Audubon at McClung Museum

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Scarlet Tanagers by John James Audubon

In 1826, rejected by publishers in this country, John James Audubon traveled to Great Britain hoping to find a more hospitable reception. He was 41 years old and virtually “penniless.” 

Hungry for natural history from the unknown wilderness of America, England welcomed the woodsman artist with open arms. 

Audubon soon met Robert Havell Jr. who agreed to print his “The Birds of America” in stages—five prints at a time—sold through subscriptions. 

Today it’s known as the Double Elephant Portfolio, because it was printed on the largest paper available measuring 28 by 39 inches, with each bird portrayed life-size. Ultimately the work contained 435 hand-colored prints engraved with aquatinting by Havell and hand-colored by his staff of colorists. It took eleven years to complete.

Towards the end of this massive undertaking, Audubon saw the need for a smaller, more affordable octavo edition. The term octavo refers to a printing process where 16 pages were printed on one large sheet of paper then folded three times and trimmed to ultimately yield eight leaves front and back. 

In Audubon’s day, typical octavo pages measured five by nine inches. But the enterprising artist, forever thinking big, wanted his to be 6.5 by 10.5 inches and perhaps because he had a flair for salesmanship, he called it the “Royal Octavo Edition.” He also chose the progressive new technique of hand-colored lithographic prints, a process that used a stone inside of a metal plate, because it was more durable and more pressings could be made.

For the rest of my sidebar piece that accompanies Louise Zepp's article about Audubon's Royal Octavo exhibit at McClung Museum on the UT campus read the July/August 2011 issue of The Tennessee Conservationist.


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seed swaps

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Be sure to check out the article about the long tradition of Seed Swaps in the new issue of The Tennessee Conservationist.

Ijams educator and resident green thumb Peg Beute penned the piece and I provided the photographs.

Here is some of what Peg wrote,

"Ijams Nature Center held its first Seed Swap in 1995. On a Saturday in April we invited members, friends and visitors to bring their favorite seeds, cuttings or bulbs to share with others. We discovered it was a chance to share not only plants, but also gardening lore, growing experiences and family stories.

The history of seed sharing is told not only in diaries and journals, but also in letters and oral histories from many of our ancestors. A seed swap was one of the ways our forbearers found out about different successful varieties of plants. We continue that tradition at Ijams, a 275-acre environmental education center minutes from downtown Knoxville, where our Seed Swap has become a rich and rewarding experience over the past 15 years. It is a kind of family reunion where organized chaos reigns. New and old gardeners bring in seeds, cuttings, bulbs and sprouts—anything they have that they want to share."

The rest of the article is in the magazine.

- Special thanks to the statewide magazine's editor Louise Zepp.

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where's the orange?

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"Our word for the color orange comes from the translated 'naranja,' the Spanish word for the citrus fruit introduced to the English-speaking world through the court of Henry VIII in 1512. Oranges are native to Southeast Asia and were once known as 'Chinese apples.' Before the fruit was introduced to Britain, the color was known in Old English as 'geoluhread,' which means yellow-red, a fitting descriptor because orange is the combination of those two primary colors.

Orange flowers get their color from carotene, the same biological pigment found in carrots. And although flowering plants are noted for their wide range of colors, there are pitifully few orange flowers. As it turns out, nature is rather parsimonious with the color.

The famous Peterson's Field Guide of Wildflowers first published in 1968, divides its contents by color. The book contains 1,293 wildflowers. There are 104 pages of yellow flowers, 100 pages of red ones, 96 of white and 50 of violet to blue. But, hold onto your hat, there’s only four pages of orange. Yes, four! There are more pages of green and brown flowers than orange. If you want to become an expert at flower identification, start with orange, there’s not that many to learn.

Why nature shuns the color is a mystery..."

For the rest of the article I penned about the scarcity of orange flowers check out the May/June 2010 issue of the Tennessee Conservationist now available.


Special thanks to editor Louise Zepp and to Kris Light for providing me with the cover photograph.







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Audubon in Tennessee

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"There is a gray and black historical marker in Tom Lee Park in Memphis. According to the Tennessee Historical Commission it reads, “John James Audubon. On Friday, Dec. 1, 1820, this naturalist and artist landed nearby, on his way by flatboat from Cincinnati to New Orleans. He kept a diary and sketched animals and birds seen en route. Near here, he saw gulls, cormorants, “white-headed eagles,” grackles, purple finches, teal, parakeets, sandhill cranes, and numerous types of geese. These sketches helped form the basis for parts of his monumental book of engravings, Birds of America, published 1826-38.”

If only the rest of Audubon’s time in the Volunteer State could be so measured, so clear and concise, so documented. Truth is, America’s foremost painter of birds was prolific, a creative maelstrom, whose energies seemed as boundless as the aboriginal America he loved. The buckskin-clad, longhaired backwoodsman made thousands of sketches, drawings and paintings (he preferred watercolor) of the flora and fauna he found in his adopted homeland. He also wrote page after page in his journals about his travels, describing what he saw and where he saw it. But, his actual peregrinations in Tennessee are something of a mystery.

“Very little is known about Audubon’s time in Tennessee,” reports Alan Gehret, Museum Curator of the John James Audubon State Park and Museum in Henderson, Kentucky. He notes that there are gaps in the record because the original journals were burned by Audubon’s granddaughter, Maria Audubon. Gehret believes she may have simply edited down the sprawling journals for clarity when she prepared them for publishing in 1897, excising the less important, sprawling details, making sure that she included only the “energy and highlights so it would not be a boring ever day travelogue.” He notes that today, of course, we would be interested in those details. Or, he speculates, the editing may have been a matter of family privacy. Says Gehret, “There may have been some things she might not want the world to know about grandpa.” The burned journals, along with the fact that Audubon was never shy about reporting his exploits have led to some speculation, but scholars will probably never know the entire story.

The missing detail of the artist’s travels may have included a lot of what he did in the Volunteer State. “She conveniently threw them (the journals) into the fire and burned them.” To the Audubon scholar who has dedicated more than 20 years to the study of the museum’s namesake, it is most frustrating because he was such an accomplished raconteur."

What do we really know about John James Audubon's time in Tennessee? Turns out, the answer may surprise you. Check out the rest of article I wrote in the January/February issue of "The Tennessee Conservationist."

- Special thanks to editor Louise Zepp and for Karen Sue.




















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batman

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Tennessee's own batman

"You have to see it to believe it: a natural phenomenon that’s as remarkable as it is primal, a throwback to a time when Tennessee’s opulent backwoods teemed with wildlife.

We were huddled at twilight roughly eight feet above Nickajack Lake on an observation deck built by TVA. The wooden platform surrounded by aromatic cedars is located just off I-24 in Marion County at the Maple View Public Use Area. The deck faces the 140-feet wide by 50-feet tall rectangular entrance to Nickajack Cave, a gapping portal into the dark subterranean world beneath terra firma.

It was a hot summer’s evening. Kyle Waggener, senior naturalist from Chattanooga Nature Center, led the group and just as he predicted as night settled over the lake at about 9:05 p.m., the sky began to fill with thousands and thousands of gray bats. They flowed from the cave’s entrance like dark gray smoke from a fire. Nickajack is a nursery cave used by the species to birth and raise their young. The current summertime population inside the cave is estimated to be between 60,000 and 100,000.

“This is one of the great natural spectacles of our region,” declared naturalist Waggener. And it is wondrous to see, perhaps even miraculous, because with the spectacle comes the realization that just a few short years prior to our visit, the endangered gray bat had disappeared from the site completely. But the story of their triumphant return begins several decades earlier in a much smaller cave, many miles upstream.

A student of the world, Merlin Devere Tuttle was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1941. His father, a biology teacher who loved to travel, eventually moved his family to East Tennessee. As a teenager, Merlin attended Little Creek Academy in west Knox County and soon began to explore nearby Baloney Cave with his newfound high school friends. One mammal found inside the cave in particular intrigued the budding young biologist.

“I was fascinated by the bats,” remembers Tuttle...

For the rest of the article, check out the May/June issue of The Tennessee Conservationist for the feature I penned about the Volunteer State's own batman: Dr. Merlin Tuttle.

The article also details the story of his work with the gray bat, Myotis grisescens, and the species hopeful recovery.

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invisibility

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"The Tennessee Conservationist” May/June 2008


Whip-poor-wills, on the borderland of invisibility

If you grew up in the country, you know the sound. It rips through the night like automatic rifle fire.

Sitting tucked away in the shadows, where open land gives way to forest, nothing pierces the evening stillness with such force. It’s a staccato song filled with intensity and white-hot yearning, delivered with the fervor of a jackhammer. Its energy alone seems to represent the rush of the season. It’s spring! And the need to reproduce before the sultry days of summer is overwhelming, so much so that a normally hidden bird must give away its location.

“The whip-poor-will continues its lively song for several hours after sunset, and then remains silent until the first dawn of day, when its notes echo through every vale, until the beams of the rising sun scatter the darkness,” wrote John James Audubon in 1832.

If woodland wildflowers could speak, you would expect they would cry in the night with similar urgency. Their time is short and the same necessity governs their colorful panache, but the trillium and mayapple and celandine poppy sit mute and must rely on a go-between pollinator to propagate.

It’s not that way with wildlife, but there is a caveat: the males and females must find each other. Some use song, some scent and some rely on visual display, but the night belongs to the singers: the chortling frogs, peepers and, perhaps most of all, the rapid-fire voices of the farm boy’s favorite Nightjar, the whip-poor-will.

Henry David Thoreau knew them as birds of the countryside.

“The whip-poor-will suggests how wide asunder are the woods and the town. Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill omen. Only the dwellers on the outskirts of the village hear it occasionally,” he wrote on June 11, 1851.

“But go into the woods on a warm night at this season and it is the prevailing sound. I hear now five or six at once. It is no more of ill omen therefore here than the night and the moonlight are. It is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods”...

Special Note: For the rest of the article penned by me, check out the May/June issue of “The Tennessee Conservationist.”

The subtitle comes from famed American ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent. It’s one of the best descriptions of the illusive nightjar’s lifestyle ever put to paper.

“Some birds depend on speed for safety, or on agility or strength, but the whip-poor-will relies chiefly on not being seen. Safety comes to the whip-poor-will in dim light, half shadows, and the faint, confusing obscurity of dusk, and among these, on the borderland of invisibility, the whip-poor-will lives all its days.”

Special thanks to Vickie Henderson for contributing three illustrations of whip-poor-wills and to Louise Zepp, editor of the magazine.