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He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one's the mockingbird? Which one's the world?
Audubon was famous for animating his bird subjects--the terrified bobwhite quail scattering before the talons of a red-shouldered hawk look like panic- stricken pogrom victims and make you forget that, before being given such dramatic life, they were shot and posed by Audubon himself, who also had killed the killer hawk. Audubon killed in order to capture. A Bewick's wren, sitting innocently on the branch of an elm, was, according to Audubon, shot "standing ... in the position in which you now see it."
Death is everywhere in Audubon's work, but there are different kinds of death. His painting of a pair of Eskimo curlews has a strangely prophetic quality. In Audubon's painting, the female bird is dead--not shot or visibly maimed but simply dead--the only time Audubon painted a dead bird whose cause of death was not apparent. The dead bird lies stretched on the ground, her pale underparts exposed. The male bird looks sideways at its dead mate, with a kind of avian astonishment. There were huge flocks of Eskimo curlews in the 1870s, but, as the passenger pigeon diminished, it was turned to as a market bird, and, 20 years later, the bird was essentially gone. The last official sighting was in the 1960s; today, it is presumed extinct.
