John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

and his more pleasurable “thoughts of birds” requires reading with some measure of caution, if not skepticism.

      When it came to taking care of business, he tended to depict himself as inconsistent, impatient, and very easily distracted, sometimes making bad decisions, sometimes simply not caring enough to do the work before him. He wrote that he reveled in the delightful diversions of his business trips, which gave him ample opportunities to track down birds while he should have been looking after his merchandise: “Were I here to tell you that once, when travelling, and driving several horses before me laden with goods and dollars, I lost sight of the pack-saddles, and the cash they bore, to watch the motions of a warbler, I should repeat occurrences that happened a hundred times and more in those days.”⁷ Written some years after the fact in “Myself,” Audubon’s autobiographical sketch for his sons, this frank confession of failure—what might be called a form of professional attention deficit—did not go on to drive home a fatherly lesson about the need for better commitment to commercial affairs. Instead, Audubon drew a contrast between his fascination with birds and his indifference, even disdain, for day-to-day business.

      Just as Audubon used various written accounts of his life—particularly the autobiographical “Myself” but other briefer passages throughout Ornithological Biography as well—to complicate, at times even obfuscate, the details of his origins, so, too, did he use his writings to underscore his distaste for, and ultimate failure in, the world of commerce. In the more than two decades between first arriving in the United States in 1803 and then departing for Great Britain in 1826, to devote himself fully to the production of The Birds of America, Audubon did indeed have his financial ups and downs. He did well enough in his financial affairs to be able to acquire considerable property—both land and enslaved human beings—to create a comfortable existence, and then he lost essentially everything in the Panic of 1819.⁸ The failure was real, and the distaste no doubt just as real.

      His later portrayal of his struggles in those years can sometimes appear to be a near-parable about one man’s high-minded pursuit of art and science within the less lofty economic context of American society. The story is hardly that simple, though. In an era of ever-expanding economic activity in America, Audubon tried his hand at enough entrepreneurial enterprises to seem just as energetic and resilient as the next small-scale capitalist, and if he turned out to run up against financial failure at one point, so, too, did thousands of others. The point is not to declare his business narrative altogether true or false, but to be aware of the always self-conscious construction of the image he sought to offer the world. Audubon became a self-made man in more ways than one.

      The Birds and the Beauty of Mill Grove

      Arriving at his father’s farm in the autumn of 1803, Audubon alighted in an ornithologically fortunate spot. Situated along Perkiomen Creek just before it flows into a bend in the Schuylkill River, about twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia and less than a hundred miles east of the Kittatinny Ridge, Mill Grove lay within a major American flyway. According to a leading modern-day naturalist, the Kittatinny region is “one of the world’s most famous migration corridors,” a true “birding paradise” now, and probably even more so back in Audubon’s day.⁹ Contemporary observers certainly celebrated the avian abundance of eastern Pennsylvania. William Bartram, whose 1791 Travels became one of the best works of natural history in the new nation, wrote about bird migrations through Pennsylvania, taking happy note of “those beautiful creatures, which annually people and harmonise our forests and groves, in the spring and summer seasons.”¹⁰ From his professorial post at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton likewise studied the multitudes of birds that passed within eighty miles of Philadelphia, from the rarely seen “Occasional Visitants,” such as the Great White Owl (or Snowy Owl), to the more regular arrivals of “Passeres,” none more numerous than the massive flocks of Passenger Pigeons. Barton attributed part of the attraction to the region’s rural areas, where “the hand of man, by clearing and by cultivating the surface of the earth, contributes essentially to the greater uniformity in the temperature of climates,” thus making the environment more inviting to migrants. In turn, the annual migrations also influenced human behavior. He pointed, for instance, to the Pewee, “one of the earliest Spring birds of passage,” typically arriving in the vicinity in mid-March: “We have seldom hard frosts after the arrival of this bird, which seems to give a pretty confident assurance to the farmer, that he may very soon begin to open the ground and plant.”¹¹

      Figure 1. Mill Grove Farm, Perkiomen Creek, Pennsylvania, by Thomas Birch, ca. 1820. Oil on wood panel, 16 1/4 x 24 3/8 in. Object #1946.161. New-York Historical Society.

      Mill Grove thus provided the perfect place for a bird-conscious boy like Audubon. He seemed little inclined to worry much about the seasonal call to “open the ground and plant,” leaving most of the agricultural concerns to the farm’s tenant, William Thomas, and his family. Instead, Audubon admitted that living in this new place liberated him and allowed him to indulge in all the engaging activities he had enjoyed back in France: “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment,” he wrote; “cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.”¹²

      He did get to know the neighbors, and he came to care quite a bit about one of them, the young woman who would become his wife. Just across the road from Mill Grove stood another farm, Fatland Ford, which had lately come into the possession of another recently arrived immigrant, 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