Audubon's yellow-billed cuckoo

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my favorite Audubon's:

Yellow-billed cuckoo

"They resort to the deepest shades of the forests, and intimate their presence by the frequent repetition of their dull and unmusical notes, which are not unlike those of the young bull-frog. These notes may be represented by the word cow, cow, repeated eight or ten times with increasing rapidity. In fact, from the resemblance of its notes to that word, this Cuckoo is named Cow-bird in nearly every part of the Union. The Dutch farmers of Pennsylvania know it better by the name Rain Crow.”

From Ornithological Biography by naturalist/artist John James Audubon. (Today, the cowbird is an entirely different species but Aububon the naturalist, knew it was a cuckoo.)

On January 20, a complete first edition, four volume Audubon's The Birds of America including his five-volume Ornithological Biography will be auctioned in New York at Christie's. There are only 120 known copies of this huge work. As big as a coffee table, weighing over 200 pounds, it contains 435 hand-colored engravings each measuring 28X30 inches. Massive.

I'll be speaking at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge on Thursday at 1 p.m. about the "Making of Audubon's Birds of America," a most remarkable feat. 

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