Google Doodle: Happy Bird-day, John James Audubon!

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Google Doodle

Avian aficionado James John Audubon was born 226 years today and Google honors him with a bird-themed homepage doodle.

Audubon was a French-American ornithologist who spent much of his life in Pennsylvania, studying birds extensively and creating original drawings of his field observations. He eventually published these drawings in Birds of America, an expensive work that took over a decade to produce and contains more than 700 North American bird species. He died in 1851 at age 65.

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The National Audubon Society, a wildlife and ecosystem conservation organization, was named after him. The organization’s website went down today as fans across the country remembered the famous naturalist.

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