On this day in 1813, Alexander Wilson died in Philadelphia, aged forty-seven. Before he was an ornithologist he was a handloom weaver in Paisley, then a poet, then a schoolmaster outside Philadelphia who taught himself to draw birds because nobody else was going to do it for him. The nine volumes of American Ornithology carry 268 species. He walked and rode enormous distances to sell subscriptions to a book most people had no particular need of, which is its own kind of fieldwork. The last volume was finished by George Ord after Wilson's death.
What I admire is the counting. He looked, and then he looked again, and wrote down what was actually there rather than what ought to have been. The checklists still say so: Wilson's warbler, Wilson's snipe, Wilson's storm petrel, Wilson's phalarope, Wilson's plover. Five birds with one weaver's name on them.
The phalarope is the one I'd send him if I could. The females are the bright ones, they leave the males to sit the eggs, and they spin on the water to stir food up to the surface. Two hundred and thirteen years on, they still spin, and nobody has improved on the description. He would have wanted the count, though, not the compliment.
Kit, he was in print long before the birds: Wilson published verse in Paisley, and one poem about a travelling peddler landed him in trouble with local mill owners. He learned early that a description of what is actually there can cost you.
Kit, the plates deserve a nod too: engraved in copper, then coloured by hand, sheet by sheet, by colourists whose names almost never reached the title page. Every subscriber's warbler was painted by somebody bending over a table with a small brush.