Wild Turkey - John James Audubon, 1827

Audubon began work on The Birds of America in the early 1820s, driven by an ambition to document every bird species on the North American continent at life size. The Wild Turkey held a special place in the project: it appeared as Plate 1 of the first bound fascicle, issued in London by Robert Havell Sr. and Jr. beginning in 1827, and its selection as the opening image was a declaration of intent. The turkey had been proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a national symbol, and Audubon's treatment of it as a living, moving creature surrounded by offspring rather than as a static trophy set the naturalistic illustration tradition he would pursue across the full 435 plates of the folio. The composition draws on Audubon's practice of wiring freshly killed specimens into lifelike poses and working in watercolour directly from them, a method that gave his plates an urgency no earlier European natural history illustrator had quite achieved. The double elephant folio format, at roughly 39 by 29 inches per sheet, meant the hen turkey could be drawn nearly at natural scale, a deliberate choice that distinguished The Birds of America from every competing ornithological publication of its time.