Heron and wading bird prints

Audubon was self-taught, but he understood composition. In his heron plates the necks, reeds and shorelines run on diagonals and S-curves, as in the Purple Heron and Reddish Egret of plate 256, and the Great White Heron of plate 281 is almost one long curve, with the roofs of Key West small in the distance. He showed each bird where it lives, the Yellow-crowned Heron in the branches where it nests, and where male and female or adult and young differ, he drew both. Audubon’s herons looks at these plates in detail. The Whooping Crane has two plates of its own, 226 and 261.

The smaller sheets come from other books: Johann Michael Seligmann’s eighteenth-century herons after Mark Catesby and George Edwards, the stork from Cornelius Nozeman’s Nederlandsche Vogelen, and John Gould’s Common Crane and Heron from The Birds of Great Britain and his Spoon-billed Sandpiper from The Birds of Asia.