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…
Author: Robert Francis
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…
Deadly Pillars of Light
To make a safe landing, one of the many pieces of data that pilots need is the height of clouds above the landing strip. Because clouds block a pilot’s vision, a low cloud bank can make it difficult, even dangerous, for planes to approach an airport. In 1946, a new machine was put into widespread…
Birds and Slavery
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…
“An Innocent Recreation”: Shooting Pigeons for Sport
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…
Capital Birds
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…
Our Birdy Presidents
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…
Eating King Can
“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,…