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….
Author: Robert Francis
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…
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…