Florida Jay

This plate, identified in Audubon's text as Corvus floridanus (now Aphelocoma coerulescens), was engraved by Robert Havell Jr. and published in London as part of the Double Elephant Folio edition of The Birds of America between 1827 and 1838; the Florida Jay plate appeared around 1830, during a period when Audubon was moving between London, Edinburgh, and his collecting expeditions along the American Gulf Coast. Audubon had observed these birds during his 1831–32 Florida expedition, one of the most productive and grueling journeys of his career, conducted through swamps and scrublands that few naturalists had documented with comparable rigor. The Florida Scrub-Jay held particular scientific interest because it was already understood to be geographically restricted, confined to the oak-scrub habitat of peninsular Florida, making it one of the few bird species in North America entirely endemic to a single state. The plate's subscription list included institutions and collectors across Europe and America, and original folio copies today reside in major natural history museums and rare-book collections worldwide, with complete sets commanding prices at auction in the tens of millions of dollars. Audubon's broader project is recognized as a foundational document of American ornithology and a landmark of Romantic-era natural history art.