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…
Two years ago, my dear friend Molly asked me what topic I’d choose to write about if I were to write a book. “I don’t know, probably something about presidents and birds,” I said. I had been on a big presidential biographies kick and was also several years into a fixation on birds that was…
“So well and so widely known that its very name has passed into an epicurean proverb, the canvasback needs no introduction.” These words were doubtlessly true when they were written in 1901. But today, unless you are an avid hunter, birder, or historian of 19th-century American dining, I would guess that you do, in fact,…
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…
“Wherever there are large settlements of Italians,” wrote the prominent conservationist William Temple Hornaday in 1913, “the reports are the same. They swarm through the country every Sunday, and shoot every wild thing they see. Wherever there are large construction works, —railroads, canals or aqueducts, —look for bird slaughter, and you are sure to find…
“In St. Paul, Minnesota, the boys like to go to school, and when they get into the sixth grade it is hard to pry them out. At that stage in their schooling a wise board of education has instituted manual training, for every fourteen-year-old boy is a carpenter at heart. And they don’t make corner…