Word: birding
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...Beatles Anthology albums, which came out in 1995-96, were an exhaustive, exhausting exploration of the Fab Four's musical past, featuring the reunion of surviving Beatles McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with the one late Beatle, John Lennon, on a beyond-the-grave ballad, Free as a Bird, and the release of obscure tracks such as the fifth take of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and the seventh take of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! By now, it seems, the Beatles' entire recording history has been exhumed and made public, except perhaps...
...exhibit does not simply provide visitors a chance to look at one big, beautiful book. "There's more to Audubon than just the bird pictures," says Smithsonian Institution Libraries guest curator Helena Wright. The items she and her staff have assembled--many gathered from the Smithsonian's own holdings--certainly bear her out. An original copy of Audubon's less famous work on mammals, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-48), demonstrates his astonishing range in art and natural science. Both are fields he mastered, as far as anyone can tell, by teaching himself...
Born in Haiti as the illegitimate son of a French planter and slave trader and his Creole mistress, Audubon was sent to France for a brief education and then to live on a property owned by his father near Philadelphia, where he became enamored of local birds and wildlife. But a series of businesses he tried all failed; in 1819 he had to declare bankruptcy. That was when, at age 35, he decided to enlarge the collection of American bird paintings he had done over the years and prepare them for publication...
...become famous still seems incredible. At the outset, most of his contemporaries scoffed at this upstart crow with no known training in either art or ornithology. Audubon scoffed back. In 1824 he managed to antagonize the Philadelphia scientific community and could find no publisher for his swelling collection of bird paintings. Two years later, he departed for England, where, togged out in backwoods garb, he wowed the sophisticates, arranged a publishing deal and oversaw the realization of his dream...
...have never drawn from a stuffed specimen," Audubon claimed in 1828. "Nature must be seen first alive." Like nearly everything else he said about himself, this statement was, at best, a half-truth. Audubon killed thousands of birds; before photography and high-resolution binoculars, that was the only possible way to render accurate images of them. But before Audubon shot them, he watched his subjects intensively, noting how they moved and behaved, the plants or habitats they preferred. When he had his bird in hand, he used wires to arrange the specimen in a characteristic pose...