Hi --

An interesting lecture coming up at the Zoo, about Audubon and his work.

Gail Mackiernan
Colesville, MD


September 23 - Book Signing at 7:00 p.m.; Lecture at 8:00 p.m.

"Under a Wild Sky"

Everyone is familiar with John James Audubon's magnificent paintings of
American birds. Less well known is how unconventional and controversial they
were at the time. As author William Souder writes in Under a Wild Sky: John
James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America, "Audubon saw the world
through a lens all his own."  In a fascinating lecture, Souder will talk
about how Audubon saw birds as well as how Audubon lived his tumultuous,
peripatetic life. (Audubon the man was, aptly and to say the least, one
strange bird.) Souder paints a brilliant picture of the wild America that
Audubon explored in the 1800s, much of which no longer exists. Audubon, for
instance, witnessed flocks of passenger pigeons numbering in the billions
that darkened the mid-day sky, but this species was extinct less than a
century later.  Souder also sets Audubon's life and art in the scientific
context of the times, when rivalries raged among the United States' first
homegrown biologists and their European counterparts.  William Souder is an
award-winning journalist and author of A Plague of Frogs, a widely acclaimed
book on the international effort to solve the mysterious causes of deformed
frogs.