I'm John Batcher with Professor Dan Flores. While New World is his new book, The Epic Story

of Animals and People in America, Thomas Jefferson, Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark,

and the opening of the West, because much of the story up to now about the striking

paradox between the original Eurasian settlers and their sympathetic approach to the animal

kingdom where they thrived, and the second invasion of the Eurasian Homo sapiens, where

they were either either consternated or frightened by the animal kingdom. Now we move to the West

of the country. And Lewis and Clark record the first shooting of a buffalo that's official

in American life. At the same time, this period of revelations across America also include

a man named John James Audubon whom we remember as the Audubon Society. So there are two

approaches going on. One how rich are we and what can we do with it? That would be the

buffalo, the elk, and the wild animals of the West, and the other appreciate the bird

life, the ornithology that is here right now. Let's start with Audubon. Dan, you make it very clear

that he had to kill the animal, the birds that he painted because they wouldn't hold still form,

of course. Did he regret? In his early life, you don't find many examples of regret. I mean,

what Audubon recognized was that in order to capture the vibrancy of the birds he was painting,

because he had to have them close at hand. He had to have them actually freshly killed.

And so he tended to wire them into lifelike poses and paint very rapidly. Sometimes with both

hands, he was ambidextrous. He could paint with either hand. And so he would paint very quickly

before the sheen of the eye and the sheen of the feathers began to fade. And to be sure, in his

written work, Audubon was also observing the birds as living creatures in their ecologies.

But early on, he doesn't seem to express much regret. Later, and I, in this section on

my description of what happens in the American West, as the story of American history precedes

...