants promised to them for their heroic war service.  These “brave and honest” men were nothing like rapacious eagles in their deportment.  Audubon, though a quintessential American, spoke the heavily accented English of a native Francophone, and he occasionally indulges his French erudition.  The phrase chevalier d’industrie, which has now entirely fallen out of usage, sounds pretty good—unless you grasp the specialized sense of Latin industria from which it derived.  Audubon refers to the “knights” of—well, the knights of monkey business, funny business, shady business, flim-flam, sharp practice, strong-arm stuff.  Audubon thought the bald eagle, a raptor and a bully, had the morals of a magpie or a blue jay!  Eagles, he suggests, are the mafia of the skies.  And he knew a fair amount about birds.