Raven (Corvus corax), Volume 2, Plate 101

Likely drawn in the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, 1829. Botanicals added by Audubon’s Swiss–born assistant George Lehman.

The plate shows a “very old” male raven on a shellbark hickory branch. Audubon respects the raven for its superior intelligence, as reflected in several anecdotes he includes in his essay, notably one about the bird’s ability to sense danger when necessary. The plate shows Audubon’s ability to modify the bird-on-branch model of natural history illustration: tilting the head, the bird has his eye trained on the viewer, offering its imposing black body as a barrier between the world of the viewer and that of its habitat (suggested by the hickory). Note the contrast between the decaying leaves of the tree and the bird’s powerful black body. The woodsman Jediah Irish, in whose company he encountered the raven, is mentioned elsewhere in Ornithological Biography and praised for his hunting skills.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

A friend of mine, who is an excellent observer of the habits of birds, has told me that he saw a Raven’s nest in the high lands of New York placed in a deep fissure of a rock, in the immediate vicinity of that of a Golden Eagle. I chanced one day, while in the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, to stop, for the purpose of resting and refreshing myself, at a camp of the good JEDIAH IRISH, with whom I have already made you acquainted during my former rambles in that remarkable district. We had seen some Ravens that day, and our conversation returning to them, the person employed in preparing the food of the woodcutters told us, that whenever she chanced to place a salt mackerel or other fish in the brook running from the spring near the camp, “the Raven was sure to carry it away in less than an hour.” She firmly believed that it had the power of smelling the fish as she carried it from the hut to the water. We went to the spot with her, and, leaving a fish there, returned to our homely meal, but on visiting the place several hours after, we found it untouched. “The Raven perhaps smelt the powder in our guns!” At all events, it did not choose to come that day.