These are the stories of the birds of America – and the people who named them, ate them, studied them, and saved them.
From 1936 to 1938, an army of formerly-unemployed writers hired under the Works Progress Administration traveled South to collect the life histories of aging women and men born into slavery. The Federal Writers Project was just one of many depression-era initiatives designed to get blue- and white-collared Americans back to work, and part of the…
In 1883, the New York State Association for the Protection of Fish and Game faced a problem: there were no more passenger pigeons for their annual pigeon shoot. Every year, the Association’s assembly drew massive crowds with a pigeon-shooting contest that consumed upwards of twenty thousand birds, where contestants took turns blasting away at pigeons…
Any given weekday morning during spring and fall migration, you can probably find me wandering the US Capitol Grounds looking for the colorful neotropical songbirds that sweep through Washington, DC on their way to or from their northern breeding grounds. Dressed in business casual and standing slightly off the sidewalk, craning my head skyward trying…