Wild Turkey Cock, Hen and Young

This plate is among the most celebrated images in Audubon's monumental The Birds of America, issued in parts between 1827 and 1838 as a series of hand-colored aquatint engravings produced in Edinburgh and London with engraver Robert Havell Jr. The wild turkey was Audubon's deliberate opening statement: plate number one in the elephant folio, chosen not merely for its native American grandeur but because Audubon understood the bird as a symbol of the continent's wild abundance at a moment when that abundance was already under pressure from settlement. Audubon had observed and drawn wild turkeys in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley through the early 1820s, capturing the species at life size, a decision that drove the folio's famous double-elephant format. Benjamin Franklin had famously argued for the turkey over the bald eagle as the national bird, and Audubon's placement of this plate first carries that cultural weight deliberately. The original watercolor studies were executed in gouache and graphite on paper, and the finished aquatints, hand-colored by teams of colorists, became the standard of natural history illustration for the following century. Subscribers to the original edition included kings, scientific academies, and the major natural history collections of Europe.