These are the stories of the birds of America – and the people who named them, ate them, studied them, and saved them.
In 1916, a serious debate about cats was consuming the country’s attention. Conservationists blamed cats for being the greatest threat to the country’s bird life, while cat-lovers accused bird-lovers of hysteria. The conflict was often reduced to zero-sum terms, with the naturalist John Burroughs declaring that “the preservation of birds involves the nonpreservation of cats.”…
How many dollars is a Blue Jay worth to a farmer? It seems illogical, and even a little profane, to think about the economic returns that each bird brings for agriculture. Birds today seem completely irrelevant to crop yields, and many of them are severely threatened by habitat destruction and pesticides from farming. But a…
Between 1900 to 1915, more than three million Italians entered the United States, and many of them brought from their homeland the tradition of eating songbirds. Concerned conservationists watched these immigrants come ashore and fretted that “these people bring to America all their native predilection for potting the smallest birds that fly, all their poaching…