John James Audubon was a self-trained artist, woodsman and bird expert whose fascination with his feathered friends led him to create pictorial guides to at least 490 bird species across North America, and dozens of the bird names he conjured are still used by the scientific community today. He was also a collector of Native American skulls, a slave owner who wrote dismissively of the abolitionists of his era, and the proprietor of a general store that drew customers from an Ohio River slave market in Louisville, Kentucky.
His legacy, celebrated by generations of bird lovers, has come under fresh scrutiny from chapters of the National Audubon Society, who have struggled to balance Audubon’s racist practices against his many contributions to ornithology.
On Wednesday, the St. Paul and Minneapolis chapters of the National Audubon Society both announced that was a fight no longer worth having. By a unanimous vote of its board this month, the St. Paul chapter — which represents some 2,500 Audubon members in Ramsey and Washington counties — dropped the name “Audubon” from its title and has now dubbed itself the St. Paul Bird Alliance. The Minneapolis chapter said it is becoming the Land of Lakes Bird Alliance, a title now on its website.
“We surveyed our members, and there’s a range of opinion,” said Martha Douglas, a St. Paul resident and vice president of communications for the St. Paul Bird Alliance. “The general tone is pretty positive. People have been very thoughtful about this, and they’ve responded in very thoughtful ways. Ultimately, it’s about the birds and how to protect the birds. We need more people who care, so you don’t want to have barriers put up that keep people from getting involved. And we had heard from people that the name was a barrier.”
The two chapters’ decisions to buck the Audubon name are not unique. New York City, Georgia, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Madison and other chapters have done the same, generally opting to add the words “Bird Alliance.” The National Audubon Society announced in March 2023 that it would retain the Audubon name but continue its relationship with chapters that chose otherwise.
St. Paul Bird Alliance
The St. Paul Bird Alliance noted Audubon was not in its original title. The chapter was launched in 1945 as the St. Paul Bird Club, which had 12 founding members. It became affiliated with the National Audubon Society three years later and changed its name to the St. Paul Audubon Society in 1948.
“Through membership surveys, one-on-one conversations, and discussions with partners, the board learned that many fellow bird conservationists, current members and prospective bird lovers feel unwelcome and uncomfortable using the Audubon name,” reads a statement issued by the St. Paul Bird Alliance on Wednesday.
The St. Paul chapter said it had no immediate plans to alter its logo or undergo a major rebranding, which could be costly, and financial gifts made out to the “St. Paul Audubon Society” would still be honored.
Still, Greg Burnes, president of the St. Paul Bird Alliance, said in the statement that chapters have experienced “a declining awareness of the Audubon brand outside of individuals and groups not currently part of Audubon, and many of those who do recognize the Audubon name hold a negative association with what it is meant to represent. … We heard clearly that
our name must reflect what our organization is about — birds.”
A legacy of art, exploration — and slave ownership
Audubon was born Jean-Jacques Rabin in Haiti, in April 1785, to a plantation owner — a French naval captain — and his mistress, who died of disease months after his birth. Audubon mostly grew up in France, where he went to military school and attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps, but discovered he was prone to sea sickness and failed a naval officer’s test. His father sent him to the United States at the age of 18 to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars.
His new life as John James led him toward taxidermy, bird studies, writing and painting. It also led him to open a Louisville general store with a partner along the Ohio River, a key pipeline for slave trading. Audubon later moved his family to Kentucky, where he sometimes joined Shawnee and Osage hunting parties and developed a fascination with Native American cultures and languages.
In Kentucky, he had nine enslaved people working for him, and he would continue to own, buy and sell slaves until at least 1830, according to biographer Gregory Nobles, author of “John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman,” who summarized his findings in a July 2020 article in Audubon Magazine.
In 1834, Audubon wrote to his wife that the British government had “acted imprudently and too precipitously” in emancipating slaves in the West Indes, according to Nobles, and the outlandish tales he included in his published works depicted a gun stand-off with a Black man in a Louisiana swamp, and Audubon’s seemingly generous effort to reunite an escaped slave with his family by returning him to his owner.
“Audubon also collected human skulls from Indigenous peoples’ graves, a practice that some naturalists of his time participated in,” reads a position statement from the St. Paul chapter. “Skulls that Audubon found or acquired during his travels made their way to Philadelphia. There, they became study specimens for Dr. Samuel George Morton, whose skull size and intelligence theories formed the background of scientific racism.”
Ever committed to drawing and documenting the secret lives of birds, Audubon explored the woods of the deep South, funding his travels through Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and other states with charcoal portraits and oil paintings for clients.
In 1824, peers nominated him to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, but his membership was rejected amid allegations that some of his engraved images were frauds.
Audubon, in his seminal 1827 pictorial guide “The Birds of America,” painted a never-before-documented species of eagle — the “Bird of Washington” — that continues to draw controversy. His findings were “published without specimen evidence and, to this day, no specimen with the anatomical characters in Audubon’s descriptions and plate has ever been found …but was the product of both plagiarism and invention,” wrote researcher Matthew Halley, who after exhaustive research condemned the “fraudulent origin of the Bird of Washington painting” in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club in June 2020.
Audubon followed “The Birds of America” with a massive, multi-volume sequel — “Ornithological Biographies” — that took him from Key West to Newfoundland. He died in his family home in northern Manhattan in January 1851. The National Audubon Society was founded in January 1905 as the National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals. It has more than 400 chapters across the country.
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