Catesby's Birds of Colonial America (review)

Catesby's Birds of Colonial America. Edited by Alan Feduccia,. University of North Carolina Press, 1999 (reissued). 176 pp. Paper $24.95

This year marks the tercentennial of one of the most important and least-known natural history explorations of the New World: the 550-mile odyssey through the Carolinas' backcountry by the young Londoner John Lawson. The journey and Lawson's subsequent decade spent as collector for British scientists and surveyor-general for the colony form the basis of his 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina, considered the finest natural history of its region and time. Throughout the last year there have been reenactments of Lawson's arduous foot-journey through the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, and scholarly confabulations about his role in documenting the flora and fauna of the colony. Each event has been an attempt to lift Lawson from history's nether corners, and give him his place in the pantheon of early thinkers and chroniclers such as Carl Linnaeus and John James Audubon.

Which is precisely what evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia sets out to do with Lawson's protégé, Mark Catesby, in his glorious Catesby's Birds of Colonial America. Lawson's death at the hands of Tuscarora Indians in 1711 snuffed out his own plans to produce a complete natural history of America, but it opened the door for one of his most ardent fans, the young, unknown painter/naturalist Mark Catesby. Catesby arrived in Williamsburg three years after A New Voyage was published. He was thirty years old, with a natural inclination towards the scientific; his mother's family was from Castle Hedingham, site of a large private botanical garden. Catesby's sister, Elizabeth, was married to the secretary of state of the Virginia colony, so when Catesby set foot in the New World he enjoyed easy introductions to some of Virginia's leading citizens, including William Byrd II, with whom he struck up a lasting friendship. From 1712 to 1719 Catesby roamed Virginia, returned to England for a few years, and then from 1722 to 1726 he plumbed the backcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and the Bahamas, collecting and painting mammals, fishes, turtles, lizards, and plants.

But birds were his passion; Catesby contended that he painted a portrait of every kind of land bird he saw during his travels. The result of this fieldwork is a masterpiece of art and science called The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Published in two volumes between 1729 and 1747, the work included 220 color plates: 109 species of birds, thirty-three amphibians and reptiles, forty-six fishes, thirty-one insects, nine mammals, and 171 plants. It was as detailed a portrait of animal, plant, and bird life of the region as anything that would appear for the next half-century.

But until recently the work languished. Only major institutions held copies of The Natural History of Carolina. The original watercolors remained in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle until they were exhibited in America in 1997. Occasional reproductions appeared in magazines and journals, but not until the original hardcover volume (1985) of this present paperback reissue did Catesby's work receive the wide attention it deserves. With this new, more affordable paperback volume, the work of the Colonial Audubon sees new light. So too does the context provided by Alan Feduccia. Feduccia, the S. K. Heninger Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an evolutionary biologist with a particular interest in the origin of birds and the evolution of avian flight. Some years ago, he rocked the ornithological establishment with his meticulous argument against the long-held tenet that birds evolved from dinosaurs. ("The theropod origin of birds will be the greatest embarrassment of paleontology in the twentieth century," he wrote in Science.) No such great pronouncements are found in Catesby's Birds of Colonial America. Instead, Feduccia places Catesby's work within the greater context of the evolution...