Today’s laws would have banned Audubon

Today is Audubon Day, but it’s not for the birds, it’s for the man, John James Audubon, whose birthday this is.

He was born on this day in 1785 in Haiti, the son of a wealthy French plantation owner and his maid. Shortly after his birth, his mother died, and soon after that, his dad, sensing an impending slave revolt, took him back to France to be raised by his French wife. (One can only imagine how she felt about this.)

At the age of 18, young Audubon immigrated to the United States with a fake passport to escape being drafted into the Napoleonic wars.

He went on to become the quintessential American frontiersman and entrepreneur, but struggled to support his wife and children while developing his expertise as a naturalist and painter. His wife, described as “the Abigail Adams of ornithology” actually supported the family as a teacher for a time.

In 1826, at the age of 41, Audubon traveled to England to exhibit his bird paintings and drawings and to find a book publisher for his magnum opus, “Birds of America.” In this he was extremely successful, as he clearly had a talent for marketing himself as a swashbuckling but well-educated woodsman with tall tales about life in the American wilderness, and a spectacular talent for painting birds in vivid, lively detail. He managed to raise the equivalent of $2 million to finance an incredibly expensive coffee table book, which cost the equivalent of $23,000 per copy.

This was a turning point in his life; from this time on, he was financially comfortable and able to refine and develop his art and pursue his naturalist passions. At the end of his life, he was working on a similar book of American mammals.

Audubon was also a prolific and florid writer, and there is a lovely tribute to his literary talents in the November/December 2011 edition of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, written by Danny Heitman. It includes a breathtaking 126-word Audubon sentence about a bird called the Mississippi kite that will surely delight English teachers and horrify newspaper editors.

Audubon’s contribution to our appreciation of birds and the natural world they inhabit is incalculable. But there are also vital lessons from his life history. Today, he is a hero, lionized for his pioneering role as an artist, ornithologist and writer. But if he were to try to do today what he did as an 18-year-old — that is, to flee from war and immigrate to this country with a fake passport — he would be deported instantly. Had this country done then what we are doing now, Audubon might well have died young under Napoleon’s command, without ever painting a single bird.

So today, as we celebrate Audubon day and watch the absolute freedom of birds in flight, we might consider forgoing the labels that confine people – draft-dodger, illegal alien, Muslim and others not fit for print. And instead of worrying so much about the risk of letting people in, we might pause to wonder what we are losing by keeping people out.

This story was originally published April 25, 2016 at 9:38 PM with the headline "Today’s laws would have banned Audubon."