Audubon Plate # 242, Snowy Heron $450 Click the small images for more detail
Print size: 26 1/4" x 39 1/4"; image size: 19 1/2" x 24 1/2" In the early spring of 1832, Audubon and his assistant George Lehman stayed at the home of John Bachman in Charleston, South Carolina. Audubon wrote of the thousands of snowy egrets that had arrived there by March 25 and "were seen in the marshes and rice fields, all in full plumage." Soon he painted this magnificent egret, while Lehman added the landscape of a rice plantation in the Carolina low country. Known to the plume hunters as the "Little snowy," the bird was adorned in breeding season with delicate plumes. Its lovely recurved back plumes were the milliners' "cross aigrettes," and it was for these nuptial feathers that the heronries were destroyed. "Where there had been hundreds of egrets in our southern states," Roger Tory Peterson writes, "there soon remained but a few hundred. The National Audubon society fought for plumage laws, and to meet the emergency hired wardens...Under protection the egrets and all the other long-legged waders have made a spectacular comeback." EHJ |
