He was among the first to use colour plates for illustrating birds and opposed the use of binomial nomenclature introduced by Carl Linnaeus, preferring instead to use descriptive French names such as the bateleur (meaning "tumbler or tight-rope walker") for the distinctive African eagle.

At that time, South Africa was a relatively unknown and exotic location and he collected specimens that would establish his reputation within the scientific community until July 1784[2]: 249  when he made his way back to Holland and France.

The cartographic elements of the map were made by Perrier with the insets of animals and landscapes by Van Leen.

It has been suggested that the success of the first book drove him to become more creative in the descriptions of the second voyage, many parts of which are considered to be fiction.

A dowry of 50,000 francs helped the couple and they had four children (including a son named Jean-Jacques Rousseau Levaillant who took an interest in ornithology).

[2]: 177–182  Levaillant claimed later to have been in prison during the time of the French Revolution but this was untrue—he was in fact close to many revolutionary figures and even applied for a post at the Natural History Museum through the Committee for Public Safety.

Through Foyot's family, he was a grand uncle of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who read Levaillant avidly as a young student.

[6] Levaillant's fame as collector in his lifetime was based on bringing back the first giraffe skeleton to France.

He called his "Hottentot" companion Klaas his brother and his equal and was one of the first to describe a close relationship between Western explorer and an indigenous man.

In his writings, he wrote about how he shared food and drink with Kees and considered him a simple soul who was more loyal than many humans.

His portrayal of their flirtation influenced early South African novels before such relationships became less socially acceptable in the later colonial period.

[11] A brave experimenter, he allowed a Hottentot medicine man to diagnose him when he fell ill and wrote of the successful treatment and cure.

[13][14] Le Vaillant was opposed to the systematic nomenclature introduced by Carl Linnaeus and only gave French names to the species that he discovered.

Some of these are still in use as common names, such as bateleur, the French word for tumbler, for the way the bird playfully falls in flight.

He mounted his bird specimens, preserved with arsenic soap,[15] in lifelike positions and the illustrators showed them in near realistic poses.