Birds of prey prints

John James Audubon drew his raptors at life size: the Golden Eagle of plate 181 carries a hare over snowy peaks, and the Fish Hawk of plate 81 rises from the water with a fish in its talons. In his watercolour of the Golden Eagle a tiny hunter crosses a log below, but the engraver left him out; Audubon’s birds of prey and the missing hunter tells the story.

Hermann Schlegel and Abraham Hendrik Verster van Wulverhorst printed their Traité de fauconnerie in fewer than 100 copies. Its life-size hawks, mainly by Joseph Wolf, launched his career, and two plates show heron hawking at Het Loo. John Gould’s eagles, falcons, kites and harriers come from four of his books, from the ‘large tyrants of the air’ of The Birds of Great Britain, with a Golden Eagle of its own, to the Wedge-tailed Eagle of The Birds of Australia and the harpy eagle of New Guinea.