From bird to verse: Poet hails intrepid Scot who found (and drew) the birds of America
How adventurer immortalised in The Last Of The Mohicans
He has birds named after him, Oscar winner Daniel Day-lewis played him in a blockbuster film and he is lauded as the godfather of American birdwatchers.
But, in his homeland, Alexander Wilson remains largely unknown.
Now the achievements of the Paisley-born ornithologist are highlighted in a book saluting his legacy and influence. Burds In Scots is illustrated with Wilson’s beautiful penand-ink paintings from his groundbreaking, nine-volume American Ornithology.
He was a daring and remarkable man, a radical working-class weaver and poet who left Scotland after being imprisoned in 1793 for his seditious poems – which he was forced to burn publicly – about the exploitation of millworkers in his home town in Renfrewshire.
In his new life in America, he became a teacher and took up natural history, travelling the length and breadth of the vast continent on foot, recording birds and drawing them from life in their natural habitat – the first person in that country to accurately and scientifically describe 268 native species. Today, he is renowned and revered across the USA, where there is an ornithological society and journal named after him, and his name has been given to the many birds he discovered, such as Wilson’s Warbler and Wilson’s Storm Petrel.
Paul Walton, head of species and habitats for RSPB Scotland, wrote the introduction to the book, which comes out next month.
He said: “I’ve always been a Wilson enthusiast and I’m delighted that this book will bring him to the attention of a Scottish audience. In America he is known as the father of ornithology.
“He was an adventurous, intrepid character who walked vast distances in the US, living comfortably in the wild. James Fenimore Cooper said he based his character Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans on ‘the Scotchman Wilson’.”
Daniel Day-lewis played Hawkeye in the 1992 Hollywood film based on the classic American novel. “Wilson was a major player in the Scottish tradition of natural sciences,” added Paul. “But he remains obscure in Scotland.
“There’s a statue outside Paisley Abbey of Wilson holding a dead bird, which he is studying, but many locals have no idea who he was.” Paul hopes this new book will help us appreciate our native wildlife and bird population, which is under threat from climate change.
“We are losing nature in Scotland because of global climate change and the ecological crisis, with many species under threat,” he said. “There has been a 38% decline in breeding seabirds over the past nine years and Scotland holds half of the breeding seabirds in the EU.
“There has been a 70% decline in the kittiwake population, and the corncrake has only just been saved from extinction. When Alexander Wilson was alive every single county in Scotland had corncrakes but now they can only be found in the Western Isles and Orkney.”
In Burds In Scots, Wilson’s illustrations are accompanied by their Scots names and poems in Scots by Hamish Macdonald, a former Scottish Scriever at the National Library.
“I stumbled on Alexander Wilson when I was researching the library’s publications in Scots,” said Hamish.
“I was looking through a rare manuscript when a piece of paper fell out of a book and it was a poem in Scots by Wilson. I started looking into him more and read his pamphlets and his nine volumes of American Ornithology.
“I became fascinated by his story and wanted to share it more widely – he’s not as well known as he should be in Scotland, not like John Muir by comparison, who went on similar adventures.
“His poems in Scots are vibrant and rich. He used to walk 60 miles from Paisley to Edinburgh to deliver them at the Pantheon Club, a debating society, in front of 500 people.
“Most interesting are the political poems that satirised the mill owners for being usurious and ripping off their