Extinct Birds Painted From Life

Every bird in this book was drawn by someone who had the animal in front of them.

That is a narrower rule than it sounds. Most pictures of extinct animals are reconstructions - somebody measured a skeleton, read a sailor's description, and painted what the creature probably looked like. The dodo appears here only as an argument, because nobody we can trust ever drew one alive.

The forty-three birds were painted from the bird itself: usually one shot that morning, occasionally one still alive in a cage, once from birds held in a crate in Honolulu harbour. Forty-three full-page colour plates, each facing a page about the bird and the man who drew it.

From Audubon's Birds of America: the great auk, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck, the ivory-billed woodpecker. From Buller's Birds of New Zealand: the huia, the laughing owl, the piopio, the takahē. From Rothschild and Wilson on Hawaii: the mamo, all four ʻōʻō, the kioea, the koa finches - the most comprehensively destroyed bird fauna in the world.

The text quotes the collectors directly. Audubon counting pigeon flocks with a pencil until the task defeated him. Buller writing the standard work on New Zealand's birds while selling their skins to London. Henry Palmer buying the last Laysan rails from a sea captain because no steamer was leaving for Europe.

Every quotation is verbatim from a public-domain source published between 1827 and 1900.

Note: the dodo is discussed, not pictured. The text was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence and edited by the author.