We didn't so much learn the secrets of flight from the birds as we did steal them. What one doesn't have one must take, if only for the noble purposes of education and research. They fell to our field rifles and our poisons and, under the white lamps of our labratories, we peeled off each layer of muscle like onionskin, scrutinized the curve of every hollow bone, learning about motion from the things we had stilled.
Audubon killed thousands of birds just to paint them, the anecdote goes.
The anecdote does not go on to say that he ate them, too, although he did. The Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, wasted nothing, and Audubon's bedsprings wheezed beneath feather-swollen blankets and his wife drooped from the weight of the necklaces he gave her, strung with shell-like beaks.
Mostly, though, he ate them. John James Audubon, the history books say, is the first and only man to ever have consumed the elusive bee hummingbird, which he cooked pierced by a toothpick over a candleflame, a miniature spitroast.
He gorged himself weekly on purple-drumsticked ostrich, the meaty thigh like a basketball in his hands. A man who could appreciate the finer things in life, surely -- penguin flesh, oily and soft, barn owls rolled in honey, toucan stewed in pungent wine.
His painted birds, resplendent in watercolor, may stare at us reproachingly from calendars and coffee mugs, but Audubon understood the price of knowledge and his dinner parties were legendary.