calsfoundation@cals.org
April 26, 1785
John James Audubon was born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). He was the illegitimate child of Jean Audubon, who was a ship’s captain, and Jeanne Rabin, who was a French chambermaid. Audubon, a frontier naturalist and artist, is famous for illustrating and writing The Birds of America. He visited Arkansas Territory in 1820 and 1822 and documented Arkansas’s birds, including the Traill’s flycatcher, also known as the willow flycatcher, which is the only bird originally discovered in Arkansas.