This exhibition showcases Audubon’s spectacular ‘Birds of America’, a metre-high book filled with Audubon’s stunning life-size colour depictions of American bird species, with text prepared by MacGillivray. It explores the travels of both men – including MacGillivray’s often humorous account of his epic journey on foot from Aberdeen to London – and their legacies in the worlds of zoology, ornithology and environmental conservation.

The exhibition was first shown in the Sir Duncan Rice Library Gallery in 2019. Some of the text in this online version has been changed in order to more fully represent the racial history of John James Audubon, and to acknowledge the part that people of colour had in the creation of Birds of America.