Audubon's engagement ring : a spring story

Eastern phoebes are back in force, building their cup nests under bridges and eaves, singing their scratchy “fee-BEE!†song, and catching flies with quick sallies from a perch. A midsize flycatcher, and perhaps the one member of the family most acclimated to human presence, the phoebe is among the earliest landbird migrants to arrive in our area and the latest to depart.

Although phoebes are fairly nondescript gray birds, you can always tell them (if not by the song) from other flycatchers — including the forest-dependent Eastern wood-pewee, which will soon return to our region — by their incessant habit of wagging their tail up and down as they sit.

The phoebe figures prominently in the life story of John James Audubon, the seminal American bird artist and naturalist whose 224th birthday anniversary is this Sunday.

More than two centuries ago, in April 1804, Audubon was a strapping, 19-year-old French dandy living on property owned by his father outside Philadelphia, called Mill Grove. He had been sent there to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s army. While there, Audubon was expected to look after the property, including an iron mine that never really played out, and plan for a future in business. His great book of bird illustrations, “The Birds of America,†was not even a glimmer in his eye.

 But Audubon had other ideas. His budding interest in birds was already strong, and he had amassed an impressive portfolio of bird drawings begun in his youth in France. The call of the woods and fields and the Perkiomen Creek that flows alongside Mill Grove proved irresistible.

No doubt hormones were stirring, too, and serendipity took a hand in the form of the Bakewell family next door, who had recently emigrated from England. The eldest Bakewell child, Lucy, was a perfect match for Audubon: independent, educated — her family had known the Darwins and other prominent intellectuals back in England — and physically robust.

Pretty soon the youthful duo was rambling the woods together, and that spring they stumbled upon a cave on the banks of the Perkiomen. Inside the cave, they found the nests of what Audubon called “pewee flycatchers†— but we know today as Eastern phoebes.

John and Lucy spent many hours in the cave observing the birds, with Audubon drawing them and doing we know not what else — presumably whispering sweet nothings to each other. In a moment of grand inspiration, Audubon decided to approach the nestlings and, after many tries, devised a way of tying tiny silver threads around their legs. (Most modern biographers surmise that these “threads†were thin wire filaments.)

 With these bands on the birds’ legs, Audubon was able to discover that the phoebes, now grown up, returned to the same cave the following year to nest. As far as we know, this was the first experiment in bird banding — or, as the English say, “ringing†— ever conducted in America.

I like to imagine that, in some small way, an unconscious gesture, perhaps, Audubon had fashioned an “engagement ring†for his beloved Lucy. Four years later, they would marry and begin a lifetime together that was marred by tragedy and heartache, but ended in triumph. And like the phoebes in the cave, even through periods of separation and struggle, the Audubons always came back to the same place: to each other.

Fast forward to 2009, and our own phoebes, many generations removed from Audubon’s, are back to remind us of the endless renewal of spring.

Fred Baumgarten is a writer and naturalist living in Sharon. He can be reached at fredb58@sbcglobal.net.