On the afternoon of May 18, 1833, John James Audubon was a part of a group traveling to meet and visit with the Passamaquoddy people living at Pleasant Point, Maine. The area of Pleasant Point today covers about 40 square miles just northwest of Eastport. Point Pleasant is a small fraction of the lands that the indigenous people of Passamaquoddy controlled before European settlement. Joining Audubon to visit Pleasant Point was Thomas Lincoln. Lincoln was born and grew up in Eastport to become a skilled hunter and expert birdwatcher. Lincoln regularly joined parties led by Passamaquoddy hunters and considered the knowledge and abilities of the Passamaquoddy hunters far superior to anything the white man possessed, even those born and raised in the forestlands of Maine and southeastern Canada.
The route to Pleasant Point included an unexpected light show of white, black, and yellow. And of those putting on the show, Audubon determined that most of them were Black & Yellow Warblers. The bird was “abundant by the roads, in the fields, the low woods, and even the orchards and gardens. In fact, so numerous were those interesting birds, that you might have fancied that an army of them had assembled to take possession of the country. Scarce a leaf was yet expanded, large icicles hung along the rocky shores, and I could not but feel surprised at the hardihood of the little adventurers.”
Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) assigned the scientific name of Sylvia magnolia to the little adventurers. “This bird I first met with on the banks of the Little Miami, near its junction with the Ohio. I afterwards found it among the magnolias, not far from Fort Adams, on the Mississippi.” Despite the bird preferring to alight much more so on scrubby bushes like the Flowering Raspberry than Magnolia trees, the Black & Yellow warbler is known today as the Magnolia warbler (Setophaga magnolia).