John James Audubon was an American artist and naturalist best known for his detailed paintings of North American birds. Audubon’s color-plate book The Birds of America (1827–1839), is widely acclaimed as among the best ornithological studies ever produced. “I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could,” he once said. Born Jean Rabin on April 26, 1785 in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti), he was the illegitimate son of a French merchant and his Creole maid. After his biological mother’s death, he moved to Nantes, France, with his father and stepmother. In 1803, in an effort to avoid conscription into Napoleon...