Plate 88 – Autumnal Warbler

John James Audubon spent much of the spring and early summer of 1829 searching for and documenting birds along the shores of New Jersey and in an area of Pennsylvania that was known as the Great Pine Swamp. The heart of the Great Pine Swamp was a town called Mauch Chunk. The town developed in an area that the Leni-Lenape indigenous people called Mawsch Unk or what might be translated as “bear place.” Mauch Chunk would have been at the bottom of an expansive mountain lake or tarn before a continental shift emptied the lake to create the Great Pine Swamp with the Lehigh River running through it. By 1954, enough trees had been cut and floated down the Lehigh River and coal stripped from the Great Pine Swamp to turn Mauch Chunk into a place running out of bears and people. Those determined to keep Mauch Chunk as their home renamed the town Jim Thorpe after purchasing the remains of Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) and placing them in a monument despite the Olympic gold medalist, Hall of Fame football player, and major league baseball player never stepping foot in the town. The bird that Audubon was most interested in finding in the Great Pine Swamp was the Hemlock Warbler (Plate 134). Audubon found not only the Hemlock Warbler but also the Autumnal Warbler. Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) was the first to identify for science the Hemlock Warbler and the Autumnal Warbler. For the later octavo edition of Birds of America, Audubon re-identified the Autumnal Warbler as a juvenile Hemlock Warbler which has since been identified as a female Blackburnian warbler (Plate 135). If nothing else, Audubon proved in the Great Pine Swamp that identifying warblers was just as difficult for him and Alexander Wilson as it is for birdwatchers today.