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Further reading:\n\nAudubon's Bird of Washington: Unraveling the fraud that launched The Birds of America\n\nThe Mystery of the Missing John James Audubon Self-Portrait\n\nWashington's eagle, as painted by Audubon:\n\n\n\nThe tiny detail in Audubon's golden eagle painting that is supposed to be a self-portrait:\n\n\n\nThe golden eagle painting as it was published. Note that there's no tiny figure in the lower left-hand corner:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis past weekend I was out of town, or to be completely honest I will have been out of town, because I\u2019m getting this episode ready well in advance. Since July 4 was only a few days ago, or will have been only a few days ago, and July 4 is Independence Day in the United States of America, I thought it might be fun to talk about a very American bird, Washington\u2019s eagle.\nWe talked about it before way back in episode 17, and I updated that information for the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book for its own chapter. When I was researching birds for episode 381 I revisited the topic briefly and realized it\u2019s so interesting that I should just turn it into a full episode.\nWe only have two known species of eagle in North America, the bald eagle and the North American golden eagle. Both have wingspans that can reach more than 8 feet, or 2.4 meters, and both are relatively common throughout most of North America. But we might have a third eagle, or had one only a few hundred years ago. We might even have a depiction of one by the most famous bird artist in the world, James Audubon.\nIn February 1814, Audubon was traveling on a boat on the upper Mississippi River when he spotted a big eagle he didn\u2019t recognize. A Canadian fur dealer who was with him said it was a rare eagle that he\u2019d only ever seen around the Great Lakes before, called the great eagle. Audubon was familiar with bald eagles and golden eagles, but he was convinced the \u201cgreat eagle\u201d was something else.\nAudubon made four more sightings over the next few years, including at close range in Kentucky where he was able to watch a pair with a nest and two babies. Two years after that he spotted an adult eagle at a farm near Henderson, Kentucky. Some pigs had just been slaughtered and the eagle was looking for scraps. Audubon shot the bird and took it to a friend who lived nearby, an experienced hunter, and both men examined the body carefully.\nAccording to the notes Audubon made at the time, the bird was a male with a wingspan of 10.2 feet, or just over 3 meters. Since female eagles are generally larger than males, that means this 10-foot wingspan was likely on the smaller side of average for the species. It was dark brown on its upper body, a lighter cinnamon brown underneath, and had a dark bill and yellow legs.\nAudubon named the bird Washington\u2019s eagle and used the specimen as a model for a life-sized painting. Audubon was meticulous about details and size, using a double-grid method to make sure his bird paintings were exact. This was long before photography.\nSo we have a detailed painting and first-hand notes from James Audubon himself about an eagle that\u2026doesn\u2019t appear to exist.\nAudubon painted a few birds that went extinct afterwards, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, along with less well-known birds like Bachman\u2019s warbler and the Carolina parakeet. He also made some mistakes. Many people think Washington\u2019s eagle is another mistake and was just an immature bald eagle, which it resembles.\nBut here\u2019s the problem. Audubon wasn\u2019t always truthful. He painted some birds that he never saw but claimed he did, because another bird illustrator had painted them first. Once he claimed he went hunting with Daniel Boone in Kentucky in 1810, but at that time Boone would have been in his 70s and was living several states away.\nAudubon also claimed that he discovered a little bird called Lincoln\u2019s sparrow, but this wasn\u2019t the case.