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 children gathered to hear Governor John Tener’s remarks on the importance of protecting birds, which the embarrassingly effusive newspaper called “one of the best speeches of his life.” 

The crowd of students was probably more excited about the prizes they’d get as soon as the governor stopped talking. Pennsylvania’s state game commissioner passed out five hundred birdhouses and five hundred cherry tree saplings to help the kids give food and shelter to their local birds. With all its characteristic exaggeration, the newspaper said the participating children were “fairly quivering with delight.”¹

The Bird Day celebration was the culmination of a year of nature study and observation, and as William Temple Hornaday wrote two years later, these efforts “transformed the schools of Carrick into seething masses of children militantly enthusiastic in the protection of birds.”²

Carrick was hardly alone in celebrating Bird Day. Although governors weren’t usually on the invite list, schools and communities in every state in the country enthusiastically celebrated this now-defunct holiday throughout the first three decades of the 20th century. In more than twenty-five states, Bird Day was designated by legislative acts and governor’s proclamations, where it was often paired with Arbor Day. In other states, schools still celebrated the occasion with poetry readings, dramatic performances, bird walks, and activities to help house, feed, and protect birds. Everywhere it was practiced, Bird Day was inspired by a concern over dramatically declining bird numbers, and a belief that the best response was to teach the rising generation to love and protect birds. 

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Bird Day got its start eighteen years before Carrick’s celebration and seventy-five miles to the north, in another small Pennsylvania town named Oil City. In that era, a national movement called nature study was pushing for students to get a hands-on outdoor education, driven by a concern about rising environmental destruction. The superintendent of Oil City’s schools, Charles Babcock, wanted to find a way to encourage students who were learning about birds as part of the school’s nature study program. He thought that organizing a Bird Day celebration, modeled after Arbor Day, would be a memorable way to do it. 

Babcock was a man of no small ambitions. To get his students excited about the celebration, and possibly to satisfy grander aspirations than what Oil City could fulfill, he wrote letters to the country’s leading luminaries in nature and ornithology to solicit their support. The response he received could not have been more encouraging. Pennsylvania’s Superintendent of Public Instruction said “in your plan to inaugurate a ‘Bird Day’ you have struck a capital idea.” The ornithologist Bradford Torrey called it “a new saints’ day in my calendar, so to speak.” The beloved naturalist John Burroughs wished, somewhat prophetically, that Babcock would “succeed in starting a movement that may extend to all the schools of the country.”

The most significant endorsement came from J. Sterling Morton, who had founded Arbor Day twenty years before, and was now the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Morton wrote back that the plan to establish Bird Day had his “cordial approval … Let us have a Bird Day,” he went on, “a day set apart from all the other days of the year to tell the children about the birds … to develop and intensify the sentiment of bird protection.”

With the blessing of these thought leaders in hand, Babcock went ahead with his plans. For weeks before the celebration, children in Oil City schools learned about birds in classes and collected observations of the robins and blue jays that visited the schoolyards. When the inaugural Bird Day arrived on May 4, 1894, “original compositions were read, informal discussions were held, talks by teachers were given, and the birds in literature were not forgotten or overlooked.”³

Over the next two years, the relatively sedate Bird Day celebration didn’t go much further than Oil City. Babcock kept augmenting the school’s festivities, incorporating “talks by pupils and teachers, comparing observations, giving localities of bird haunts, and general exchange of bird lore,” and closing the day with “a trip to the woods to listen to the vesper concert of our feathered brothers.”

The modest assessment one writer gave of the holiday was that “it bids fair to become a regular feature of the schools in Oil City at least.” Even so, Babcock believed that Bird Day was having an impact. “Our children generally know most of our bird residents, they also love them, and feel like protecting them. There has been a complete change in the relations existing between the small boy and the birds.”⁴

But with all of Charles Babcock’s outreach efforts, people were starting to pay attention. Two months after Oil City’s third annual Bird Day, the Bureau of Biological Survey (today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) published a circular titled Bird Day in the Schools, arguing that a holiday “devoted to instructing the children in the value of our native birds and the best means of protecting them, might with propriety be added to the school calendar.” Later that month, the US Department of Agriculture issued Secretary Morton’s 1894 letter to Charles Babcock as a department circular. The federal government had come out firmly in support of Bird Day, and the rest of the country took notice. 

In 1897, Wisconsin became the first state to pass a Bird Day law. The governor issued a proclamation naming April 29 as Arbor and Bird Day, and recommended “that all public schools, colleges and other educational institutions of the state, and citizens generally, do observe the same in a proper manner.”⁵

State after state clamored to follow Wisconsin’s lead. Iowans organized their state’s Audubon Society in 1898, and its first initiative was establishing Bird Day in public schools. In 1899, the Omaha Sunday World-Herald argued that the holiday should be adopted statewide, since the value of birds was “inestimable, and the rising generation should be taught the importance of this sentiment by an observance of ‘Bird Day’ in Nebraska.” The Minnesota Audubon Society celebrated their state’s passage of an official Bird Day in 1899 by writing, “through this law we can do more towards bird protection than we could accomplish in many years’ labor without it … as you educate the child so you mould the man.”⁶

Yet for all the institutional support it was getting, Bird Day was at its heart a grassroots movement, and schools did not wait for official approval before organizing Bird Day celebrations. A 1901 New York Times article made the claim that “many cities and towns in States where there is no State law observe the day; every State in the Union has been so represented.” And it wasn’t just schools that got involved. Maine commemorated its State Bird Day with “special features in many theaters,” while Kansas celebrated Bird Week by broadcasting lectures on the economic importance of birds by radio.⁷

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The turn of the century was a time of passionate concern over the disappearance of the country’s birds. Passenger pigeons had vanished from the wild due to overhunting and ducks and other game birds were becoming alarmingly rare. A craze for feathered hats was clearing wetlands of herons and egrets, while nature writers warned of the destruction that cats, Italian immigrants, and nest-raiding schoolboys rained down on songbirds. 

Protecting these birds wasn’t just a sentimental matter. Economic ornithologists were publishing study after study showing that birds played a vital role protecting crops from insect pests, accompanied by dire warnings. “Without the services rendered by birds,” wrote the famous ornithologist Frank Chapman, “the ravages of the animals they prey upon would render the earth uninhabitable.”⁸

Conservationists were hopeful that Bird Day could help eliminate the share of bird-killing for which children were responsible. As an 1899 article in Bird-Lore magazine put it, “The boy who thus comes into fellowship with birds will not delight in beanshooters or find his chief joy in robbing birds’ nests and violating game laws; while his sister will try to find something more ornamental for her hat than slaughtered birds.” 

But more significantly, activists believed that education could durably shift an entire generation’s relationship with wildlife. Most states had passed laws protecting birds, but conservationists worried that legislation could “not be expected to accomplish much unless supported by popular sentiment in favor of bird protection.”⁹ And so they went straight to the source. Through Junior Audubon Societies, through birdhouse-building contests, and now through Bird Day, they attempted to transform children into adults that not only avoided harming birds, but became fierce advocates for their protection.

State governments were also enthusiastic about the movement, and not just because they liked birds. Ohio’s governor speculated that “a boy that would rob a bird’s nest or hurt a lost dog is likely to become a citizen both dishonest and dangerous,” while California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction reminded teachers that “it is really a patriotic duty you owe to the commonwealth, to plant in the minds of the young people [that birds] are vital elements in our prosperity for all time to come.”¹⁰

In some states, the legislation establishing Bird Day gave guidelines about what the day should include. Iowa’s 1927 law stated that “it should be the duty of all public schools to observe said day by devoting a part thereof to a special study of birds, their habits, their usefulness, and the best means of protection.” California’s law, passed in 1909, directed schools to instruct children “on the economic value of birds and trees, and the promotion of a spirit of protection towards them.”

Teachers got more tangible help from annual guides or circulars published by state superintendents of education. These manuals, which were often combined with Arbor Day materials, usually included a proclamation by the governor, readings about different bird species, practical suggestions on birdhouse construction, and dozens of pages of sentimental poems on the benefits of protecting birds. 

A consistent message was that Bird Day shouldn’t be the starting point for learning about birds, but an exclamation point following months of preparation. Charles Babcock suggested starting in January and dedicating twenty minutes twice a week to bird study to prepare for a Bird Day celebration in May. Nevertheless, the frequent reminders that Bird Day should be more than the bland repetition of a standardized program suggests that in some schools it was little more than that. 

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By 1930, at least twenty-five states had passed laws establishing Bird Day.¹¹ And whether it had official recognition or not, schools in every state celebrated the occasion. But as the Great Depression began to set in, the country’s attention moved elsewhere. In 1933, the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction cut the size of the annual Arbor and Bird Day manual in half to lower costs, but even so “its publication was criticised [sic] as an unnecessary use of public funds.”¹² After a twenty-five year run, that was the last time Illinois issued an Arbor and Bird Day manual. 

Some governors continued issuing Bird Day proclamations into the 1940s and 1950s where their state laws required it. But the movement had clearly lost its momentum. Nature study had gone out of fashion, and the development of cheap and effective pesticides meant that farmers no longer needed to rely on birds to protect crops. Maine’s 1948 Arbor and Bird Day declaration noted that “the National Arborist Association, concerned lest the institution of Arbor Day lose significance, now seeks to have April 30 designated for the annual observance in all states.” But no one was lobbying on behalf of Bird Day, and whatever was left of it was absorbed by Earth Day in 1970.

Fortunately, we don’t live in a world entirely empty of bird days. Conservation organizations celebrate World Migratory Bird Day in May, and use the occasion to lead educational programming. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology holds Big Day competitions for birders to find as many species as possible in twenty-four hours, while the National Audubon Society carries out annual Christmas Bird Counts — a winter bird census, but festive. All of these celebrations are fun and useful for conservation. But it’s as true now as it was a hundred years ago that a holiday for birds is only as impactful as it is integrated into society. 

What’s remarkable to me about Bird Day is how it exemplified this commitment from every level of society. Federal agencies spoke out in its favor and shared resources to support the movement. State legislatures passed Bird Day bills, governors wrote Bird Day proclamations, and education superintendents distributed Bird Day manuals. Audubon Societies gave lectures in schools and shared lesson plans. Teachers spent months preparing their students to celebrate Bird Day, and students spent months writing essays, practicing poems, and observing birds in the schoolyard. 

I’d be delighted if we started celebrating Bird Day again. But to turn back the forces that have wiped out three billion North American birds in the last fifty years, we’ll need to do more than just hold annual celebrations. We need a movement that mobilizes society all the way from the federal government down to schoolchildren in the interest of birds. It worked a hundred years ago, and I believe it can work again.

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1. This emotion was apparently widespread — the superintendent of schools was “simply a mass of delight” following the day’s proceedings. “Tener Talks to Carrick Tots on Bird Day,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, April 12, 1912. ↩︎
2. Hornaday, William Temple. Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation. United States: C. Scribner’s sons, 1913. ↩︎
3. Babcock, Charles Almanzo. Bird Day: How to Prepare for it. United States: Silver, Burdett, 1901. ↩︎
4. Palmer, Theodore Sherman. Bird Day in the Schools. United States Department of Agriculture, Division of Biological Survey. Circular No. 17. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896. ↩︎
5. Emery, J. Q.  “Arbor and Bird Day for Wisconsin Schools.” State of Wisconsin, Department of Public Instruction. 1898. ↩︎
6. “Reports of State Societies: Iowa.” Bird-Lore, Vol. 1 No. 2, 1899; Armitage, Kevin C. “Bird day for kids: Progressive conservation in theory and practice.” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (2007): 528-551; “Reports of State Societies: Minnesota.” Bird-Lore, Vol. 1 No. 2, 1899. ↩︎
7. “Bird Day for Children: Eight States Have One and New York Educators Want It.” New York Times, April 21, 1901; “Report of Arthur H. Norton, Field Agent for Maine.” Bird-Lore, vol. 27. United States: National Audubon Society, 1925; “Reports of State Societies and Bird Clubs.” Bird-Lore, vol. 27. United States: National Audubon Society, 1925. ↩︎
8. Trafton, Gilbert Haven. Bird Friends: A Complete Bird Book for Americans. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 1916. ↩︎
9. Palmer, Theodore Sherman. Bird Day in the Schools. United States Department of Agriculture, Division of Biological Survey. Circular No. 17. United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896. ↩︎
10. State of Ohio Department of Public Instruction. Arbor and Bird Day Proclamation, Ohio Arbor Day Program. Bulletin No. 2, Whole Number 14. 1916; California. Bird and arbor day for 1911 in the schools of California. [Sacramento, 1911]. ↩︎
11. Abbey, M. J. “Arbor and Bird Day Manual.” West Virginia School of Agriculture, Vol. 5 no. 66. 1916. ↩︎
12. Blair, Francis. “Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, 1932-1934.” Illinois. Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. 1934. ↩︎