About the Cover: Audubon's Gatling of Woodpeckers

The collective noun, or noun of assemblage, for woodpeckers is "galling," presumably derived from the similarity in sound between a woodpecker's drumming on a hollow tree and the rattle of a Gatling gun of Civil War fame.In this cover, John James Audubon presents a wide scatter of woodpecker species.Of the five species shown, three are western, one eastern, and one found continent-wide.The pair in the upper left-hand comer of the plate are Hairy Woodpeckers (Picoides villosus), found across North America from Alaska to the Maritime Provinces of Canada and south to Central America.The upper right-hand pair are Red-bellied Woodpeckers (Melanerpes carolinus), disttibuted over most of the eastern United States north to the Great Lakes.These woodpeckers have recently expanded their breeding range into Massachusetts.The central pair, with open bills almost touching, are Redshafted Flickers, now considered a western race of the Northern Flicker {Colaptes auratus).The pair below them, clinging to the vertical tmnk, are Lewis' Woodpeckers {Melanerpes lewis), a western, local, and unfortunately declining species.The bottom pair, facing in opposite directions, are Red breasted Sapsuckers {Sphyrapicus ruber), a bird of the west coast from Alaska to Mexico.Audubon was bom in 1785 in what is now Haiti, but was taken by his father, a French naval officer, to France at age six, and sent to the United States twelve years later.Always an outdoorsman with an interest in birds, he tired of unsuccessful business ventures and in 1820 began his monumental work painting life-size the birds of the United States and territories.The project took him to Europe for subscribers to his rather expensive project, and for suitable engravers to produce the prints from his watercolor paintings.By 1827 Audubon had settled on Robert Havell, Jr., of London as an engraver, and his ambitious project progressed rapidly.Audubon traveled extensively in North America, painting from freshly shot bird models and making extensive observations and notes on the natural history of living birds.He also received specimens and observational notes from travelers to areas that he could not reach.Ultimately he produced 433 paintings, mostly watercolors, from which 435 copper plates were etched.They depict 489 of what Audubon considered bird species (by today's nomenclature, more than 450 species because some of his species were reduced to subspecies, a few birds were actually females, young birds, or hybrids, and several ephemeral or apocryphal birds remain unidentified

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