Audubon's Migratory Birds of East Tennessee
In recognition of International Migratory Bird Day, the Frank H. McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has created an exhibit of plates from John James Audubon's Birds of America, Royal Octavo Edition, that depict birds that migrate through or to East Tennessee. The selection includes species that breed in Canada and the United States during the summer and spend the winter in Mexico, Central America, South America or the Caribbean islands (neotropical migratory birds), and species that migrate to East Tennessee during the fall and winter months and return to their breeding grounds to the north in the spring.
Between 1827 and 1838, John James Audubon (1785-1851) published his famous elephant folio size Birds of America which contained 435 plates of birds engraved life-size in aquatint and hand colored by Robert Havell. By 1839, lithography had essentiallyreplaced engraving andAudubon sawthis as an opportunity to produce a smaller version of his Birds ofAmerica.The result was the publication of the Royal Octavo Edition in which theHavell engravings and Audubon's originalwatercolorswere reduced by the method of camera lucida, a device using a prism that permitted a copyist toessentially trace the original in reduced size on drawing paper.The smaller lithographs were printed and hand colored by J.T. Bowen in Philadelphia and were issued in a hundred parts of five plates each between 1839-1844. The McClung Museum has the complete set of 500 Royal Octavo plates thanks to Ardath and Joel E. Rynning, Peter DeSorcy, and W. Graham Arader III.
The exhibit includes plates of 181 species depicted by Audubon that are considered part of East Tennessee's migratory bird fauna. It is curated by Gerald R. Dinkins and sponsored by the Ardath and Joel E. Rynning Operations Endowment.