The Snowy Heron or White Egret (Ardea candidissima), Volume 3, Plate 242

Likely painted on March 25, 1832, when Audubon and George Lehman were staying with their naturalist friend John Bachman in Charleston.

George Lehman added a beautifully detailed South Carolina landscape to Audubon’s drawing, thus creating an opposition between the wild beauty of the egret and the civilized aspirations of humankind, as represented by the tiny hunter on the right, an emissary from the world of farmers and farmhouses, pointing a matchstick-sized gun in the general direction of the bird’s chest. The egret’s delicately-feathered beauty is echoed in the vegetation that surrounds it, especially in the thin stalks of grass that so inadequately shelter it. In the accompanying essay Audubon describes himself visiting the birds’ breeding grounds, peering into their nests and generally disrupting what he himself calls a “most agreeable” and “most pleasing” sight.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

While migrating, they fly both by night and by day, in loose flocks of from twenty to a hundred individuals, sometimes arranging themselves in a broad front, then forming lines, and again proceeding in a straggling manner. They keep perfectly silent, and move at a height seldom exceeding a hundred yards. Their flight is light, undetermined as it were, yet well sustained, and performed by regular flappings, as in other birds of the tribe. When they have arrived at their destination, they often go to considerable distances to feed during the day, regularly returning at the approach of night to their roosts on the low trees and bushes bordering the marshes, swamps, and ponds. They are very gentle at this season, and at all periods keep in flocks when not disturbed. At the approach of the breeding season, many spend a great part of the day at their roosting places, perched on the low trees principally growing in the water, when every now and then they utter a rough guttural sort of sigh, raising at the same moment their beautiful crest and loose recurved plumes, curving the neck, and rising on their legs to their full height, as if about to strut on the branches.