The birth of John James Audubon, the naturalist and artist who catalogued the birds of America and influenced Charles Darwin, has been celebrated with a Google doodle.
The search engine featured images from the pioneering ornithologist’s popular 19th Century prints to mark his 226th birthday.
Birds of prey, songbirds and a watchful owl replaced Google’s distinctive logo on the doodle.
The son of a French sugar plantation owner in what is now Haiti, Jean-Jacques Audubon emigrated to America at the turn of the 19th Century and made his name studying and recording the country’s bird life.
He set himself the challenge of painting North America’s bird species in greater detail than ever before.
A keen hunter, he earned the nickname the "American woodsman" in Europe, symbolising the frontier spirit of the United States to many.
Born on April 26 1785 on his father’s sugar plantation in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, he moved to France on the eve of the revolution and grew up there.
In 1803 his father sent him to America where he began studying and recording the country’s bird life, selling prints of his work across America and overseas.
In the 1820s he took an exhibition of his work to Britain where it was a hit.
The tour helped him raise the money to publish Birds of America, his monumental work cataloguing almost 500 species in intricate detail.
He was quoted by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species and also in later works.
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