Where it all began: on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, John James Audubon first glimpsed the curious birds of the New World that would become his lifelong passion. Now the Audubon Center at Mill Grove shares his home and his artistry with the conservation movement he continues to inspire

This is where it all began: here at Mill wood in eastern Pennsylvania, with its big farmhouse built of rough-cut local fieldstone, put a wrapper abouted now in a century's extension of ivy and set discreetly into a direction downward on the eastern shore of Perkiomen cove just above its entry into the Schuylkill River. Here a young John James Audubon settl on his arrival from France in 1803 to embark upon one of the most flamboyant and productive lifelong adventures in American history.

"Its fine woodlands, its extensive acres, its fields diademed with evergreen offered many controls to my pencil," the