When I was first getting started as a scientific illustrator, I fell in love with the work of Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874–1927). I was studying with Nancy R. Halliday at the time, who told me stories that she heard from working as the bird illustrator for the Smithsonian.
Fuertes was an American ornithologist and illustrator whose work, I felt, was much more vibrant than his predecessor John J. Audubon. Both artists worked in the field collecting specimens and both painted birds in their habitats. Audubon's birds, however, look rigid. He would hunt the birds during the day, then prop them up and paint them in the evening after they were literally quite stiff!
"Wild Turkey" by John James Audubon - University of Pittsburgh, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8710187
Fuertes, presumably, spent more time studying living birds, as he traveled extensively. In 1926, he went on the Abyssinian expedition to Africa for the Field Museum of Natural History, where he did some of his best work. I had access to these works for a time, and came across a quick sketch of an owl. I decided to make my own watercolor study of this sketch, and have kept it as a memory of the museum.
"Secretary Bird" by Louis Agassiz Fuertes - Abyssinian Birds and Mammals: Painted from life by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90653405
Unfortunately, Louis Agassiz Fuertes met an untimely death. I was told that his car stalled on some railroad tracks and seeing that he could not escape in time, he threw his artwork out the window before he was struck by the train.