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Author: Robert Francis
Charity to the Outdoor Poor
I woke up last Monday morning and found my world blanketed with snow. Outside my window, I saw dozens of house sparrows mobbing the neighbor’s bird feeder. These birds are aggressive and disorderly on a good day, and the snow seemed to have sent them into overdrive. Six inches of powder had covered up their…
Dining with Robins
If anyone has the claim to being America’s best-loved bird, it’s the robin. These cheerful and universally recognized creatures love hanging out in the front lawn, pulling up earthworms and gorging themselves on berries. They’re joyfully welcomed as the first sign of spring, and their cheerful chirps brighten moods wherever they’re found, although they often…
Happy Bird Day
“The Governor was there, and the children, the bird-boxes, and the young trees. And was there ever a brighter or more fitting day for a children and bird jubilee!” This is how the Pittsburgh Gazette Times opened their reporting on the Bird Day celebration held in Carrick, Pennsylvania on April 11, 1912. Two thousand flag-waving…
Birds We’ve Lost, and Birds We Can Still Save
Note: This is part 3 of a series on the Carolina Parakeet, America’s only native parrot. Part 1 talks about what it was like sharing a world with these birds, and part 2 is about how we drove them extinct. For the last few years I’ve used John James Audubon’s 1827 painting of Carolina Parakeets as my phone’s wallpaper….
Doomed to an Early Extinction: How we lost the Carolina Parakeet, America’s only native parrot.
Note: This is part 2 of a series on the now-extinct Carolina Parakeet. Read part 1 here. As America’s first ornithologist, Alexander Wilson needed samples of each bird he studied. This meant killing a lot of birds. Wilson, a Scotsman who had made America his home, was undertaking an audacious project to paint every one…
We Used to Have Parrots
At the northern tip of Kentucky there’s a mineral spring called Big Bone Lick. Some of the earliest Europeans to arrive at the spring found massive bones sticking out of the mud, left by enormous animals that had evidently gotten stuck while licking up the salty water that the spring brought to the surface (to…
Canaries in Coal Mines
Sometime between 7:00 and 7:30AM the morning of November 6, 1922, a stray spark ignited a pocket of gas deep beneath the town of Spangler, Pennsylvania. Several men working inside the Reilly coal mine were immediately killed by the blast, thrown against the cave wall by the force of the explosion that also caved in…
America’s Favorite Bird
Shrewdness. Intelligence. Capability to endure a vast amount of exposure and hardship. Skill at telling male and female birds apart. These were the most important characteristics to succeed in the international canary trade, at least according to George Holden, who painted a vivid portrait of the arduous work of ferrying the birds from their birthplace…
When Birds Meant Food
Looking back at the pieces I’ve written since I started this newsletter last September, I realize that an uncomfortably large number of posts deal with killing birds, often for their meat, sometimes out of necessity, and many times just for fun. These stories are not very comfortable or pleasant to think about. But it’s important…