On September 25, 1833, John James Audubon and his wife, Lucy, and their son, John Woodhouse Audubon, departed from New York City to spend the fall in Charleston, South Carolina, with Rev. John Bachman (1790-1874) and his family. As the number of prints for Birds of America grew, so did the complications that came with corresponding with subscribers, finding and identifying and describing specimens, supplying the printer in London with more drawings, delivering prints, and collecting payments for the prints. John Bachman provided John James Audubon and his family not only a wonderful home but also a sort of main office for the production of Birds of America. Bachman was also instrumental in guiding Audubon through the exacting standards for describing his observations, scientific terminology, and anatomical descriptions. Given all of his financial, moral, and technical support, a case could likely be made that, without John Bachman, Birds of America would not have been completed.
Nearing Charleston on October 16, Audubon encountered a flock of Tree swallows of “such an immense quantity of this species of birds that the air was positively darkened. As far as the eye could reach, there were Swallows crowded thickly together, and winging their way southward; there must have been many millions!” The largest number that anyone in South Carolina has been able to report on Cornell’s eBird system is 144,000. Steve Calver counted the birds on April 7, 2011, at the Savannah Spoil Site (see eBird Checklist S24754816). There is no more telling sign of the drastic changes that have happened to the North American landscape since European settlement than birds needing a toxic waste site for refuge.