“I have named this pretty and rare species after Baron Cuvier, not merely by way of acknowledgement for the kind attentions which I have received at the hands of that deservedly celebrated naturalist, but more as a homage due by every student of nature to one at present unrivalled in the knowledge of General Zoology.

I shot the bird represented in the Plate, on my father-in-law’s plantation of Flatland Ford, on the Skuylkill River in Pennsylvania, on the 8th June, 1812, while on a visit to my honored relative Mr. William Bakewell . . . I have not seen another since, nor have I been able to learn that this species has been observed by any other individual.”

–J. J. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, I (1831), 288 [excerpted].