COOL IMAGES

Birds. How exasperating they are! Even when I lift my camera to shoot them through the window, they scatter. Light, vulnerable and deft, they hide in the branches until the frightening woman with the black box vanishes. They must think my camera shoots bullets instead of photographs.

I told you about my single attempt to photograph birds in the meadow in winter. None appeared though I sat for an hour and a half and froze my tush, never to embark out again this season.

Not so Mr. Audubon. From the time he was a baby he felt an intimacy with birds bordering on frenzy. He spent most of his life chronicling them, often in harrowing conditions. (See field notes from his journals, below.)

The portrait, above (now where Sasha and Malia can see it daily on the west wall of the of Audubon by John Syme shows him as he must have looked in the years 1820-1824 when he explored Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the start of his attempt to paint all the birds of North America. One of the treasured books I inherited from my parents is Audubon's Birds of America, the greatest picture book of all time. It has 435 watercolor plates of birds painted by John, well my edition has photographs of the plates. In all, the field work and paintings took 14 years to complete for the book. Yes, the gun there means he shot birds in order to draw them. At the time of the painting of this portrait in Edinburgh by the Scottish Syme, Audubon was in the British Isles looking for a publisher for the book.