Strange Bird: John James Audubon Was a Terrible Writer and a Cruel Conservationist, But His Vision Still Took Flight (Culture) (Essay)

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, author of The Birds of America and patron saint of American wildlife, was, to tell the truth, an awful writer. His spoken English was strongly accented with the French of Haiti, where he was born in 1785 to a Spanish Creole mother and a father who ran a sugar plantation. By his own admission, his written English was a lot worse than his written French, which was pretty bad, too. It's best to take a few indigestion tablets when you tackle the raw text of his prose, before it was edited by William MacGillivray, his Scottish collaborator. Here he is on the Ruby-throated Hummingbird: