English explorers John Franklin and John Richardson and the rest of their party reached the mouth of the Coppermine River in the farthest reaches of the north in the summer of 1826. They then continued southwest by foot to the north end of Great Bear Lake. Once they reached the lake, they paddled in canoes to the southwest corner of the lake and spent the winter at Fort Franklin (present-day Déline in Canada’s Northwest Territories).
The next spring, Richardson splits off on his own to return to England. The first leg of his journey is a 900-mile walk to meet his assistant Thomas Drummond at Carlton House. The fort is located just north of Saskatoon in the Saskatchewan province of Canada. Such a monumental trek rewards Richardson with the first recording of a Gray-crowned linnet.
The one specimen of the Gray-crowned linnet that Richardson is able to collect and carry back to England is the one that appears in Plate 424 (#3) of John James Audubon’s double elephant folio of Birds of America. The bird’s current common name is the Gray-crowned rosy-finch. The bird nests mainly in North America’s upper northwest and winters in and around the Rocky Mountains. Where the Gray-crowned rosy-finch lives and flies is nowhere near where the Stokes’ aster seeds and grows.
Stokes’ aster (Stokesia laevis) is native to the southeastern United States. It is from this region that John James Audubon has at his disposal most of his drawings of plants and flowers, almost all of which either Maria Bachman or Joseph Mason provided. Maria Bachman’s drawings of plants and flowers are those that grew close to her home in Charleston, South Carolina. Almost all of Joseph Mason’s drawings are of plants and flowers that he encountered in Louisiana while working as Audubon’s assistant in 1821.
Neither Audubon, Bachman, nor Mason ever had a view of a live Gray-crowned rosy-finch, and the Gray-crowned rosy-finch has most probably never had the pleasure of perching on a Stokes’ aster. Yet the combination was enough to satisfy Audubon for what he was unable to accomplish with the elephant folio of Birds of America. In the octavo edition, every bird in the book had its own Plate. It is only through the power of art that will likely ever bring together the Gray-crowned rosy-finch and Stokes’ aster.