Audubon lived in an era when birds were harvested for food. He shot birds like everybody did, but he also shot them to draw them, and to dissect them, and to measure them with a compass. In fact, ornithologists still kill birds today.

How did you choose what to include?

It’s always a challenge, because our holdings of Audubon are so rich. But I wanted to mix stories. We have three species here that are definitely extinct. Then there’s the eskimo curlew, which has not been seen since 1962—and the image is so terribly moving, because it has the male looking at its dead mate, as though he can’t believe that she’s dead. But then we have success stories like the condor, which has just been taken off the endangered species list, or the whooping crane—there were fewer than 20 in 1941, but then they were brought back from the brink.

All of these birds are like the canaries in the coalmine for our planet. If their habitat goes, they go. They are all endangered. Just as our way of life is endangered.

Would the show's 21st-century environmental message have made sense to Audubon?

Audubon was environmentally concerned long before the word “ecology” was ever coined. In his later writings he talked about how man is a destroyer. For him what had begun as a passion for discovery became a passion for preservation as well.