John James Audubon: Fake Bird Banding, Wired Specimens and Stolen Skulls

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John James Audubon was born Jean Rabin in 1785 in Saint-Domingue, the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and privateer and a 27-year-old chambermaid who died months later. Sent to France in 1788 and adopted as Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon, he hated math, got seasick and failed his naval tests. In 1803, with the Napoleonic draft looming, his father obtained a fake passport and he fled to the United States. Nursed through yellow fever by Quaker women, he settled at his father's Mill Grove farm in Pennsylvania, met Lucy Bakewell, and later claimed to have banded eastern phoebes there with silver thread in 1804. Dated drawings show he was in France in spring 1805, and his claimed 40 percent return rate dwarfs the 1 to 2 percent seen in modern studies.

After marrying in 1808 he ran a failing store in Kentucky, sold enslaved people for cash, and went bankrupt in the Panic of 1819, landing in debtors' prison. In 1826 he took more than 300 drawings to England, played the American woodsman in buckskin, and signed subscribers including King George IV for The Birds of America, a double elephant folio costing over $115,000 to print. He posed freshly shot birds on wires, invented a Bird of Washington, and sold skulls taken from Native American graves to race theorist Samuel George Morton. He died in 1851 after years of dementia.

• He rode through the 1811 New Madrid earthquake and described the ground rolling like lake waves.
• After Constantine Rafinesque smashed his violin swatting a bat, Audubon fed him fake fish and rodents that Rafinesque published.
• Assistant Joseph Mason painted many botanical backgrounds without credit.
• His granddaughter Maria Audubon published sanitized journals and burned the originals.
• As of 2025 the National Audubon Society kept the name, while over two dozen local chapters dropped it.