As the National Audubon Society recovers from a referendum to change its name in light of the fact that America’s founding birder was a slave owner (the name stayed), a luxe reissue of John James Audubon’s magnum opus, BIRDS OF AMERICA (Abbeville, $195), proves the man’s artistry itself unimpeachable.

His paintings foretold the ambitions of the camera, and at only a quarter of the size of the four-volume folio that was first published between 1827 and 1838, this still hefty edition preserves the poetic backdrops and fierce detail of the original. The copperplate lines are so exact they mimic the individual venation of feathers; the neck of a gyrfalcon takes on all the ripply realism of moiréd silk.

But the real subject of these immaculate 435 prints is prey: A red-tailed hawk clutches a rabbit midair, urine dribbling from the stunned mammal’s loin, as two Northern shovelers hunt a beetle whose weight has bent a blade of grass. In the gung-ho years after the Monroe Doctrine, Audubon, a white refugee from revolutionary Haiti, brought a convert’s zeal to this thinly veiled portrait of American power.

Across the pond, the less obsessive and more mystical Elizabeth Gould (1804-41) — the illustrator of books by Charles Darwin and her husband, the ornithologist John Gould — was depicting neon lorikeets from Australia next to the quiet Galapagan finches that taught Darwin natural selection.

In a new anthology of her work, BIRDS OF THE WORLD (Prestel, $70), we find lithographs whose knowingly slapdash linework, paired with bright pigments and quick washes, makes prints such as her candy-cloudy Senegalese woodland kingfisher feel like daydreams as much as records. As Her Majesty’s navies and naturalists patrolled the world, Gould limned its limits, whetting the visual imagination of an ever-reaching empire.