an Englishman named William Bakewell. At first, Bakewell’s Englishness ran up against Audubon’s Anglophobia—the English were, after all, the traditional enemy of France, and they had twice made his father a prisoner of war—but Audubon quickly came to realize that, except for being British, the Bakewells might be close to perfect neighbors. William Bakewell liked to hunt, was an expert marksman, and had a big house, beautiful dogs, and, perhaps best of all, an especially fetching seventeen-year-old daughter named Lucy.
Lucy immediately caught Audubon’s eye, exuding “that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ which intimated that, at least, she was not indifferent to me.” As soon as he sat down in the room with her, he just stared, “my gaze riveted,” while she made polite chit-chat with her good-looking visitor. She looked good to him, too, and when she stood up to go help produce the family meal, Audubon noticed that “her form, to which I had previously paid but partial attention, showed both grace and beauty; and my heart followed every one of her steps.” The rest of him, though, soon followed her father’s steps: “The repast over, guns and dogs were made ready,” and Audubon went out hunting with Mr. Bakewell and his boys.13 But Audubon knew he had everything a nineteen-year-old could want, and right on the other side of the road. Mill Grove seemed a lucky spot to have landed, indeed.
To complement Lucy’s je ne sais quoi, Audubon brought his own joie de vivre to the Bakewell household. Audubon let himself go before the Bakewells, giving them a one-man show of his exuberant spirit—a self-celebrating, scene-stealing penchant for performance that would stay with him even into his last years. Lucy’s younger brother, William Gifford Bakewell, captured some of Audubon’s eclectic talent in a quick survey of the sorts of prowess Audubon displayed before the family: “He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer, a clever rider … he was musical, a good fencer, danced well, and had some acquaintance with legeredemain tricks, worked in hair, and could plait willow baskets.”14
Audubon himself was hardly the type to downplay his personal profile with false modesty, and he later described himself in those days as being “extremely extravagant.” “I was ever fond of shooting, fishing, and riding on horseback,” he wrote, and he took considerable pride in doing those things well and, equally important, well equipped. His guns, fishing tackle, and horses had to be the best. So did his clothes. He admitted that going hunting in satin breeches, silk stockings, and a ruffled shirt might have been a bit foppish, “but it was one of my many foibles, and I shall not conceal it.”15 (Two decades later, when first in London, he would do something of the reverse, going against cultural context by dressing in the garb of an American backwoodsman, but once again using a surprising sartorial display to draw attention to himself.)
On the other hand, he noted that he was “temperate to an intemperate degree,” and his abstemious eating and drinking habits gave him an “uncommon, indeed iron, constitution.” He existed, he said, “on milk, fruits, and vegetables, with the addition of game or fish at times, but never had I swallowed a single glass of wine or spirits until the day of my wedding.”16 Not many Frenchmen could make that claim, nor could many citizens of early nineteenth-century America, a bibulous country that one scholar has called the “Alcoholic Republic.”17 But Audubon had left one nation behind and was just getting his footing in the other, and he took personal pride in making the transition on his own terms. Still, boastful though he could be about the “iron constitution” of his youth, he could also later look back at the time and see himself as a work in progress: “I had no vices, it is true, neither had I any high aims.”18
High aims or not, he still had birds. For all the time he spent hunting and fishing and riding and dancing and wooing Lucy, he always turned his attention back to his growing avian obsession. In the short time he first lived in Pennsylvania, he began a new project, “a series of drawings of the birds of America, and … a study of their habits.” The term “study” seems especially apt, because it was in the account of his time at Mill Grove that Audubon described a now-famous but then-novel experiment in bird banding, which still stands as a much-respected contribution to American ornithological practice. In early April of 1804, finding a pair of Eastern Pewees in one of the many caves above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon visited the cave day after day until “the birds became more familiarized to me, and, before a week had elapsed, the Pewees and myself were quite on terms of intimacy.” Audubon soon observed one of the most intimate moments of the pewees’ relationship: the laying of six eggs and the feeding of the five young birds that survived. By that time, he said, “The old birds no longer looked upon me as an enemy,” and they made no fuss when Audubon handled their young and “fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each, loose enough not to hurt the part, but so fastened that no exertions of theirs could remove it.” Sure enough, the next year he caught some of the banded pewees in roughly the same area, and he thus determined that they migrated back to the neighborhood of their birth.19 Audubon had not yet developed the systematic practices that might constitute a true scientific method, but with his persistent field observation and his innovative approach to bird identification, he was clearly taking some useful first steps toward becoming a serious naturalist.20
Audubon also wrote of using thread to make an innovative approach in his drawings of birds, an artistic technique that he would employ throughout his life. While again observing a pair of pewees and their “innocent attitudes,” he wrote, “a thought struck my Mind like a flash of light”—the idea that the only way to capture nature on paper would be to represent the birds as they were in life, “alive and Moving!” If alive, most birds are indeed moving, and they don’t tend to stay in place for long, so trying to draw them as they fly or flit from branch to branch could be frustrating, all but impossible, work for anyone. Audubon admitted he “could finish none of my Sketches.” He knew how to draw dead birds, of course: “After procuring a specimen, I hung it up either by the head, wing, or foot, and copied it as closely as I possibly could.”21
But dead birds just hung there, looking dead, and Audubon wanted to bring them back to life. He kept pondering the problem until early one morning, well before dawn, he had his “aha!” moment. He leapt out of bed, saddled his horse, and rode a fast five miles to Norristown, where, given the hour, “not a door was open.” Having time to kill and being too agitated just to wait, he went on to the Schuylkill River, jumped into the water and took a chilly bath, and then retraced his ride back to Norristown. This time he found an open shop, and he bought what he needed: thin wire. Racing back to Mill Grove, he grabbed his gun, rushed down to Perkiomen Creek, and shot the first bird he could find, a Belted Kingfisher. Using the wire he had just purchased, he fixed the dead bird to a board and got its head and tail looking just right, and then he drew it on the spot. “Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first attempt at Drawing actually from Nature,” he explained, “for then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if full of Life before me whenever I pressed its Lids aside with a finger.”22
Drawing from nature—or at least recently deceased specimens put in a natural-seeming pose—became an important part of Audubon’s artistic signature: “I have never drawn from a stuffed specimen.”23 In the end, that claim did not turn out to be altogether true, but it still served as a proud declaration of artistic independence.
Moving on from Mill Grove
Banding birds and arranging them in lifelike poses might have been fine ornithological and artistic activities, but neither one did much for the management of Mill Grove. Audubon’s father already knew his teenaged son didn’t yet have the talent and temperament to take on that sort of responsibility. When the boy was growing up in France, Jean Audubon had been mildly tolerant of his boy’s fascination with nature—“so pleased to see my various collections,” the younger Audubon wrote, “that he complimented me on my taste for such things”—but the father also wanted him to study something more practical, perhaps even more manly, like seamanship and engineering.24 When young Audubon failed at those things, Jean Audubon had good reason to feel exasperated by his son’s aversion to schooling and unprofitable-seeming
