while the birds seemed to lift Wilson’s spirits, his work held his mood in check. Wilson was better paid at the Union School than he ever had been, but he knew now that teaching was not for him. He hated its confinement above all. Indeed, he was now convinced that the grinding repetitiveness of the classroom was killing him. “Close application to my profession, which I have followed since November 1795,” he wrote to a friend, “has deeply injured my constitution, the more so, that my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of anyone’s in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher’s life.”
Troculus colubris: The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
I ask of you, kind reader, who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover?
—Ornithological Biography
While Wilson walked in the woods and practiced his draftsmanship, drawing and redrawing his owl, someone else was watching the birds thirty miles away. The eighteen-year-old who now called himself John James Audubon had arrived at his father’s estate, Mill Grove, in late summer of 1803. The final leg of his journey from France had proved more difficult than the ocean crossing. Two weeks earlier, Audubon had left his ship the instant it docked in New York and walked all the way into Greenwich Village, where his father had arranged a line of credit with a bank. Audubon, excited by the city, perhaps failed to notice an uneasy quiet in the streets. Yellow fever had broken out in New York that summer, and by the time Audubon made his way back to the docks he was feeling unwell. His condition deteriorated so quickly that the captain, a man named John Smith, hired a carriage and hurried him out of the city. He ended up at a boardinghouse run by two Quaker ladies who cared for him as his condition first turned grave and then, amazingly, improved just as rapidly.
Audubon’s first weeks after finally reaching Mill Grove were awkward. His English was all but nonexistent, and his exact status at the estate was ambiguous. The elder Audubon was having trouble managing his property from France, and was at odds with both his American agent in Philadelphia (who, among other things, evidently was to handle John James’s modest allowance) and with François Dacosta, the man he’d sent over from Nantes to develop the lead mine on the property. Audubon’s father and Dacosta had entered into an agreement for shared ownership of Mill Grove that was a continually evolving tangle of bonds, mortgages, and promises to split future proceeds from the mine. To the extent that anybody was actually running the place, it seemed to be the tenant farmer, a Quaker named William Thomas. Thomas tilled the land, tended the livestock, operated the lumber and grist mill, and took care of the large house. Audubon, apparently oblivious to these arrangements, assumed he was in charge of Mill Grove. But he showed little interest in accepting any daily responsibilities. Instead, he went hunting.
For a young man already in love with the outdoors and fascinated by wildlife, Mill Grove was a dream come true. It was near the confluence of Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Audubon would recall the place later in his life as his “beautiful American plantation.” The house, already forty years old, was impressive—a sprawling, three-story stone structure topped by a dormered shake roof and several tall brick chimneys. Inside, it was a warren of small rooms and low ceilings. The floors were wide-planked southern yellow pine worn to a warm patina. The house and a compound of out-buildings stood on a hillside, at the end of a long drive. A wide veranda ran the length of the house in the rear, overlooking an expanse of lawn and pastureland falling away to the south on a long slope above Perkiomen Creek. The Perkiomen, more truly a river than a creek, was eighty yards wide at the foot of the hill, where it ran over a low dam built to power the mill. Being close to the main crossing point of the creek, the house featured a small addition on its west end, with a tavern in the basement and rooms for travelers above. The famous lead mine was in the front yard, only twenty paces from the entrance to the house. Its shaft was twelve feet across and went straight down for some distance before angling off beneath the hillside.
Audubon spent little time in the house. Every day he was up at dawn and into the woods with his gun. The countryside, just then beginning to color with the onset of fall, was spectacular. High bluffs flanked the grounds, and the ravines were cathedrals of old-growth beech and oak and chestnut. Hemlocks stood on the ridgetops. The bottoms, especially along the creek, were shaded by immense, thick-bodied sycamores. Recent surveys at Mill Grove have found 176 species of birds in the forest. In Audubon’s day there were more, including flocks of passenger pigeons that appeared from time to time.
The intensity of Audubon’s curiosity about the birds and animals in the forest was unflagging. In the evenings he practiced his violin and flute, but he also retreated to an upstairs room where he assembled a growing collection of specimens—nests, eggs, shed snakeskins, and now and then a freshly dispatched bird or small mammal that he practiced drawing. He was always reluctant to come home at the end of the day, and usually only returned after the dew had begun to settle and he had a full game bag hanging against his damp trousers. In a crevice in the rocks on one of the cliffs above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon discovered a grotto that became a favorite retreat. Phoebes nested there, and under his constant attentions the birds became so tame that Audubon could hold them in his hands. Curious as to whether they returned to the same nesting place every year, Audubon tied threads around their feet in hopes of identifying them in subsequent seasons. Audubon would later recall this as a time when he had not a care in the world, passing each day afoot in the woods, dressed in fancy coats and shirts with lace cuffs, or riding over the fields on one of his fine horses. The reality may have been more modest—it took him some months to save up for a new gun and a hunting dog—but Audubon’s claim of having spent these days in a kind of nature-induced trance was true.
Shortly after he got to Mill Grove, Audubon learned that a new family was moving in at a big house only a half-mile down the road. Their name was Bakewell. They were originally from Derbyshire, in England, and more recently by way of New Haven, Connecticut. Evidently they were well off. Expensive stocks of fancy-bred sheep and cattle arrived shortly, and the Bakewells renamed their estate Fatland Ford after a local legend about the richness of its soil. Like Mill Grove, the house at Fatland Ford—far bigger and grander than Audubon’s—commanded stunning vistas of the rolling countryside to the south and west. On a clear day, you could see from Fatland Ford all the way to Valley Forge.
Audubon was curious about the Bakewells. It was said that they had several handsome daughters, though he was more intrigued by the rumor that William Bakewell, the father, raised pointing dogs. But Audubon kept his distance. These people were, after all, English—countrymen of the enemies of his father. And although Audubon had slipped effortlessly into the role of young prince on his American plantation, he was painfully aware of his limited education and social experience, and that there were only a handful of English words that made sense to him. The Bakewells were sure to be much too sophisticated for his company.
But one day right after New Year’s, Audubon came upon William Bakewell when they were both out grouse hunting along Perkiomen Creek. Bakewell was friendly and reassuring, and insisted the young man come to Fatland Ford for a visit and a formal introduction to the Bakewell family. Audubon said he would, and after some delay, he nervously went.
Audubon never forgot that day. He went down the lane to Fatland Ford in the morning. A servant answered the door and quietly led him into the parlor, where he found himself alone with a girl who was sewing by the fire. She seemed momentarily surprised by her visitor, but stood politely and offered Audubon a seat. Her father, she said, was out but would return shortly. They sat. Audubon could not take his eyes off the girl, who continued to sew and now chatted amiably with her guest. Her name was Lucy. She was the Bakewells’ eldest daughter. In two days she would be eighteen.
Between stitches, Lucy studied the young man squirming in his chair and staring at her. She’d heard of her reclusive neighbor. The reality was unexpectedly