These are the stories of the birds of America – and the people who named them, ate them, studied them, and saved them.
Last October, I flew back home to South Dakota to visit my parents for apple cider season. My dad planted an apple orchard years ago, and coming back to make apple cider with family and friends is my favorite fall tradition. My parents live a bit outside of town, and one evening at twilight, I…
Until phonographs became commercially available at the end of the 19th century, the only way you could hear a song was to be in the presence of someone, human or otherwise, who was making music. There was no chatter of a radio or melody from a record player to serve as the backdrop of daily…
While traveling through the South in 1905, the writer Dan Beard had the questionable pleasure of meeting an eccentric character in a small Georgia town who invited Beard over to watch him feed his chickens, a term which the man evidently used quite loosely. “At his call of ‘cluck, cluck’”, wrote Beard, “there appeared two…