Prophet River Firearms

The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London. Not all of the specimens illustrated in the work were collected by Audubon himself; some were sent to him by John Kirk Townsend, who had collected them on Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's 1834 expedition with Thomas Nuttall.

The work consists of 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints, made from engraved plates, measuring around 39 by 26 inches (99 by 66 cm). It includes images of five extinct birds and three more possibly extinct birds: Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, great auk, pinnated grouse, and, possibly, the Eskimo curlew, Ivory-billed woodpecker, and Bachman's warbler. Also, there are five more images of 'mystery birds' that are not identified with any extant species : Townsend’s Finch (identified in a later edition as Townsend’s Bunting), Cuvier’s Kinglet, Carbonated Swamp Warbler, Small-headed Flycatcher and Blue Mountain Warbler.