John James Audubon (1785-1851)

Plate CCCLXVI Iceland or Jer Falcon

From the Birds of America

Aquatint engraving with original hand color

London: Robert Havell, 1827-1838

Paper size: 25 5/8 x 38 1/8 in.

“Their flight resembled that of the Peregrine Falcon, but was more elevated, majestic, and rapid. They rarely sailed when travelling to and fro, but used a constant beat of their wings. When over the Puffins, and high in the air, they would hover almost motionless, as if watching the proper moment to close their pinions, and when that arrived, they would descend almost perpendicularly on their unsuspecting victims.” - (Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, 1831).

Audubon’s “Iceland or Jer Falcon is among the most dramatic raptor images in the series. Here, the artist depicts a pair of white-morph gyrfalcons, the largest falcon species, with brilliant white plumage flecked with dark barring, soaring above a rocky perch against a darkening blue sky at day's end.

This dramatic composition dates to the late 1830s and stems from Audubon’s expedition to Labrador, where he encountered the species at the southern edge of its range. Audubon was not actually present at the initial encounter with this species. He relayed in his journals that on August 6, 1833, his companions Thomas Lincoln and Joseph Cooledge, together with his son John, were walking along a brook flanked by high rocks some eight or ten miles from the port of Bras d’Or on the Labrador coast when a piercing shriek from the cliffs above alerted them to a large hawk, which John shot; a second bird rushed toward the fallen one and was brought down as well. His son and companions returned to the Ripley, the expedition schooner, “towards evening,” carrying the two hawks, which Audubon immediately recognized as a species he had never before seen in America. He then describes examining the specimens minutely, opening their eyes, spreading the wings, and studying the talons and the toothed upper mandible. We see this attention to detail in the composition, with one bird poised and alert, while the other spreads its wings in an animated posture.  Audubon then sets the scene not in the daylight hours when he first observed and shot the species, but when he received and studied it: “towards evening.”

The gyrfalcon is a bird of the high Arctic, with a circumpolar native range spanning Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, and northern Russia. In North America, it breeds in Alaska and across Arctic and subarctic Canada, including the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, northern Quebec, and Labrador. Within the United States, Alaska is the only state where the species nests. In winter, this species has been sighted in the northern tier of states, most often Washington, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New England, though such sightings remain uncommon and are considered notable events among birders.