The Golden-Eye Duck (Fuligula clangula), Volume 4, Plate 342

Painted 1832-1834 on the Atlantic coast.

Audubon shows a pair of ducks in midflight, the moment after the male on the left has been shot in the wing. As the male begins to plummet forward, the female is about to bump into him. With her left foot nearly touching her mate, her eye registers horror and surprise. Hurtling through the air, their bodies distorted by the unexpected interruption, this pair of Golden–eyes has been deprived of what Audubon, in the accompanying essay, describes as their most outstanding feature, the capacity for “wonderfully protracted” flight. If we assume Audubon to be the gunman, the plate implicitly comments on his own lethal intrusions into the lives of birds, his disruptions of their family lives. Audubon’s plate served as the inspiration for Winslow Homer’s painting Right and Left (1909; National Gallery, DC).

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

This species exhibits a degree of cunning which surpasses that of many other Ducks, and yet at times it appears quite careless. When I have been walking, without any object in view, along the banks of the Ohio, between Shippingport and Louisville, I have often seen the Golden–eyes, fishing almost beneath me, when, although I had a gun, they would suffer me to approach within a hundred paces. But at other times, if I crawled or hid myself in any way while advancing towards them, with a wish to fire at them, they would, as if perfectly aware of my intentions, keep at a distance of fully two hundred yards. On the former occasion they would follow their avocations quite unconcernedly; while on the latter, one of the flock would remain above as if to give intimation of the least appearance of danger. If, in the first instance, I fired my gun at them, they would all dive with the celerity of lightning, but on emerging, would shake their wings as if in defiance. But if far away on the stream, when I fired at them, instead of diving, they would all at once stretch their necks, bend their bodies over the water, and paddle off with their broad webbed feet, until the air would resound with the smart whistling of their wings, and away they would speed, quite out of sight, up the river. In this part of the country, they are generally known by the name of “Whistlers.”