Classic bird paintings

Hooded Merganser painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

The Hooded Merganser is plate 232 of John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827–38), a male and a female under the same name, and Audubon.org has a free high-resolution scan of it. The swimming pair shown here is Louis Agassiz Fuertes's plate 11 for Elon H. Eaton's Birds of New York (1910–14), signed in the corner.

Updated

A male Hooded Merganser with a black-and-white fan crest swimming beside a brown female with a rusty crest on a still pond with dead trees
Hooded Mergansers, male and female, signed by Fuertes, from Birds of New York, plate 11. Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Elon H. Eaton's Birds of New York (1910–14)

About this painting

Fuertes painted the pair on still water among drowned trees and signed it in the lower corner; the caption names the bird Lophodytes cucullatus. It is plate 11 of Elon H. Eaton's Birds of New York (1910–14). The bird also appears in John Gould's The Birds of Europe and The Birds of Great Britain, as Mergus cucullatus.

Audubon’s Hooded Merganser: plate 232, “Hooded Merganser”

Except for the Smew, Audubon thought the Hooded Merganser the handsomest of its family. He liked to stand on the banks of the Ohio on moonlit autumn nights, hear the whistle of wings, and watch small flocks shoot into a creek to wash, preen and dive for minnows.

When he moved from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, he found them near Louisville in summer, and told Alexander Wilson so. He caught young ones in a partridge net and insisted they were very dark brown, not yellow, as some writers said. He found their nests seven or eight times, in tree holes like a Wood Duck's, and wrote that the mother carries the ducklings to the water in her bill.

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 3 (1835). See plate 232 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

  • John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 413: “Hooded Merganser”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
  • John Gould’s The Birds of Europe (1832–37), plate 386: “Hooded Merganser” (Mergus cucullatus). Free scan (University of Kansas Libraries)
  • John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73), vol. 5, plate 36: “Hooded Merganser” (Mergus cucullatus). Free scan (University of Kansas Libraries)
  • Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 11: “Hooded Merganser” (the painting shown above). Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Hooded Merganser

The oldest known wild Hooded Merganser lived at least 14 years and 4 months: it was banded in Minnesota in 1995 and found in Mississippi in 2009. 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 232 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 Hooded Merganser with the date and place you first saw one. See your own list as a book, free.