Plate 264
Havell XXXVII
Golden-Winged Woodpecker or Yellow-Shafted Flicker
(Colaptes auratus)
This painting is one of the most complicated, technically, of all Audubon’s compositions. The two quarreling females, at top, were done in water color and pastel in Louisiana in 1821. Later, about 1827, Audubon pasted a piece of paper, five inches high, onto the bottom of his composition and added water-color renderings of a male in profile and the heads of two other males. The profile of the male is exactly like Alexander Wilson’s flicker in Plate 3 of his American Ornithology; Audubon probably copied Wilson’s work.
Source: The Original Water-Color Paintings by John James Audubon. Copyright 1966 by American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc.
Learn more about this print on the National Audubon Society's website.
Learn more about the Library's Audubon Collection.