To Europeans, America’s cardinals and mockingbirds were plenty exotic—and they couldn’t get enough of them.

“You must have a hobby of some kind in these parts, or you will die,” wrote the Reverend C. D. Farrar, “therefore take my tip and go in for birds.”¹ Reverend Farrar of Yorkshire was one of England’s more prominent aviculturists at the turn of the century, and he dedicated just as much ink to the care of cage birds as to the care of his flock. Leading his Anglican congregation was just a day job compared to rearing exotic birds, and he preached its merits with missionary zeal.

In the June 1902 issue of the London-based Avicultural Magazine, Reverend Farrar dispensed some advice to amateurs in the hobby, those who had built their aviary but hadn’t yet decided which birds to stick in it. Go to dealers of good repute, he suggested, and don’t spring for cheap bargains. Buy birds in the summer, then keep them in quarantine for a few weeks. As to which ones to buy, Farrar put together a list of twenty-eight recommendations for beginners. Among them he suggests white-eyes from East Asia, which look like “a little girl wearing granny’s specs”; oriental magpie-robins, from India, which are “always getting into mischief”; and superb tanagers, from Brazil, which are “fairly hardy,” and “lovely even in death.” Zebra waxbills, from southern Africa, were affordable and widely available. “Let us thank God,” he proclaimed, “that there are birds within the reach of all!”² With a small investment, anyone could have a collection of birds spanning every corner of the world.

Among the birds that Farrar felt compelled to recommend, there were also three from the United States, namely the scarlet tanager, which “will always delight and surprise with its beauty,” the Virginia cardinal, which “enlivens the dulness of winter like the scarlet coat of the huntsman on the snow,” and the painted bunting, “a gorgeous fellow.” These most colorful and charismatic of America’s wild species once formed part of a global community of exotic birds, one small part of the colonial project of capturing the world’s brightest and most interesting creatures from the imperial frontier and bringing them back to Europe as pets. Outside of their native contexts, each of these birds took their place as live decor, household entertainment, status symbol, or collectible to the “specialist hobbyists who collect animals like other people collect stamps.”³

As soon as Europeans reached the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean became a busy highway transporting people, livestock, crops, weeds, bugs, and diseases between the continents. While colonizers were most interested in extracting “merchantable commodities” and sending them back to Europe, novelties were an important part of the exchange as well. Affluent English settlers imported nightingales, bullfinches, starlings, and linnets to remind them of the English countryside, and in return they sent back the most eye-catching birds that America could offer.

The northern cardinal’s stunning crimson feathers quickly made it one of the most popular exports. In 1688, one English traveler wrote about how boys in Virginia would catch and sell cardinals “to the Merchants for about six Pence apiece; by whom they are brought for England.” In an English guide to cage birds published in 1740, the cardinal (which it calls “The Red Bird” or “Virginia Nightingale”) was only one of two foreign birds mentioned—the other was the ubiquitous canary. Later guides considered the cardinal “too well known to require description, everyone is well acquainted with the brilliant crimson plumage of the male.”⁴

America’s export in cage birds stayed small-scale, if steady, until the mid-1800s, when German firms set up efficient supply chains to bring canaries to the United States and return to Europe with their American counterparts. As one British guide explained in 1878, “Large numbers of Indigo-birds are brought to Europe every summer, and mostly by German Canary dealers, who go out to America with German Canaries and Bullfinches, and bring back Indigo-birds and Nonpareil Finches.” This was the reason, the guide went on, that imported American birds were “as a rule, offered for sale in German canary-cages.”⁵

Mockingbirds were another immensely popular export. Although their gray-and-white plumage is comparatively drab, their impressive ability to mimic any other bird’s song, or any other noise for that matter, made them favorite pets both at home and abroad. Ranking cage birds could be as much a question of patriotism as preference, and one British guide defended the superiority of their native nightingale against the foreign upstart: “According to American writers, the Mocking-bird is, of all cage-birds, the very best songster, an opinion which is, however, not generally shared in Europe.” Another book weighted in with typical English dryness: “Enthusiastic American writers have named the Cardinal Grosbeak ‘Virginian Nightingale,’ and have described his song as equal or superior to that of the European Nightingale. Tastes differ.”⁶ These minor disagreements didn’t stop thousands of Germans, English, French, and Scandinavians from keeping cardinals and mockingbirds as pets.

While most American birds couldn’t boast the same colors as parrots and tanagers imported from the tropics, one advantage they did have was their tolerance of cold weather. The eastern bluebird, according to one guide, “thrives well in open-air aviaries, and is easily kept for years without artificial heat in winter.” Another guide recommended the indigo bunting, which “being a Northern bird, is somewhat better adapted to withstand the cold climates.” All the same, one writer remarked in 1896 that he found it “somewhat curious that fewer birds should be imported from America than from South Africa or Australia.”⁷

Most American cage birds were known by different names in the trade than they were domestically. Painted buntings, found in the American south, are a riot of blue, red, and green, and this exuberant color scheme earned them the name nonpareil, meaning “without equal” in French. In his 1888 guide to pet birds, George Holden wrote how they were “largely exported to the various European countries, where of late years they have become great favorites . . . At Havre and Paris immense numbers of them are sold yearly.”⁸

Eastern bluebirds were another popular export, and they too went by a confusing array of names. In England they were called Blue Robins and Blue Nightingales. Their German name translated “Blue Cottage Songster,” because allegedly, “wherever a settler builds a cottage in North America, there the Blue-bird greets him, approaches his dwelling with entire confidence, and forthwith builds his nest.” For the most dedicated aviculturists, the greatest prize was to succeed in breeding birds in captivity. Bluebirds reached this landmark by 1888, by which point “all the zoological gardens of Europe breed them so extensively, that there is no need of exporting them to supply the demand.”⁹

But most other birds were tougher nuts to crack. Rev. C. D. Farrar gives us a sense of the passion this sort of project could inspire: “A wise man has somewhere said ‘that if you want to know what a man is, examine his castles in the air.’ Here is one of mine, to breed the American Cat-bird.” It didn’t help that importers almost exclusively brought over colorful singing males and left their drab and silent female counterparts back in America. With indigo buntings, for example, “among every hundred males imported there are only a very few females, and it is by no means easy to obtain a hen-bird when such a one happens to be wanted.”¹⁰

Cardinals, mockingbirds, painted buntings, scarlet tanagers, and rose-breasted grosbeaks were all shipped wholesale and widely available, but nearly every other American bird, it seems, was also shipped overseas at some point. In Germany, the red-shouldered meadow-starling (red-winged blackbird) was “one of the most abundantly, annually, and regularly seen of Starlings in the market,” while the boat-tailed troupial (boat-tailed grackle) “only comes into the market extremely rarely.” The Swainson’s thrush “comes only singly from time to time in the bird market, yet it has appeared several times in the great bird shows in Berlin.” The Baltimore hangnest (Baltimore oriole) “has always been common in the German Gardens,” and “in the bird market it is always readily bought.” Blue jays were a common sight at zoos, but “on account of its high price . . . it is rarely to be found in private collections.”¹¹

While these birds all seem like more or less conventional picks, there was really no limit to what birds an enthusiast might keep. Turning a wild bird into a pet was as simple (or as complicated) as getting it in a cage. One letter from an English writer to Avicultural Magazine describes an experiment keeping burrowing owls: “In captivity these little Owls are very easily kept… Mr. Meade-Waldo, who has bred this species several times in his aviaries, tells me that the young ones burrow as soon as they can run.”¹² An 1888 price list from an American dealer in cage birds gives a sense of the great variety one might find, listing “woodpeckers, any variety,” flamingos, ravens, “crows, tame and trained,” alongside foreign birds like macaws, cockatoos, and ostriches. The only limitation was what the market could provide.

Even though the United States was a relatively minor exporter, the international market still drained enough songbirds from its forests to cause alarm. As early as 1808, the ornithologist Alexander Wilson noticed that the trapping of mockingbirds around Philadelphia had “rendered this bird extremely scarce for an extent of several miles around the city.” The bird protection movement which began in the 1880s with opposition to the plume trade and market hunting also addressed the market for cage birds. Beginning in 1886 one state after another passed a model law that banned the killing, capture, and sale of songbirds, and by 1906 one U.S. Department of Agriculture report concluded that “the once extensive trade in native American birds has dwindled to the vanishing point.” While small batches of cardinals or mockingbirds were still occasionally smuggled to Europe, “the life of the trade is gone.”¹³

Across the Atlantic, Europeans watched the diminishing supply of American songbirds with dismay. In 1892 a Wisconsin newspaper reported that “the exportations of American birds has of late diminished in number, due to laws prohibiting this which have gone into effect in a number of our States.” From there, American birds only became harder to buy, and a British cage bird guide from 1909 wrote conclusively that birds like American Goldfinches used to be regularly imported until “this traffic [was] put a stop to by the existing laws for the protection of birds in the United States.” By 1920 American birds like the Indigo Bunting were “not easy to get nowadays.” If Europeans still wanted to legally import North America’s birds, they’d have to look to Mexico.¹⁴

There’s an ironic hypocrisy in the United States ending the export of their wild songbirds when they did. Since 1918, the capture and export of America’s wild birds has been federally prohibited. But for another seventy years, the United States kept importing wild-caught birds from the rest of the world. Until they finally ended the practice in 1994, the United States was the world’s largest market for wild-caught parrots. The hundreds of thousands of wild birds we imported from Latin America, Africa, and Asia drove some species to the brink of extinction. While America quickly recognized the damaging impact that exporting its wild birds had on its own biodiversity, it took nearly a century to address the harm it was causing abroad.

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1. Farrar, C. D. Birdroom and Aviary: Trials and Triumphs of a Yorkshire Parson. London: F. V. White & Co. 1910. ↩︎
2. Farrar, C. D. “On the Stocking of Aviaries.” The Avicultural Magazine, vol. 8, no. 8, June, 1902, p. 162. ↩︎
3. Serpell, James. “In the Company of Animals.” Cambridge: University Press. 1986. ↩︎
4. The Bird-fancer’s [sic] Recreation: Being Curious Remarks on the Nature of Song-birds, with Choice Instructions Concerning the Taking, Feeding, Breeding and Teaching Them, and to Know the Cock from the Hen. United Kingdom: T. Ward, 1740; Fillmaker, H. R. “The Grosbeaks.” The Avicultural Magazine. Vol. 2, no. 23. September 1896. ↩︎
5. Blakston, W., Swaysland, W., and Wiener, August. The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds, British and Foreign. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 1878. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. Blakston, W., Swaysland, W., and Wiener, August. The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds, British and Foreign. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 1878; Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888; Greene, William Thomas. Feathered Friends Old and New. United Kingdom: L. Upcott Gill, 1896. ↩︎
8. Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888. ↩︎
9. Blakston, W., Swaysland, W., and Wiener, August. The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds, British and Foreign. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 1878; Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds. United States: G.H. Holden, 1888 ↩︎
10. Farrar, C. D. “The Nesting of the Cat-Bird.” The Avicultural Magazine, vol. 8, no. 10, July, 1902, p. 226; Blakston, W., Swaysland, W., and Wiener, August. The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds, British and Foreign. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. 1878. ↩︎
11. Butler, Arthur. Foreign Birds for Cage and Aviary, Volume 2. London: The Feathered World. 1909. ↩︎
12. Seth-Smith, D. “The Burrowing Owl.” The Avicultural Magazine, vol. 8, no. 9, July, 1902, p. 193. ↩︎
13. Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep. 1810; Oldys, Henry. “Cage-Bird Traffic of the United States.” US Department of Agriculture. Yearbook of agriculture. 1906. N.p.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907. ↩︎
14. Eagle River review. (Eagle River, Wis.), 17 March 1892. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress; Butler, Arthur. Foreign Birds for Cage and Aviary. London: The Feathered World. 1909; Finn, Frank. Frank Finn’s Manual on Cage Birds. London: Cage Birds. 1920. ↩︎