Feather and Brush: A History of Australian Bird Art

By Penny Olsen

Feather and Brush traces the history of bird art in Australia – from the simple engravings illustrating accounts of the earliest European voyages of discovery to the diversity of artwork available today. It explores the early European approach, in which naval draughtsmen, officers, convicts, settlers, naturalists, artists and scientists alike contributed both to the art and the science of ornithology, through to a wealth of contemporary artists who feature birds in their works.

This book contains more than 400 images, representing the work of 158 artists; some well-known, others published for the first time. The illustrations have been selected for their interest, whether ornithological, historical or artistic. They range from classical to quirky, decorative to functional, monumental to intimate. Together they demonstrate the rich history of Australian bird art, as it evolved in Europe and Australia, and continues today, along with the trends and technologies of the times.

This second edition includes new and revised chapters, and features about 200 new artworks, including some by Indigenous artists.

Certificate of Commendation, The Royal Zoological Society of NSW 2022 Whitley Awards: Historical Zoology

Cultural sensitivity
Readers are warned that there may be words, descriptions and terms used or referenced in this book that are culturally sensitive. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this book contains images and names of deceased persons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781486314195

Penny Olsen

Penny Olsen is an award-winning research scientist and author. She has written more than 30 books on Australia's natural history and its practitioners. Feather and Brush developed from her belief that Australia has a fascinating ornithological history, which is incomplete without full recognition of the contributions of artists and illustrators.

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone (Oscar Wilde 1879).

BIRDS’ ENERGY, SHOWY COLOURS AND conspicuous behaviours have often caught the eye of the artist. Their ability to fly and their migrations cause imaginations to soar. Since early in human history, we have assigned them symbolic roles as patriotic eagles, vain parrots, peaceful doves and wise owls, and pronounced them messengers of heavenly gods, manifestations of abundance and harbingers of good or evil. Their eggs represent fertility, their nests, security, their flight, freedom.

Ancient human records of Australia’s birds are found in the cave, rock and bark paintings that were part of the spiritual and practical life of many Aboriginal peoples. Examples of this early bird art survive today. Near Victoria River, Northern Territory, several strong petroglyphs of eagles illustrate their social and cultural prominence, as do those far across the country in Wollemi National Park, north-west of Sydney, New South Wales. The more transient bark paintings of Arnhem Land and parts of the Kimberley region, northern Australia, often of Emus and Brolgas, are characterised by fine cross-hatched clan patterns that create a dazzling optical effect to evoke the presence of ancestral forces. These traditional art practices continue today, recording and respecting the ancient traditions, knowledge systems and stories connected to Country. Not only can they be artistic in expression, but they add to the pool of human knowledge of birds and their importance.

UNKNOWN ARTISTS The main figure in this rock art at the Eagles Reach site, Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, is interpreted by the contemporary Aboriginal people of the area as the Eagle Ancestor, a significant Dreamtime being. Each of its wings is overlaid with stencils of an axe (left) and a boomerang (right). There are also Emu footprints at lower left. The petroglyph is estimated to date back ~5000–6000 years and was made by up to five Aboriginal skin groups and clans. PHOTO BY PAUL S. TACON

In the late nineteenth century, Indigenous artists such as Tommy McRae and Mickey of Ulladulla were given pen and paper. They drew scenes of abundant wildlife, hunting and ceremonies that were passing – poignant records of their changing world. While such traditional and contact art is significant, Feather and Brush focuses on the European approach, which, historically, has been fundamentally ornithological.

The earliest known illustrations of Australian birds by Europeans were made in the late 1690s during Dutch voyages that reached Australia’s west coast – black swans by Victor Victorszoon on the Geelvink in 1697, and shorebirds made on Dampier’s voyage in 1699. Between 1750 and 1850, great voyages of discovery by the British and French opened up the world. Cloistered, classical ideals of order and perfection gave way to curiosity and a closer investigation of the natural world, and led to developing ideas of evolution. Scientifically accurate illustration, which had its genesis in the exquisite anatomical illustrations of Leonardo da Vinci and his Renaissance contemporaries, was put to good use describing nature. Indeed, a great deal of artistic talent was absorbed by the newly popular field of natural history study, which sought to describe and classify the planet’s plant and animal kingdoms. Coincidentally, the development of fast-drying watercolour, stored in dried cakes, providedan ideal medium for painting birds, especially while travelling or in the field.

BOB YANYURR BUMARDA Emu Dromaius novaehollandiae. Earth pigments on the interior of eucalyptus bark, 54 × 34 cm; c. 1960s. Yanyurr was a figurative artist from Oenpelli (Gunbalanya), western Arnhem Land. He used a cross-hatching technique, often referred to as Rarrk, still commonly used by the Indigenous people of Arnhem Land to represent animals of spiritual and practical significance, at once expressing the artist’s relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds. Important internal organs and parts of the skeleton are sometimes depicted. This tradition, which dates back thousands of years, is dubbed X-ray painting and is most often seen in rock art. PRIVATE COLLECTION

MICKEY OF ULLADULLA Pelicans, swans and other coastal waterfowl. Pencil, 24.4 × 14.4 cm; 1875. These birds and chicks were drawn by Mickey, a disabled Dhurga man, at Nelligen on the Clyde River. Much of his known work was done later, at Ulladulla, where he was given drawing material – including pastels, coloured pencils and watercolours, which he used to add soft colour to some of his art – by Mary Ann Gambell, the lighthouse keeper’s wife. Mickey was a boy when Europeans began taking over his people’s Country and his drawings show how life changed. STATE LIBRARY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

TOMMY MCRAE Unidentified birds. Pen and ink, 23.4 × 33.6 cm; c. 1890s. Tommy McRae, also known as Yackaduna or Warra-euea, probably belonged to the Kwatkwat clan of the upper Murray River region. McRae worked as a stockman and labourer for pastoralists, later making a living selling drawings, boomerangs and other artefacts. He filled sketchbooks with pen and ink drawings of traditional hunting and fishing techniques, conflicts and ceremonies, and interactions with squatters and Chinese farmers. In this typical sketch, two men hunt a flock of birds with a boomerang and a spear, approaching with their faces hidden behind handfuls of vegetation. STATE LIBRARY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

In the 1770s, Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook made his well known voyages to the region. They were the first English voyages to include naturalists, most notably the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, who championed the idea to the Admiralty, in part to fend off the French. The enthusiasm and influence of Banks helped to create a rage for collecting natural history objects (which then included ethnological material) from the South Pacific. Banks and his colleagues, often young men from the upper classes, scoured the world for land and trade-worthy products to benefit the British Empire. The items they collected were often subject to serious study and illustration, as part of the race for scientific prominence. A handful of newly discovered Australian birds were drawn on shipboard by Sydney Parkinson, Georg Forster and William Ellis. These illustrations and written records of birds from the period before colonisation are particularly important because, even when collections of birds were made, many have been lost.

By the time of British settlement of Australia in 1788, European art had moved away from the religiousimages of earlier centuries to present a more realistic view of the world. From the late eighteenth century, artwork was primarily intended to be informative. A universal system of naming and classifying plants and animals was in place and art was an established medium for the recording of science and the ordering of the natural world. An illustration could be used as evidence of a new species, and many First Fleet sketches were seized upon by Europeans clamouring to be the first to name and claim for both personal and imperial gain. This was the birth of an era when bird art and science were at their most intimate.

PORT JACKSON PAINTER Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen. Watercolour, 42.5 × 32.8 cm; c. 1788–1792. Several unidentified convicts or officers were co-opted by John White to illustrate the fauna and flora of the new colony; some of them have collectively become known as the Port Jackson Painter. Drawn full-sized, the magpie is labelled the ‘Piping Roller.’ The Eora name is recorded as ‘Tarra-won-nang.’ In 1801, English zoologist John Latham scientifically described and named the Australian Magpie based on this drawing, which makes it the type specimen. NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

THOMAS WATLING Scarlet Honeyeater Myzomela sanguinolenta. Watercolour, signed, 10.7 × 15.5 cm; 1792–1797. Because of their ornithological significance, convict Thomas Watling’s drawings, together with those of the Port Jackson Painter, are the most important collection of early Australian natural history drawings – they are the first depictions of several species and the basis of many scientific descriptions of new species. John Latham described and named the Scarlet Honeyeater from this illustration. The label ‘Cochineal Creeper’, for the brilliant red of the adult male, later inspired its scientific names, meaning ‘blood-red honey-sucker.’ The female is brown with a faint red tinge to her face, which makes the species one of the two sexually dichromatic Australian honeyeaters. The drawing is annotated, ‘A Rare Bird only seen in the Spring.’ NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

SARAH STONE Superb Fairy-wren Malurus cyaneus. Watercolour, 23 × 17.2 cm; c. 1790. Stone possibly prepared this watercolour for presentation, after completing a set of paintings of Australian birds, including two of the ‘Superb Warbler’, for First Fleet surgeon John White’s Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (1790). She even managed to convey some of the species’ perkiness, despite drawing from a stuffed specimen. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

To several administrators, convicts and colonisers, a sketchbook comprised a record of the resources of the new addition to the British Empire. To some it was also an escape from the hardships of an unfamiliar land and offered a temporary role in the making of a new colony. Ornithologically important illustrators such as John William Lewin, Thomas Watling and several unknown sketchers known collectively as the ‘Port Jackson Painter’ produced the first depictions of a multitude of species new to science. In several of these illustrations and accompanying annotations, a keen interest in natural history is evident. They are valuable records of the bird life of a continent at the time of European arrival. Nevertheless, much of the earliest illustration of Australia’s birds was by convicts commissioned to paint novelties and officers untrained in either art or science. Their efforts, while scientifically significant, are often amateurish and workmanlike. A further difficulty was faced back in Europe, where professional natural history illustrators struggled to produce realistic images from poorly stuffed specimens of unfamiliar birds and plants they would never see in life.

CHARLES REUBEN RYLEY Glossy Black-Cockatoo Calyptorhynchus lathami. Original watercolour (left) and matching hand-coloured engraving by James Fittler (right) for Shaw’s Museum Leverianum: Containing Select Specimens from the Museum of the Late Sir Ashton Lever (1792–1796). Until the nineteenth century, the printing process involved an engraver, who transcribed the artwork, and a hand-colourist. This allowed the possibility of improving the work, but tampering was often of concern to the artist. The skill of the hand-colourist also influenced the final illustration. In this case, yet another artist may have been involved: Ryley appears to have based his illustration of a raffish black-cockatoo on an earlier one by Sarah Stone. Labelled the Banksian Cockatoo (today known as the Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo Calyptorhynchus banksii), the size of the beak, crest and general plumage colour suggest that Banks’ specimen was most likely a Glossy Black-Cockatoo, a species not recognised until 1807.

Well into the nineteenth century, much of the interest in Australian birds was centred on the excitement of discovery of new, particularly useful, types. Most specimens made their way back to Britain to be described and illustrated in some of the first volumes on Australian natural history and, eventually, in some of the great works uniting and categorising the birds of the world. Dead specimens continued to be the usual source of information for scientific representations, made in Europe, resulting in artists’ representations of a taxidermist’s remoulding of the animal, perched on a lopped stump or branch. Often, the subjects were heavily Europeanised, hybridised with more familiar creatures and plucked from the natural world onto a sawn-off stump against white-page habitat. When backgrounds were present, they showed wildernesses of questionable origin – too dark, green and leafy to be Australian. Many illustrations were copied and recopied as this was the only way to share documentation, which has confused investigations into their origins. By today’s standards, most of the illustrations appear stilted, if not distorted, and undeniably quaint. Notwithstanding, some of the originals and hand-painted engravings are beautiful and have become valued works of art.

By the end of Cook’s explorations in 1770, some ninety of the over 800 bird species found in Australia had been recorded. The proportion known had increased to about half – 400 of the 800 – by the 1830s, when John Gould began his self-appointed task of describing and illustrating all Australian birds, and to over 90 per cent by the time Gould finished in the late 1880s. Many were first described by Gould himself.

JOHN WILLIAM LEWIN White-cheeked Honeyeater Phylidonyris niger on Grevillea. Watercolour; 1800. In 1800, Lewin arrived in Sydney from England as a free settler. The colony’s first professional artist, he soon set about recording its natural history for publication. The honeyeater is one of eight original bird paintings in a leather-bound album thought to have belonged to Lady Arden, one of Lewin’s patrons. Lewin dedicated his first book, on insects, to Arden’s ‘goodness which gave the Author an opportunity of employing his talents, as it were, in a new world.’ BLACKER WOOD COLLECTION, RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, MCGILL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, MONTREAL

EDWARD LEAR Cockatiel Nymphicus hollandicus. Hand-coloured lithograph, 52.7 × 36.6 cm, 1830–1832. The ‘New Holland Parrakeet’, from Lear’s Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae or Parrots … Drawn from Life and on Stone (1832), was reused and recoloured in Gould’s The Birds of Australia, in which it was attributed to Gould and Lear. Cockatiels were among the first parrots to breed well in captivity in England. Lear drew birds in the aviaries of the Countess of Mountcharles. The blue-grey male (right) is a colour mutation – in the wild such individuals stand out from the flock and their habitat, which makes them more likely to be targeted by predators. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

This golden age of natural history study and illustration prospered throughout the nineteenth century. Less and less, old descriptions, rough sketches and poorly stuffed specimens provided the basis of natural history illustration. Colonists and explorers rapidly increased the knowledge of Australian birdlife. Motivated by wonder, recreational needs and a desire to contribute to understanding of their new surroundings, increasing numbers of pastoralists and settlers, including scientists and amateurs, men and women, embraced natural history study. They had the opportunity to see the living birds and this was reflected in more lively, naturalistic representations. Even in Europe, living birds in menageries and homes provided opportunity to illustrators.

The means of reproduction of illustrations for books was evolving along with the increased scientific knowledge of Australian birds. When the nineteenth century began, engraving was the common method for reproduction of artwork; this involved the possibility of enhancing or corrupting a work. The first colourplate book etched and printed in Australia was The Birds of New South Wales (1813), a reissuing of Lewin’s 1808 publication which was the first dedicated to Australian birds. Unusually, Lewin was both artist and engraver.

During the 1830s, engraving was largely replaced by lithography, which allowed the artist to complete the steps between sketch and final plate themselves. It was a quicker and more practical way to produce prints and was adopted by the best artists. At this time, Australian ornithology and its illustration were dominated by Gould. Gould commandeered the majority of specimens collected and his publications, printed in England, were unrivalled. He began publishing on Australian birds in 1837 and produced large illustrated volumes on The Birds of Australia (1840–1848), its supplement (1869) and The Birds of New Guinea. The last, which included several new species recently discovered in Australia, appeared in 1888, seven years after Gould’s death. The illustrations in Gould’s books, realised by his stable of artists, set a new standard for ornithological illustration.

JOHN GOULD and HENRY CONSTANTINE RICHTER Masked Owl Tyto novaehollandiae. Hand-coloured lithograph, 53.5 × 37 cm; 1840. The owl appeared in the first volume of Gould’s The Birds of Australia (1840–1848), a handsome illustrated folio of all Australian birds known at the time, many described and named by Gould. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

JOHN COTTON Eastern Whipbird Psophodes olivaceus. Pencil, ink and watercolour, 17 × 29 cm; c. 1844–1849. A talented artist-naturalist and new settler in Victoria, Englishman John Cotton hoped to publish a book on the birds he encountered around Port Phillip, Victoria. However, he was thwarted by the paucity of painting and reference material, and his early death at forty-seven. Arguably, Cotton was the first resident to succeed in producing accurate, naturalistic depictions based not on stuffed specimens but on the living birds. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

Although several colonial museums had been established by the 1860s – in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart – specimens of new or rare species and important illustrations continued to leave Australia. Resident illustrators, such as John Cotton, struggled in Gould’s long shadow. Sylvester Diggles and Gracius Broinowski were among those who made many paintings of Australia’s birds, for books that were intended to be more accessible than the expensive Gouldian volumes. However, they never achieved Gould’s popularity or scientific value, if the volumes were published at all. A handful of women, including Louisa Atkinson and Ellis Rowan, began to contribute to natural history illustration and publication in their own right.

In the late nineteenth century, with the approach of federation and Australians’ increasing appreciation of wild places and unique animals, nature and nation became linked. Wildlife art, by the likes of Neville Henry Cayley, became popular, as resident Australians bought original paintings of iconic animals and trophy art to hang on the walls of homes, pubs and public buildings. At the end of the century, photogravure became commercially available, allowing photographic reproduction of original artwork and mass production of illustrated books.

As the twentieth century progressed, good-quality mass reproduction replaced labour-intensive lithography and hand-colouring, and made natural history art more accessible than ever before. Despite this, and the widespread interest in birds and their protection, promoted by the Gould League and the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, overall the first half of the twentieth century was a desert for wildlife illustration as the camera largely replaced the pen and brush. World wars intervened and, as technology advanced and lifestyles changed, natural history art took a back seat. Australian wildlife was familiar rather than a curiosity, and its images were absorbed into popular culture. The absence of a hunting tradition, as in Europe or North America, further minimised the call for wildlife paintings. Ebenezer Gostelow and Lilian Medland completed illustrations of most Australian birds in hopes of publication, never realised, but Neville William Cayley’s illustrated field guide What Bird is That? made him a household name. Nonetheless, there are few noteworthy natural history artists for the period.

NEVILLE HENRY CAYLEY Masked Lapwings Vanellus miles. Watercolour, 77 × 49 cm; 1892. Probably following a family dispute after his father’s sudden death, Cayley changed his surname from Caley and emigrated from England to Australia. He became Australia’s leading bird painter of the 1880s and 1890s and raised public awareness and appreciation of Australian birds. MUSEUMS VICTORIA

In the early 1960s, inspired by American Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an awareness of the environmental consequences of human activities began to permeate the public consciousness. With it came a renewed appreciation of nature, this time for its intrinsic qualities and the unspoiled innocence it represented, rather than its supposed oddity and the possibilities for exploitation that belonged to earlier times. Natural history study became more formalised into the science of ornithology and it was realised that there were big gaps in the knowledge required for conservation, particularly of rarer and remotely located species. Natural history illustration helped to fire the environmental movement, which in turn reinvigorated the art. In Australia, Robin Hill, Frank Morris, Raymond Harris-Ching and William T. Cooper were among thefirst to bring bird art back into the public eye. By the 1970s, interest in the Australian environment and its fauna were so strong that the first of the comprehensive, modern, illustrated identification guides, by Peter Slater, was an immediate success.

NEVILLE WILLIAM CAYLEY Western Bristlebird Dasyornis longirostris (at top) and Rufous Bristlebird Dasyornis broadbenti. Watercolour, 30.0 × 20.2 cm; c. 1936. Son of Neville Henry Cayley, Cayley junior’s watercolour accompanied a review of the species in 1936, published in The Emu, journal of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (now BirdLife Australia). It was also intended for a book Cayley worked on doggedly for many years, funded by Angus & Robertson, but the project was eventually abandoned. Cayley did much to promote birds in the 1930s and 1940s and is best known for the influential What Bird is That? (1931), Australia’s first comprehensive field guide. MUSEUMS VICTORIA

Indisputably, art reflects changing societal perceptions and can exert a powerful influence on popular opinion, not only of art itself but of the natural world. Birds are now most often depicted in their natural habitat, going about some aspect of their daily life. Today’s eagles are neither exaggeratedly noble nor overly menacing – they are set against clear blue Australian skies and waxy green foliage.

Wildlife art is more accessible and diverse than at any other point in history and there are a greater number of talented practitioners and approaches than ever before. At a time when it is seldom acceptable to possess a wild creature or a stuffed specimen, an illustration can provide a sense of affinity or ownership, a talisman of concern or admiration for nature. The dwindling of our natural world, the result of human expansionism that began tens of thousands of years ago, has become critical. Two decades into the new millennium, with climate change wreaking havoc ever more frequently, this may be our last chance to record from nature some of Australia’s avian beauties through a painterly eye.

EBENEZER EDWARD GOSTELOW Baudin’s Black-Cockatoo Zanda baudinii. Watercolour, 50.7 × 60.2 cm; 1929. Labelled ‘Habitat: S.W. Aust. … Foliage: E. ficifolia.’ Identified by Gostelow as the White-tailed Black-Cockatoo, this was one of over 700 paintings made by the retired schoolteacher for a completed but unpublished collection on all the Australian birds known at the time, Many were drawn from specimens in the Australian Museum. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

WILLIAM T. COOPER Bush Stone-curlews Burhinus grallarius. Acrylic, 82 × 150 cm; 1993 and 2002. Cooper excelled in naturalistic portraits of birds. At Artemis Station, Cape York, in 1992, he sketched Bush Stone-curlews and a log in a litter-strewn patch of habitat, later uniting them in this large oil of a pair nesting. When a friend was given an orphaned chick in 2002, Cooper used it as a model for the brood of two.

JOHANN GEORG FORSTER Blue Petrel Halobaena caerulea. Watercolour; 1772. This unsigned work depicts a specimen that was probably taken in the Southern Ocean on Cook’s second voyage. On 23 December 1772, in the thick fog and pack ice of the southern Atlantic before reaching New Zealand, Cook wrote in his log: ‘Mr Forster Shott some of the Small grey birds before mentioned … the upper parts of their Boddys and Wings and their feet and Bills are of a blue grey colour, their billies and under parts of their wings are White a little tinged with blue, … the Bill is much broader than any other of the same tribe and the Tongue remarkably large. I shall for distinction sake call them Blue Petrels.’ NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

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NEW LAND, NEW BIRDS: SEAMEN AND DRAUGHTSMEN, 1600–1777

FOR EUROPEANS, THE HISTORICAL RECORD OF the Australian continent and its natural history begins in the early 1600s, when various Dutchmen visited the northern, western and southern coastlines of the continent. The first record of an Australian bird is thought to be of the Pied Imperial Pigeon (Torres Strait Pigeon). Luis Vaez de Torres, a Spanish explorer, sailed east to west through Torres Strait in 1606, probably sighting mainland Australia. While in Australian waters, his companion, Diego de Prado, wrote: ‘we reached a flat island with good bottom where we anchored and found plenty of very large pigeons all white and trees of plums they call Nicaragua.’ Meal-sized and at that time existing in vast numbers, the pigeons, like the plums, were likely of culinary interest.

Most of the meagre information on Australian birds gleaned during the seventeenth century comes from an English buccaneer, William Dampier. Dampier left Mexico as crew on the Cygnet, crossing the Pacific to raid and trade in the East Indies. The crew were tough, unscrupulous pirates and their terms of employment included ‘no prizes, no pay.’ At the Philippines, the crew rebelled, leaving the captain and his supporters on Mindanao. In early 1688, the mutineers stopped for two months off the Western Australia coast at the Kimberley district, near King George’s Sound, to overhaul the ship. Dampier found the birdlife disappointing, noting in his account of his voyage: ‘Here are a few small Land-birds, but none bigger than a blackbird; and but few Sea-fowls.’

Back in England, in 1697 Dampier published a literate, unsensational account of his travels, which ended his days as a buccaneer. The book, with its charts and observations on natural history, inspired the Royal Society and Royal Navy to send him to further explore north-west Australia on the Roebuck. This was the first English voyage of discovery that included an illustrator; the Dutch and Spanish had begun the practice earlier. Thus, in his 1703 publication Voyage to New Holland, Dampier was able to report:

having now had in the Ship with me a Person skill’d in Drawing, I have by this means been enabled, for the greater Satisfaction of the Curious Reader, to present him with exact cuts and Figures of several of the … Birds, Beasts, Fishes and Plants.

The Roebuck arrived at Shark Bay, Western Australia, in August 1699. Dampier described a busier scene there than he had earlier encountered in the north-west:

There were but few land-fowls; we saw none but eagles, of the larger sorts of birds, but 5 or 6 sorts of small birds. The biggest sort of these were not bigger than larks; some no bigger than wrens, all singing with great variety of fine shrill notes; and we saw some of their nests with young ones in them. The water-fowls are ducks (which had young ones now, this being the beginning of the spring in these parts), curlews, galdens, crab-catchers [Pied Oystercatchers], cormorants, gulls, pelicans; and some water-fowl, such as I have not seen anywhere besides. I have given the pictures of 4 several birds on this Coast …

Sketches formed the basis for the first published illustrations – crude but recognisable woodcuts of coastal