25. John James Audubon was not American, and entered the country under a false passport
John Audubon was born in Haiti, the son of a French naval officer and his mixed-race mistress. He was raised for the most part in France, where his interest in birds developed. In 1803, in order to prevent his son from being conscripted in Napoleon’s armies his father sent him to the United States using a forged passport. His early adventures in the United States included being stricken with malaria and falling in love, but he soon returned to his study of birds. He was one of the first to practice banding birds, in order to observe the migratory habits of some species, including their returning to the same nesting grounds.
To prepare the work of paintings he called The Birds of America in the 1820s, Audubon hired hunters and trappers to catch most of his specimens. He worked, not through sketching birds temporarily perched on a limb, but from dead specimens, he killed himself or acquired through aides. After his work became a major success in Britain, he frequently shipped skins and mounted stuffed examples of American birds and animals to acquaintances there. Virtually every painting of a bird he created was from posed dead specimens he collected, making him less of an animal conservationist, and more of a successful hunter and artist.
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