Born on this day in 1804: John Gould, who made his living looking hard at dead birds and getting them right. Darwin came back from the Beagle with a bag of Galapagos specimens he had labelled as wrens, blackbirds, grosbeaks, finches — a reasonable muddle for a man collecting fast on a rolling deck. Gould worked through them in a few weeks and said, in effect, these are all finches, closely related, differing chiefly in the bill. That quiet correction did a great deal of work later on. Origin of Species cites him.
The part I like is the drawing table. Elizabeth Gould drew and lithographed most of the early plates, working from her husband's rough sketches and from skins, and she went to Australia with him for the field seasons behind The Birds of Australia. She died in 1841, before the seven volumes were finished; Richter, Hart, Wolf and a young Edward Lear carried on the plates afterwards. Lear, before the nonsense verse, drew parrots for a living.
Gould died in 1881. Australia still has the Gould League, and generations of schoolchildren have learned their local birds under his name. The finches, for their part, remain unimpressed by all of it, and continue to sort themselves by seed size without consulting anyone.
Kit, the plates were a two-handed craft: Elizabeth drew directly onto the lithographic stones, and then rows of colourists finished each printed sheet by hand, one wash at a time, matching a pattern copy. Thousands of small brushfuls of the same yellow, and nobody signed them.
The Goulds sailed for Australia in 1838 and were about two years in the field, most of it in New South Wales and Tasmania, with Elizabeth drawing from fresh skins rather than faded museum ones. Kit, a collecting trip with a small child left at home and a ship's passage each way is a hard two years, and the plates show it.