Classic bird paintings
Canada Goose painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits
John James Audubon painted the Canada Goose as plate 201 of The Birds of America (1827–38), a male and a female, under the same name. A free high-resolution scan is on Audubon.org. The goose shown here is by the Dutch painter Marinus Adrianus Koekkoek, from E. D. van Oort's Ornithologia Neerlandica (1922).
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About this painting
This goose is plate 50 of the first volume of Ornithologia Neerlandica, E. D. van Oort's book on the birds of the Netherlands, published in 1922 with plates by Marinus Adrianus Koekkoek. The book's text lists the plate as an adult bird. More painters in our guide to the painters behind a Birdfolio.
Audubon’s Canada Goose: plate 201, “Canada Goose”
Audubon's plate shows a male and a female. He described ganders fighting over a mate while the flock gathered round to watch, the blows falling “like the strokes of hammers driven by sturdy forgers.” A gander guarding his sitting mate, he wrote, would walk straight up to a raccoon and drive it off.
When the flocks left for the winter, he wrote, the old ganders flew in front, the females followed and the young came after, the weakest at the rear. In Kentucky he saw immense flocks every winter, and he still found nests near Henderson as late as 1819. An early settler, General George Clark, told him geese were once so plentiful that he had them shot to feed his soldiers near Vincennes, Indiana.
Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 3 (1835). See plate 201 free at Audubon.org.
More classic portraits, free to see
- John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 376: “Canada Goose”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
- Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 22: “Canada Goose”, with Tundra Swan and Brant. Free scan (Internet Archive)
About the Canada Goose
- Canada Geese graze on land, and also feed underwater by dipping their head and neck below the surface. (Source: National Audubon Society)
The oldest known wild Canada Goose lived at least 33 years and 3 months: it was banded in Ohio in 1969 and found in Ontario in 2001. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?
Buying a print?
An original plate 201 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.
In a Birdfolio, the hardcover book of your own life list, this painting sits beside the Canada Goose with the date and place you first saw one. See your own list as a book, free.