In the Preface to the English edition of Willughby's Ornithology, John Ray described at length the visual resources available to him while he was compiling Francis Willughby's research and adding his own further investigations to it. He had known Willughby since their time at Cambridge, and Ray took on the task of compiling and supplementing his observations after his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven in 1672. Ray provided details about the manuscript collections that Willughby bought while in Strasbourg and Nuremberg as well as drawings he commissioned upon his return to England. He also listed some of the printed sources that he used: Aldrovandi, Clusius, Olina, Marggraf, Piso, and Bondt. In addition to having access to earlier printed ornithological texts and drawings, Ray consulted live and dried specimens of some of the birds he was studying. After discussing the difficulties he had communicating with the engravers from where he was working in the country at Willughby's family home, he states: “Notwithstanding the Figures, such as they are, take them all together, they are the best and truest, that is, most like the live Birds, of any hitherto engraven in Brass” (Preface, n.p.). He also described the images as “nearly resembling the live birds” on the title page. This chapter explores what it meant in seventeenth-century London to be “most like the live Birds” and to nearly resemble life by excavating the nuanced process involved in selecting the visual source material used by the engravers for the 373 images of birds included in the eighty plates that accompanied the English edition of Willughby's Ornithology (London, 1678).