Things I like: Audubon Octavo prints.

I love birds.

I have several bird feeders in the 'secret garden' outside my little office and breakfast room area. Thanks to my mom, I have a wonderful collection of crystal and porcelain bird figurines.

Several years ago I became interested in antique Audubon prints from the Octavo edition of his Birds of America.


I learned a lot about the engravings from this coffee table book

John James Audubon was a naturalist who lived from 1785-1851. Between 1827 and 1838 he published a series of four volumes containing his 500 paintings of the Birds of America engraved in life size. Each volume weighed almost 70 pounds! From 1840-1844 these engraving were released in a smaller size in his Birds of America - Octavo edition. The pages of this book were 7 x 10½ inches as opposed to 25 x 38 in the original edition (known as the double-elephant folio). It is pages from the Octavo edition that I have collected and framed.

The prints hang above the piano in our living room.




Sorry about the glare

Some of the prints I chose because of their colors,



but in most of them, either the bird or the plant featured had significance to me.

This little 'Bonaparte's Flycatching Warbler' is situated on a magnolia branch. The magnolia is a nod to my roots in the Deep South (others print in my collection chosen for similar reasons feature a dogwood blossom and a cotton boll).



My college sorority's symbol was an owl. I had to search long and hard to find an owl print that wasn't extremely ugly or didn't feature the owl clutching a rodent in its talons.



My very favorite bird is a cardinal, but Audubon's Common Cardinal Grosbeak engraving is very elusive and expensive. It's a fixture on my *dream* list, though, and I have the perfect spot for it in my entry hall.