The Forgotten Bird Artist

Rex Brasher was one of the greatest bird artists of his time. His life’s mission was to see and paint every bird species in North America. But today, many people–even avid birders–have never heard his name. 

In this episode of “Our Wild Lives,” Cynthia Carter Ayres and Matthew Schnepf from the Rex Brasher Association join us to tell the story of the man who painted 874 different bird species of North America. 

Brasher's approach was unique. Unlike most other artists of his time, he painted live birds in the field, not after shooting them or from consulting stuffed study specimens. Now, the Association is working to bring his body of work to the modern age for all to enjoy.

Learn more: 

About Rex Brasher: https://rexbrasher.org/

The digitized “Birds and Trees of North America” collection: https://rexbrasher.org/collection/birds-and-trees

Cover Images courtesy of the Rex Brasher Association

Become a member of The Wildlife Society: https://wildlife.org/membership/

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Transcript

[00:00:01] Katie Perkins: [00:00:00] What have I told you there's someone who painted every single bird in North America from life and in the field, and you've probably never heard his name.

It all started as a childhood dream, and it took decades of odd jobs in daring adventures. But by the mid 20th century, Rex Brasher had done just that.

However, shortly after his death, his name was lost to the history books... until now.

This week, Cynthia Carter Ayres and Matthew Schnepf from the Rex Brasher Association join us to finally tell Rex's story. From his unconventional path through the field to the quiet Dutchess County property where decades of work slowly accumulated and the ongoing effort to bring his paintings and writing into the digital age so a new generation of birders, researchers and art lovers can finally find him.

I'm your host, Katie Perkins, and this is the Our Wild Lives podcast brought to you by The Wildlife Society.

[00:01:09] Cynthia Carter Ayres: [00:01:00] My name is Cynthia Carter Aryes. I am president of the Rex Brasher Association, which is a very small nonprofit, started by a group of, you could say, enthusiasts of Rex Brasher back in about 2008 and it's important to mention that we, it wouldn't have happened without the support of our, two of our founding members, Deborah Brasher and Melode Brasher, who were the great nieces of Rex Brasher and who lived in his house on his property and who in their later years were determined to preserve his legacy.

And they [00:02:00] agreed to band together with a small group of other people, most of whom had a very personal connection with Rex Brasher. In my case at my grandparents, were very good friends of Rex's and lived during the summers down the road from where his property still is in Dutchess County, New York. My father became his sort of little disciple at the age of about 10 and followed him around, annoying him probably. Anyway, we we all got together and agreed that we had to do something about the fact that nobody anymore really knew who Rex Brasher was.

[00:02:45] Matthew Schnepf: My name is Matthew Schnepf. I joined the board in 2019. And I have to admit, when I joined the board I knew nothing about Rex. I knew very little about birds and probably even less about, [00:03:00] the world of bird art or painting of birds, I knew that Rex lived down the road from me, and he was an interesting character, and I knew that I wanted to get involved in my local community and just participate. And quickly I was invited to Deborah and Melode's house to, to see the work. I had heard about Rex's work. It had been described to me. I had even seen photographs of it. But when I went to his house on a spring day, I remember it clearly. I went to his house and I entered and laid out the sofa, on the coffee table, on every flat surface were his books, and they were all laid open. And it just hit me in a flash that every one of these drawings, every one of these paintings represented a trip into the field, a trip into the woods, into the swamp, into the shore. [00:04:00] And it was hours of trekking and getting there and travel in the, at the turn of the 20th century is not simple. Documenting birds. I mean, I can barely see a bird when it flies by me. But then to be able to make notes and color studies and sketches based upon that, send it back to yourself and then create a painting later, it is just, it was completely mind boggling to me. And as I saw that work laid out in front of me, it struck me at that moment of what we had to do.

We had to document this. We had to make this available to everybody to see, because nobody knows about Rex's work. Nobody knows about Rex, the man, the person, the artist. And it, my, my own personal mission within the organization became clear. And that has really established my role for the past six years. 

[00:04:51] Katie Perkins: Awesome. Thank you both. So if people listening like me are one of those people that had never heard of Rex Brasher, you kind of hinted at it, but just who was [00:05:00] Rex Brasher and what did he spend his life devoted to? 

[00:05:02] Cynthia Carter Ayres: Rex was born in Brooklyn in what's now Brooklyn Heights in 1869. In a lot of ways he was a, still a 19th century person. He lived to 1960, so he had have a very long life. But his entire life, it's really fair to say, was devoted to this idea he got as a very young boy to paint every bird in North America from life and its natural habitat. And he found ways rather unconventionally to accomplish that. And he, I mean, just to give you a sense of the time period he grew up in he witnessed the Brooklyn Bridge being built. He worked at Tiffany's at one point as a, in the copper engraving department. And while he was there, they were working on the invitation for the unveiling of the [00:06:00] Statue of Liberty. 

[00:06:01] Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:06:01] Cynthia Carter Ayres: And yet, this man was still alive in 1960. And so the unconventional part is that because all he wanted to do was go all over and as Matthew said, sketch birds and then paint them. He had to find ways to fund himself. So he did things like he found out he was really good at betting on the horses, so he would go to the racetrack and he was very successful at it. So that would then, he would have enough money to say, oh, okay, now I'm going to commission a sloop to be built so that I can sail down the eastern shore of the entire United States, which he did.

And now it was right around the turn of the century, the last century. I mean, he worked at Tiffany's and then he actually became really accomplished as a printer for himself, a photo engraver.

And he worked [00:07:00] in Maine and again, saved up enough money to start doing these trips across the country. And as Matthew said, what he would do, he would literally either walk, take trains, probably hitch rides, spend however long it took him doing these sketches, lying in swamps for hours whatever it took.

And then he would mail the sketches back to himself in Brooklyn. Now, when he got back, eventually he'd start embarking on the paintings. 

[00:07:38] Matthew Schnepf: Rex's painting process is interesting because we don't know a lot about it. We don't have a lot of evidence on what the process is. We know that he traveled into the wild to observe birds. We know that he probably spent hours, days, weeks the wild probably hunched in buggy swamps [00:08:00] and like huddled in cold cliffs the whole time making sketches, sending them back to himself. We know that he painted and he's not a professionally trained painter, so we know that he began as a youth sketching and painting and at a certain point he, he probably got better. And then he looked at his prior work and thought: this early work is not good. I'm going to disregard it and start over with what I know now. And we know that he started, he destroyed and started paintings two, probably three times. And not just destroyed them, but burned them. It was almost ceremonial in the destruction. He wanted no evidence of his prior work of his younger self. So he completely destroyed it. So we have scant details about his early sketches and but you see the final work and you see the final work is incredibly delicately rendered. Not just the birds themselves, but the worlds they inhabit. And you get the sense that he [00:09:00] was painting, not just painting animals in the wild, but painting portraits, rendering portraits of his friends. And what comes forward first is his paintings. You see the work because he's a painter, he's a watercolorist. And so you see that work, the visual work first. But then as you dive deeper in, you realize that he's also a really interesting writer. And he writes about as much as he draws and paints. And when you look at these thick volumes of books, the paintings are predominant because they are what grab your attention first. But then there are words there. The rendering of the portrait goes beyond just the visual. It's describing who these creatures are, how they behave, why they behave the way they do. What do they do when they're threatened? What do they do when they're desperate? What do they do when they're boxed in a corner? How do they relate to other things that are going on in society that he [00:10:00] either agrees or disagrees with? It's a fascinating portrait of the world in a, both a visual and written sense. And I just love that he is there, he's present in all of his work. His hand is present making very conscious decisions about how to render these birds and these creatures.

And it's an amazing world. 

[00:10:19] Katie Perkins: It's so fascinating and it's hard to wrap your mind around at, the late 19th century, early 20th century that someone who wasn't wealthy, didn't come from a lot of money, wasn't trained that he could take on this dream that he had as a kid. How did he go from that young Rex who's like, I'm gonna paint every species in the world. Like who were his influences? Who were his mentors along the way that actually helped him take on a project that massive?

[00:10:47] Cynthia Carter Ayres: So Katherine Marie, Louise Brasher was his half niece. Not worth trying to explain, but she was his greatest supporter and [00:11:00] mentor isn't the right word, because she was neither an artist nor a birder, but she adored him and she supported him from the very beginning as far as saying, okay, you're going to go off on another one of these crazy trips.

And believed in him when, because again, we don't really know this, but I would imagine that there were a lot of people in his family, people who he knew, who thought he was out of his mind. And then at a certain point when he had pretty much finished his travels and he was trying to figure out how he was gonna finish these paintings, she really became not only his emotional support, but financial support. She was the, among other things, personal secretary to the Mayor of New York at one point. I mean, she was a very accomplished woman herself. But she devoted herself to Rex's work [00:12:00] and she came up with the idea that he needed to find a place where he could have peace and quiet and complete these paintings.

And that's how they ended up buying this a hundred plus acres in Dutchess County, New York, which is right on the border with Connecticut. And they bought that property in the, we think about 1911, 12. And he took up residence almost right away in what was then a dilapidated farmhouse. And that he, put a lot of effort into fixing up enough that he could live there.

He had Rex could've cared less about comforts. I think that's fair to say. I mean, he, all he needed was a basic shelter from the outside, and otherwise he didn't really care that much what he ate. He certainly did not care about money or what he [00:13:00] looked like or how he presented himself to the world generally.

But she continued to work for a number of years and definitely was his main support. And then eventually she came and lived there with him too.

She died in the thirties, sadly, really just after he completed this enormous project of first the paintings and then producing these 12 volume sets of books that Matthew referenced in the beginning that are based on the paintings, but that also include the text. And he would never have finished it without her because she also typed all of the text among other things.

Anyway, but she died in the thirties and he really grieved for her for the rest of his life. So, but to go back to the, your question about the mentors, I mean, he probably, [00:14:00] Matthew, I'll let you add to this, but probably the most important person was Louis Agassiz Fuertes, who you know, was a very well-known bird painter himself.

And he took Rex under his wing and really promoted his work so that he, I think that was one of the reasons Rex actually became known to other ornithologists and painters of birds at the time, was thanks to Fuertes.

[00:14:31] Matthew Schnepf: Fuertes does play a large role as a mentor, and as a promoter to a certain extent. And helping Rex with his technique, giving him tips on how he should paint and what order he should paint certain things. I get a sense from Rex's writing that some of the, some of that advice was contradictory to what he had been doing. Where you layer up in a way that it almost doesn't seem like it makes sense, but at the end it does come together in a, in a way that renders feathers and [00:15:00] environment correctly. And he writes, Rex writes about meeting with Fuertes in, I think it was 1905 or 1906. Where he gets this latest bit of advice and he has access to some of Foertes work. And it's a revelation to him because he learns that he has to paint in reverse order, basically. 

[00:15:20] Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:15:20] Matthew Schnepf: And it's that moment where he writes, he learns the technique, he practices it, he looks at his prior work and he destroys it all. And he starts over his final batch of work on his property in upstate New York, in Dutchess County in 1911. And in between 1911 and 1924 about he produces all of his final works. And this is coming off, a lifetime of trying and failing and trying and failing to get it right, and then finally finding a place where he can work in peace, people that are supporting him and having a [00:16:00] full arsenal of techniques at his fingertips so he can render every bird, all 874 birds, species of birds the way he wants to, the way he feels like it should be done. 

[00:16:12] Katie Perkins: I really like, I mean, it's tragic that his early work was destroyed, but it's interesting to see how he went through the process of learning and reimagining himself and saying, this is not good enough, and try it again to do that three or four times, as you were saying. I mean, that just takes a certain kind of person that can, can see that that's not good enough and I can do better. I think that's really interesting and I think a really key point to his work is that he captured these birds live. So can you go a little bit more into why that was not the case of many other naturalists and artists of his time?

[00:16:44] Cynthia Carter Ayres: The obvious example is who was not of his time. I mean, obviously John James Audubon was a different generation and much younger. Rex's father was also an amateur ornithologist. 

I mean, that's really where his [00:17:00] this idea came from. 'cause he spent hours as a young boy with his father all over Brooklyn, which at that time, was still, I mean, he didn't have to go very far to be in pretty rural spots and also on the water. They were in boats all the time on the great South Bay and just all these little creeks and inlets.

Which is why I think he always particularly loves shorebirds, and I think that's why. But there's a story which is on our website, I'm not gonna belabor it here, but about Rex's father trying to meet Audubon at one point and being rebuffed um, you know, how much that really influenced Rex's decisions, we don't really know that, but certainly I think even now, because Audubon's paintings are still very valuable. That was the [00:18:00] template, I guess, for what a bird painting should be. And Rex is, I mean, I think Matthew's already said this, but the whole point of what Rex was doing was to show birds in life as they actually behave, as they go about their business, as they are doing whatever birds do all day and not, maybe as dramatic as some of Audubon's paintings are, because I think it's generally agreed, he took a lot of liberties with, in some cases, with how he depicted birds, whereas Rex was really trying to depict them as they actually looked in motion sometimes.

I mean, it is interesting. I just came across something in his writing a reference to Florence, Miriam Bailey as in Miriam's dictionary who probably some of your [00:19:00] listeners are very familiar with, but she was almost a counterpart to Rex. In the same, she was essentially same period of time and she wrote a series of field guides to birds published in the twenties and thirties.

And the whole point of them was that she wasn't a trained ornithologist, she wasn't a trained anything. She wrote them from the perspective of this is a person who actually pays attention to what birds do. And Rex references her id, we don't know if they ever met. I mean, there's so many things we don't know.

One of the things we're always looking for is people who have, say, correspondence for whatever reason that Rex might have had with anyone, we are very much interested in having copies of, if not the originals. He wrote a tremendous [00:20:00] amount, and I'm, this isn't quite answering your question, but I think this is a good place to say that about the time he finished the paintings, he got some attention from some journalists, which again, I suspect came through Katherine Marie Louise Brasher because she knew a lot of people in the city.

And so there were a couple of articles written about Rex in the twenties about what he was up to. He himself had published in various periodicals, which one of our incredible volunteers isn't even the right word to describe this young woman. She's unearthed a couple of pieces that he wrote. I mean, literally just in the last few weeks that were published in things like Boy Scouts Journal, Outdoors, which was a, it's actually, I think it's [00:21:00] still published.

But so people began to be aware of who Rex was. Rex was extremely well known nationally in the thirties and forties. There were three or four articles published about it in Time Magazine. I mean, when he died in 1960, he had major obituaries because at that time he really had acquired recognition for not just the quality of what he did, but just the incredible nature of this accomplishment. So that's partly why we're so fixated on trying to rectify the fact that now, not that, a few decades later, he is virtually unknown. 

[00:21:54] Matthew Schnepf: It's a, it's an interesting question with Audubon. I mean, Audubon, there, there is some to do in the [00:22:00] origin story of Rex and the meeting, or the meeting that almost happened between Rex's father and Audubon. And I think you could spin that into a dramatic episode. But, looking back a hundred years later, there's something special about Audubon's work.

You see an Audubon painting and it's uniquely Audubon and it pulls you in a really interesting way. It's a very different painting from a Fuertes painting or a Brasher painting. But they're each unique, they're each individuals that were driven into the wild and driven to document what they saw in their own way. And I find Rex's story particularly fascinating because of the breadth and depth of what he did in his lifetime. And the fact that he was, I think he's not more well known because he just wasn't very self-promotional. He was so focused on the work what that meant for him, that he wasn't great about promoting himself or talking about it more [00:23:00] publicly. And I, I find a kind of kinship with that, and I respect that. And so you can look at these various artists and their bodies of work and appreciate it for what it is. And I think that Rex's work is stands alone and the fact that it's not well known is unfortunate. I think that when you look across the pantheon of American painters and naturalists that Rex should be part of that pantheon. And I feel like that is part of what our mission is to bring his work out of the dark, to make it accessible to people broadly and to really make it something that ,that deserves recognition. 

[00:23:42] Katie Perkins: Stay with us. We'll be right back after this message. Whether you're a student, early career professional, or seasoned biologist, The Wildlife Society has the tools to help you grow. From career resources and job boards to science-based publications and networking, [00:24:00] TWS is your professional home. Learn more at wildlife.org.

How big exactly is the scope of his life's work? What is left behind from Rex Brasher? 

[00:24:11] Matthew Schnepf: At the beginning of his life, he set out to paint every species of bird in North America. And in the end, he painted 874 paintings, watercolor paintings, which is the full body of his work. So, that's a lot of work. I mean, we've talked about the many stages of his life that got him to 874 paintings, which represents around 1200, over 1200 species and subspecies of birds. That's a monumental body of work. All of that work was eventually purchased by the state of Connecticut and is now housed in an archive safely at UConn, at the UConn archives in, in Storrs, Connecticut. So all that work is perfectly preserved. It's safe. It's not easy to get to, it's not easy to see, [00:25:00] but it is accessible. After Rex finishes those paintings in 1924 he writes a book called, Secrets of the Friendly Woods. He works with other artists and publishers to produce works in various books. And at some point during this stage, I think he realizes that his paintings are a huge accomplishment. But who gets to see them? Where do they get to see them? if you have a show at a gallery and you can maybe display 20 or even 50 paintings, which is a lot of wall space, that's a small fraction of his body of work. And so he devises a plan to publish his work, to create books and reproduce all of his paintings in books and to publish them. And he starts conceiving of this plan in 1928. And he's meeting with publishers, large commercial publishers of the day. He's negotiating on how much would this cost, how long will it take? What's the process to [00:26:00] reproduce a watercolor, an original watercolor into a commercial press process in 1928? And technology of printing in 1928 is fairly limited so when he sees samples of the work he's not happy. The work is just not representative of the original piece. And so he begins to find a new way to publish, and he comes up with an audacious plan to do it himself by having his original paintings reproduced in black and white through a very detailed process. And then hand watercoloring each one, one by one and then binding them himself and sending them out himself. So in 1929, he comes up with this plan. He creates a one sheet page, like a large, one sheet page that describes what he's about to do, why he's gonna do it, the support that he needs, both in volunteer help, but also financial support. And he sends this all over the country to people [00:27:00] he knows, people he's met, people that he's been introduced to, to try to generate support for his project. And he gets support. He gets enough subscribers to allow him commit to this project. And initially he's committing to 500 volumes of work. In the end, he produces a hundred volumes. And the a hundred volumes that he produces is a massive undertaking. So if we do a little bit of math here, not to get too nerdy, but if we do a little bit of math, 874 874 paintings times a hundred copies is over 88, 87,000 paintings. 

[00:27:36] Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:27:36] Matthew Schnepf: That he's going to hand color, hand produce at his house in his studio. And it's a, and it's an incredible undertaking and he has a plan to do it. And he has a little bit of help. And he starts that project officially in 1929 with the idea that he would be able to produce two volumes a year. It's gonna take him six years to produce all 12 [00:28:00] volumes. And he works faster than expected.

He produces more than expected, and he completes all of his work in less than four years. And those volumes, those sets are sent out to his subscribers, as he called them. Private collectors, public institutions, universities many of which still exist in those universities. But many of which were left with estates.

They were sold as individual volumes. They were broken apart and framed as individual paintings. And so much of his work was just disseminated and taken apart. But a lot of it still exists and we have some of that original work in our possession, in our collection, and that's the basis for all of our digitization that we've been working on for the past six years. 

[00:28:47] Katie Perkins: I just don't even think I can imagine what, nearly 90,000 paintings looks like and how you could even accomplish that in four years. I think that efficiency seems unheard of in today's time to do something [00:29:00] by hand like that. That is wow. I mean, I don't really have words for how amazing that is that he was able to accomplish that.

[00:29:07] Cynthia Carter Ayres: And if you saw where he accomplished it, Katie, you would be even more awestruck because I mean, we're talking about literally a, a house in the middle of the woods with a barn that he had reinforced so that he could house, at first the paintings before he sold them to the state of Connecticut.

And then, and then this whole book production it's astonishing.

[00:29:36] Katie Perkins: Yeah. Do you guys have like multiple volumes and how accurate was he from volume to volume in reproducing his work?

[00:29:43] Matthew Schnepf: I, I think we can, we could make a guess, which is we have two complete sets of books, which we've looked at in excruciating detail. We have thousands of loose prints that were produced, but never bound and published in books. So we've seen [00:30:00] those in detail and we've seen other kind of loose copies of prints from other volumes that have been sent out into the world in 1930 and then came back to us and they're remarkably consistent.

And I think that talks a little bit about his process. If you're gonna do 88,000, anything within four years, you have to have a process that's regimented and planned. And if you're watercoloring 88,000 prints in four years, and you do the math on that, working five days a week, six days a week, eight hours a day, how many minutes do you have for each painting? How would you progress through? What makes sense just as a matter of production. And I'm sure that he got his brush ready with a color and he would paint and then switch the page and paint. And watercolor takes time to dry. So where do you put these prints? How quickly can you move? But it, and then at some point your hand, the muscle memory in the painting kicks in. They're each unique because each one is a [00:31:00] fresh dip into the paint and onto the paper. But they're remarkably consistent. 

[00:31:05] Katie Perkins: So you talk about him being a very prolific writer as well. Is there any kind of passages from this book, this Birds and Trees of North America that you especially love, that still hold true today?

[00:31:17] Cynthia Carter Ayres: Well I've been compiling things for different reasons, because this, as Matthew said before, I mean the texts themselves are so rich it's hard to really describe, which is one of the reasons why the digitalization project that we're about to complete on our website. That's what's so amazing about it because you can actually read his texts.

Except for people who've sat down and looked at these original volumes, no one's really ever seen this text. So there's so many passages it would be impossible for me to pull [00:32:00] out. I mean, really every single one I, as I've been proofreading them.

I am just exclaiming to myself about how his ability with language was at least equal to his ability with a paintbrush. What I was focused on yesterday was thinking about, why would people listening to this particular podcast care about Rex Brasher? And it seems to me one of the reasons is because he was among other things concerned with the endangered and threatened status of many, many, many birds.

And he references it frequently. The ivory-billed woodpecker is a great example just because he actually saw two of them in his life. But even at that time he, they were almost gone. [00:33:00] The passenger pigeon, he has a painting of it, but he basically says it's just to record it for history because they don't exist anymore.

I'm thinking about, he called it the California vulture. We would call it the Condor. Which he, again, at the, now he's writing this in basically a hundred years ago um, was there were, was seriously endangered, which it still, I'm not sure of the exact status now, but it's certainly I believe endangered still.

But one of the things that really struck me, and I'm gonna, I do have one I'm gonna read is he, in so many of these cases, whether it's the game birds, which were obviously threatened in particular by hunters but in also in the case of the, I think it's the white [00:34:00] pelican he specifically references federal protections that have been put in place to protect these birds.

In many cases, federal protection specifically. In a couple of cases, he talks about sanctuaries that have been established by a particular individual to protect this particular bird. But it struck me, especially given what's happening in our federal government at this moment that, how poignant that was.

And it just so happens that I read an article, I think it was two days ago in The New York Times by Margaret Rankle. And her column a couple of days ago was about the whooping crane. And she talks about how they were almost gone because of all the reasons why various birds become [00:35:00] endangered and extinct. But because of federal protection, there's still a small colony of them in, I think they in north Alabama.

And she makes this trip to, to see them. But, so I was looking at Rex's description of the whooping crane. And what he wrote about it, so he says this is about the whooping crane. Little has weariness availed these stately birds against the murderous human animal. Their statuesque forms have nearly disappeared from the broad prairies they once graced, and their loud trumpet calls no longer sound over the wide spaces where they loved and danced.

Few living ornithologists have seen these birds and then he goes on to say, awakened sentiment may save the pitiful remnant of this, the most individualistic and striking bird of our ava fauna. [00:36:00] It's just a constant theme in his writing about, whether it's about birds being hunted or just habitat being changed because of human behavior.

And so I think our board members all certainly, part of our mission statement is to educate the public about conservation efforts among other things. And that is, I mean, apart from the beauty of the paintings and the beauty of Rex's writing, he was so ahead of his time in certain ways in thinking about why birds matter and why they fit into our ecosystem and why we need them and why we need to protect them and go to great lengths to do that. So I mean, but [00:37:00] there, I mean there are so many passages Katie that we could pull out. It's, and sometimes, I mean, the writing that it's in, because it's very sad, but sometimes his writing is extremely funny.

I mean, I find myself just laughing out loud 'cause it's, he's very humorous. It's very idiosyncratic. I mean, he, he brings in all sorts of topics. Like he manages to bring in a reference to the Scopes trial at one point. And 'cause that was 1925, I believe. So, but I can only say, you know, look at our website and look at, pick your favorite birds and see what he wrote about them.

[00:37:41] Matthew Schnepf: I think that's well stated. And he was certainly aware of the impact of, of humans into the natural world. I mean, I look back to 1920 30 when he was writing, and I think, oh gosh, I wish we could rewind the clock back to those days because we had, were less obnoxious [00:38:00] environmentally in those days compared to today.

But he was already concerned with what was happening in the 19 teens, the 1920s, the 1930s. And he writes prolifically about it at a, at an ecosystem level, at a societal level. But I think most importantly, he also writes about it in the individual level. Like he looks out of his window and he sees these creatures dancing around and it means something to him personally, and it brings him joy, personally. And it's that personal moment which comes through his art and his writing again and again, which constantly connects an individual person to the wild. 

And I think that's still a relevant lesson for us. I mean, it feels like we can't do a lot in the world, but if there are these little moments where we can connect and stop and slow down, and if it's as simple as just remembering that or taking a photo or making a sketch or writing a note, like it's the idea of seeing something, [00:39:00] capturing that moment and thinking about what it means, which traverses time even for us today. 

[00:39:06] Katie Perkins: Yeah, it's truly a gift to have this snapshot of what our birds were a hundred years ago in North America. It's hard to, to think about. And then you talk about birds that are still in trouble, that were in trouble a hundred years ago, and I think there's a lot of lessons that can be pulled out and learned from this work.

And like you said, he was so ahead of his time. What are some ways that the Rex Brasher Association is working to reintroduce us to Rex and to, showcase his work now more than ever?

[00:39:33] Cynthia Carter Ayres: Matthew mentioned Rex published a book called Secrets of the Friendly Woods, which was based on his, well, it's partly based on his first years living in, in Dutchess County, but it also pulls in some of his experiences working on a fishing boat out of Portland, Maine, which he did for a couple of years.

I mean, he did serious hard labor at sea and [00:40:00] he loved the men he worked with, and of course, he had ample opportunity to watch all the shorebirds and seabirds and one of his ca, captain Andrews, who was his, you could say he was one of his mentors, I think, because he apparently gave Rex time off that he didn't give the other crew said he could sit and sketch birds when they weren't doing anything that was really vital. But so he, there are stories about some of those adventures. So The Friendly Woods is somewhat of a metaphor, I would say in that book. But it was published in 1926 and I think it was quite popular at the time, but it was never reprinted and we're very excited that Globe Pequot Press, which happens to be based in Connecticut, is publishing a new edition of it [00:41:00] which is coming out in the fall.

[00:41:02] Matthew Schnepf: I feel like our digitization process is a continuation of what Rex started a hundred years ago. He wanted to publish his paintings in a way that was more broad and publicly accessible to people. So he devised a way to produce 500 books. He couldn't do 500 books, but he did a hundred sets of books in 1929 to 1933. That's huge. That is a broad distribution of his work. He had plans to distribute the unfinished prints to school children in school so they could see and learn about birds and their habitats. And I have no doubt that if he were here today, he would want to publish with the modern tools that we have to publish. And so it feels like a continuation of his work. And we began our digitization projects almost exactly seven years ago. In 2019, we began laying the foundation for this. And it's really taken all of this [00:42:00] time to set up the architectural, the technology foundation that we needed reproduce the thousands of images that are required to, to show his work. And along the way, we've had to seek help. We've developed a student internship program so that students can learn how to photograph archival materials, handle archival materials in a careful and respectful way. Document, catalog those materials, not just the images, but the text and pulling the text off the page so it becomes live, living, breathing, searchable texts that we can have access to. Organizing all of this into a database that is completely connected with all of its other parts all of the other work we're doing. And in the end, there are 2,592 pages, individual pages. In a 12 volume set of books, we've photographed every page of that. We've digitized every [00:43:00] page, we've cataloged every page, every word, every character has to be looked at because of how the, in the idiosyncratic way in which you wrote. Every painting has been scanned, it's been edited, it's been color corrected and formatted for web use. It's been put on a web in a way that's easily accessible on a mobile device, on a desktop device. And beyond that, when you look at the work in person, it, you naturally approach it at different scales.

You hold it in your hand. You might see it on the table. You move your face closer to it. You examine it. It's just what happens when you're looking at a book or looking at work in a gallery. But with digital work, it's easy to see something on a screen and it's, you can't really zoom in. So how do you show the detail of his work? We went the extra mile to go into each one of his images, crop interesting bits of them, the way he renders ripples in water, the way he [00:44:00] renders leaves in the background, the way he renders the lines of feet or beaks or feathers, patterns in color, the landscape in general. And we pulled out our favorite moments for each painting. And as soon as you begin doing that, the body of work just explodes in an exponential way. And, but then you get to really see and appreciate the work and just excruciating detail and so, in the end, we've produced well over 5,000 images from this single body of work, from a single 12 volume set, published that online.

We are wrapping up that project now. We're publishing the last few volumes in the next couple of months. And all of that work is completely accessible to everybody. You just have to go to our site, look at the, all the work that's there, and it's an incredible, I think that's an incredible achievement for us as a small volunteer organization. 

[00:44:54] Cynthia Carter Ayres: I should also mention, and this is again thanks to Matthew, the Field [00:45:00] Notes connection. Matthew reached out to the publisher of Field Notes and told him about Rex Brasher and the minute he looked at the work, he, as many people are, he was wowed and said, oh, we'd love to do a set of these notebooks. So I believe there may be another small edition coming on that I, I can't swear to that, but I believe that may happen. So that's, but that's another way to answer your question about how, how we're trying to get the word out about Rex.

When Matthew first came up with the idea of the digitization I remember at some point thinking, if Rex was live now, this is exactly what he would've done himself. Because his concern was very democratic. I mean, he wanted the work to be accessible to [00:46:00] everyone without cost and particularly children, but, so I think Matthew's a hundred percent right.

He would be using every tool available to, to publicize the work, not for his own monetary benefit, but for knowledge.

[00:46:19] Katie Perkins: Yeah, I think that's, it's so awesome that it's being a, it's able to be digitized and now shared, as you say, that he would've wanted back in the day. Have you seen any cases of maybe scientists or researchers taking his body of work and comparing it to our bird populations, the way they look now using it to study evolution in certain birds?

Has there been any kind of scientific use of this art?

[00:46:41] Matthew Schnepf: Now that this work is available online and it's broadly accessible we've found new partnerships because of that. We have found new academic interests in this work. And the writing is available and certain questions just come about naturally and it leads down an interesting [00:47:00] path.

So why are all of these birds categorized and named the way they are based upon the information that science, the scientific community in 1911 or 1920, whenever Rex was painting and writing about that bird it's, in many cases much different than it is today. I mean you can look back and see what a particular bird was called in 1920 and what it's called in 2020.

And you can look at the entire evolution of scientific knowledge between those two points. And it's not just scientific knowledge, it also becomes this interesting political question which Emma Hoffman is, who's in our group, is diving into deep and it becomes an interesting political question because, why are birds named after people in a possessive sense? And that's been a, it's been a point of controversy for at least a hundred years, and it's still a point of controversy today. And Rex had a very clear opinion on those topics, and he wrote about it [00:48:00] profusely, and he chastised other people who he disagreed with. And it's a fascinating topic for academic study. And now that this work is broadly available and people can see it I think we'll see greater academic study of his work, not just the arts, but the writing and all that implies in the future.

 You've been listening to the Our Wild Lives Podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society. If you're loving the show, we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a review or shoot us a message at the link in the description box. You can learn more about The Wildlife Society at wildlife.org and on our social media pages @TheWildlifeSociety. We'll see you next week with more stories from the wild.