Best-known grouse or rara avis?

A bird-like beast on a 1718 map opens up some historical questions.

A cropped view of a winged creature on Nicolas de Fer’s 1718 map of the Mississippi River Valley.

Finding birds in the Newberry Library’s collection has been a learning experience. Since late 2023, I’ve been poring over hundreds if not thousands of items to prepare for an exhibition coming up later this year. Some of the research ends in exciting conclusions. Some ends up mostly unresolved. This story falls into the latter category.

I began my research journey by examining some of the library’s most well-known collection items. That includes Nicolas de Fer’s “Le cours due Missisipi, ou de St. Louis, fameuse riviere de l’Amerique,” a 1718 map funded by the French government to promote its many colonial interests in North America. It’s a beautiful map and a lens into what was known of “La Louisiane” in the early 18th century.

Full view of de Fer’s map. A bird-like creature is right in the middle, near where the Illinois River meets the Mississippi River.

Since birds and the natural sciences aren’t quite a collection strength at the Newberry, this endeavor was going to be about finding birds sometimes literally in the margins. In this case, there is a bird-like beast right in the middle of the map. It seemed like something that might have a story behind it. Or maybe it was just an ornament to fill some empty space on the map.

One thought—if the creature wasn’t just an ornament—was that it’s the Piasa (pronounced pie-a-saw), a mythical animal of Illinois-speaking peoples. The Piasa was said to have had a reptilian body partially covered with scales, branching horns like those of a deer, and large batlike wings furnished with hooks. The face bore some resemblance to that of a man. Its weapons were its long sharp talons and formidable teeth. I went along with this for a while, but when you look at the typical Piasa versus the de Fer image some more questions begin to arise (more on that in a second).

One of the first things I learned about de Fer was that he never visited the Americas to make this map. Instead, he relied on earlier manuscript maps produced by other royal geographers. One of those was Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, who included an illustration of a Piasa on a 1678 map. (It was an illustration drawn from a sketch by Father Jacques Marquette, who saw a pictograph of the creature on a river bluff.)

According to Michael Edmonds in his splendid Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America (2018), Franquelin’s image from Marquette’s sketch shows a creature without wings—that’s in contrast to the popularly known Piasa.

Edmonds notes that one historian has stated the sketch wasn’t a bird at all, but a “water panther from the Lower World,” a symbol of evil to Algonquian and Siouan people. It was white residents in the early 1800s who painted a new image that loosely resembled a European dragon. “They gave it wings and called it the Piasa bird.”

So making the beast into a bird happened much after the map was printed. This historic postcard shows an early twentieth century Piasa with the wings and dragon look.

A postcard from the Curt Teich Collection at the Newberry Library.

Now here’s where a possible birding angle comes in. One of the birds often noted in early accounts by Europeans is the Pinnated Grouse, what we would now call the Greater Prairie Chicken. (As you might recall, I’ve been working on a short film called The Best-Known Grouse of the Western States; here’s the 47-second teaser video.) Many early settlers wrote about the Prairie Chicken as it was unmistakable and very numerous. Its eerie “booming” sounds were hallmarks of the prairie, which was teeming with Prairie Chickens for millennia. Here’s a look at the Prairie Chicken, or Pinnated Grouse:

Prairie Chicken. Macaulay Library image.

When I examined the de Fer image again, I saw a lot in common with the grouse. What might be the Piasa’s horns could actually be the grouse’s raised feather tufts, which gave it the name “pinnated.” Maybe word of that description made it from North America to de Fer in France. You might say the coloration is off and that the Pinnated Grouse is obviously gray with some tawny. But then take a look at this grouse:

Red Grouse. Wikimedia Commons image.

The coloration of the Red Grouse, a bird of the British Isles, sure does resemble that of the de Fer fowl. It’s a grouse that would have been found much closer to France and de Fer. Maybe something got lost in translation and de Fer depicted the Prairie Chicken as being reddish-brown but with the pinnated tufts. The bird on the map might be a combination of the Red Grouse—a familiar species to Europeans—and the Pinnated Grouse.

---

Again, the point of this post is not just a naked attempt at promoting the exhibition (sponsorship information available here). But also to provide a glimpse into the process of curating an exhibition and the twists and turns—and dead ends—that one encounters.

Indeed, the de Fer map will not be in my exhibition. It just appeared in another exhibition, Indigenous Chicago, and 300-plus-year-old maps can’t see the light of day very often. (I learned about this as I started to look into the reddish grouse on the map and made a request to conservators.)

Further, the map beast may not have a lot of meaning at all. I ran my reasoning and these conjectures past a historian who knows quite a bit about both birds and old colonial documents. He counseled me not to rely much on the animals on the maps—maybe they are just ornaments.

“I’d be cautious about interpreting too much from the image on the de Fer map, though, since both the artist and engraver in Paris had probably never seen a live prairie chicken. The images on early maps were often intended merely to fill blank spaces and were more decorative than informative.”

Alas, it may be impossible to know what de Fer was thinking when he made this map. And perhaps the little bird image doesn’t hold a lot of meaning. But in this research journey, maybe I’ve learned something. I’ll take that as a positive.