Here stalks the heron gazing in the lake, The snowy swan and party-coloured drake; The bittern lone that shakes the solid ground, While thro' still midnight groans the hollow sound; The noisy goose, the teal in black'ning trains, And long-bill'd snipe that knows approaching rains; Wild fowl unnumbered here continual rove, Explore the deep or sail the waves above. - Alexander Wilson, Lochwinnoch - A Descriptive Poem
Today’s #Feathursday post shows a gathering of Wilson’s Snipe, named after the ornithologist and poet Alexander Wilson (1766 -1813). Born in Scotland, Wilson emigrated to the United States in 1794 after one of his satirical protest poems about working conditions in a local mill resulted in him being incarcerated for libel, fined, and forced to publicly burn his work.
After settling in Philadelphia to work as a schoolteacher, Wilson befriended William Bartram (1739-1823), the prominent Philadelphia botanist and naturalist, who would become a mentor to Wilson. In 1803, with Bartram’s encouragement and the support of a local publisher (which was contingent on Wilson securing subscribers), Wilson began his life’s work of creating American Ornithology, the first ornithological study of America’s native birds, published in nine volumes between 1807 and 1814.
His efforts and extensive travels in these labors took a toll, however. Wilson died just before the publication of his final volume; colleagues and friends attributed his demise to the tolls of chronic poverty, overwork, and dysentery. With the release of his ninth and last volume, American Ornithology illustrated and described 264 birds, including forty-eight previously undocumented species. Wilson’s Snipe is one of a number of birds named in his honor by his former collaborators and admirers; others include Wilsonia (a now obsolete genus of warblers), Wilson's storm-petrel, Wilson's plover, Wilson's phalarope, and Wilson's warbler.
This print was created in 1917 for the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company’s Our American Game Birds series. The series consisted of nineteen prints of paintings of birds by artist Lynn Bogue Hunt (1878–1960), accompanied by descriptive text from ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush (1858-1929), and was released by DuPont’s Sporting Powder Division to advertise shotgun powder.
To view more prints from this series, which is part of the Hagley Library’s DuPont Company Museum collection (Accession 1968.001), you can visit this collection’s page in our Digital Archives by clicking here.
