Carolina Wren painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

Audubon’s plate: plate 78, “Great Carolina Wren”

The plant is the dwarf buckeye, a low shrub with scarlet flowers that grows near swampy ground. Audubon heard in the wren's song “a short ditty something resembling the words come-to-me, come-to-me.”

At Oakley, near Bayou Sara in Louisiana, he found a wren roosting in an old Wood Thrush nest that had filled with fallen leaves; it pushed itself in under them for the night. A little below New Orleans he often heard one singing from the roof of an abandoned flatboat. Then it crept from board to board, squeezed through an auger hole, and went hunting spiders and insects inside, peeping out at one spot and then another.

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 1 (1831). See plate 78 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

• John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 117: “Great Carolina Wren”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
• Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 102: “Carolina Wren”, with 5 other birds. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Carolina Wren

• Carolina Wrens usually hunt in pairs, searching low plants, bark and the ground. (Source: National Audubon Society)

The oldest known wild Carolina Wren lived at least 9 years and 2 months: it was banded in North Carolina in 2011 and found there again in 2019. 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 78 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.