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. Of the birds that John James Audubon documented and drew while exploring the Great Pine Swamp was a bird that Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) called the Autumnal Warbler. Audubon dropped the bird entirely from the later octavo edition proving, if nothing else, that the challenges of identifying warblers was just as difficult for Wilson and Audubon than it is for birdwatchers today.