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Author: Audubon, John James
Title: Pinnated Grouse
Place Published: Philadelphia
Publisher:J.T. Bowen
Date Published: 1840-44
Description: Hand-colored lithograph by J.T. Bowen after painting by John James Audubon. Includes text leaves on the Pinnated Grouse (p. 93-104). (Royal Octavo) 16.5x25.5 cm (6½x10").One of a handful of birds represented in Audubon's Birds of America that has gone extinct since the work's publication. Plate 296 from fascicle 60 in the Royal Octavo edition. Audubon observes "When I first removed to Kentucky, the Pinnated Grouse were so abundant, that they were held in no higher estimation as food than the most common flesh, and no 'hunter of Kentucky' deigned shoot them. They were, in fact, looked upon with more abhorrence than the Crows are at present in Massachusetts and Maine, on account of the mischief they committed among the fruit trees of the orchards during winter...Such an account may appear strange to you, reader; but what will you think when I tell you, that, in that same country, where, twenty-five years ago they could not have been sold at more than one cent a-piece, scarcely one is now found? The Grouse have abandoned the State of Kentucky, and removed (like the Indians) every season farther to the westward, to escape from the murderous white man." The last Pinnated Grouse died in 1932.For this octavo edition, the plates, accompanied for the first time by the text, were reduced and modified from the original Havell engravings for the London double-elephant folio. The plates were reduced by camera lucida and some of the backgrounds entirely changed or greatly modified. The original compositions were altered so that only one species is depicted per plate. The octavo Birds of America was originally issued in 100 parts, each containing five plates.

One edge rough where removed from binding; very good or better.