Author: Robert Francis

Until phonographs became commercially available at the end of the 19th century, the only way you could hear a song was to be in the presence of someone, human or otherwise, who was making music. There was no chatter of a radio or melody from a record player to serve as the backdrop of daily…

While traveling through the South in 1905, the writer Dan Beard had the questionable pleasure of meeting an eccentric character in a small Georgia town who invited Beard over to watch him feed his chickens, a term which the man evidently used quite loosely. “At his call of ‘cluck, cluck’”, wrote Beard, “there appeared two…

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, feathers were an indispensable part of life for the vast majority of Americans. No, I don’t mean the elaborate and costly plumes that adorned the fancy hats of fancy ladies, nor do I mean the quills used for writing until they were eclipsed by the ball-point pen. Instead, it…

Last May, I found the lifeless body of a small, black and white bird lying among the tables and chairs in front of a restaurant along Washington DC’s Anacostia River waterfront. I stooped down and saw that it was a Blackpoll Warbler, with its diagnostic black cap, white cheek, and streaked chest, and then took…

If, on April 18, 1899, you happened to be in New York City and wished to have dinner at the finest restaurant in Manhattan, you might make your way to the Financial District and find the corner of Beaver and William streets. Above the entrance of a grand brick and brownstone building, flanked by two…

In December of 1882, a gaggle of 22 seasick and presumably very confused ostriches stepped out of an ocean liner and onto the docks of New York City. For the last several months, these hapless birds had been making the arduous sea voyage from Cape Town to Buenos Aires, and then to New York. As…

In the precarious early days of the American colonies, European settlers mostly deemed birds worthy of attention to the degree that they could help them scratch out a subsistence. Yet even though it had no practical use, the miniscule hummingbird immediately captivated colonizers with its “variable glittering Colours”[1] and pugnacious behavior. In 1680 one educated…

On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to rock…

The first waves of Spanish conquistadores pillaging their way through the Yucatan in search of gold and glory found another treasure, in the form of a large, meaty, and mostly flightless bird that had been domesticated by the Aztec people and their ancestors. The closest thing in the Spanish experience to the huehxōlō-tl, as the…

The end of the 19th century was a devastating period for America’s birds. Market hunting at an industrial scale, combined with the leveling of forests, draining of swamps, and plowing under of grasslands threatened one species after another with complete destruction. While some species stepped back from the brink with the help of increasingly strict…