I went on the podcast to talk about Audubon, how he got so big, and how we deal with his legacy today. The podcast is a fantastic production, and this episode featured a guest appearance from an incredible talent you may have seen on Instagram, twelve-year-old Samuel Henderson, bird caller extraordinaire. Listen on Substack, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts!

HISTORY This Week™

Audubon’s Birds Come Home to Roost

October 12, 1820. John James Audubon—a failed shopkeeper, grist miller, and steamboat investor—sets off from Cincinnati on a flatboat down the Ohio River. He is bankrupt. The bank has taken everything except his clothes, his gun, and a portfolio of 62 bird drawings. His plan is to float south, paint every bird in America at life size, and sell the resul…

Listen now

20 days ago · 6 likes · 1 comment

Audubon is a fascinating and frustrating character, in large part because everything he says about his own life is a coin flip whether it’s true or another one of his self-serving fabrications. He didn’t just sell books and paintings. He was selling his image as an American woodsman.

Paired with his paintings, all of this self-mythologizing worked! Readers saw in Audubon frontier vigor, industriousness, creativity, and intelligence, an original American type. He rose above the critiques of effete and bespectacled closet naturalists, with their Latin names and musty specimens, plunging into the wilderness and returning with birds (or at least paintings of them) that no one had seen before.

Americans knew birds as part of their landscape and daily experience, and Audubon showed them in all their blood and vigor. He did for birds what an emerging generation of landscape painters like Thomas Cole was doing for America’s mountains, rivers, and shores—turning American nature into a reflection of the young republic’s grandeur, destiny, and distinctiveness. His paintings of birds became the way that Americans saw their birds. They joined America’s symbolic lexicon.

Audubon undoubtedly loved birds, and dedicated his life to them, at times recklessly. But like the skulls he stole from native graves, like the nine men, women, and children he enslaved and then sold to finance his dream, birds also served as currency. Each discovery was a chance to honor a patron or friend, a compelling reason to buy his books, and a notch in his belt that would secure his legacy.

In single-minded pursuit of becoming America’s greatest ornithologist, as in so many other areas of his life, Audubon stretched the truth, or fabricated lies outright, to increase the number of birds he could claim to have discovered. It’s these faults that make him such a deeply American figure—an immigrant, self-styled frontiersman, enslaver, plagiarizer, and self-promoter. Maybe he’s the ornithologist we deserved.

All the same, I wish he was just one more of the many colorful personalities in 19th-century history, an eccentric, obsessive bird-lover who dedicated his life to painting (and in many cases eating) every one of America’s birds. But because of his own wildly successful self-promotion, and the Audubon Society’s choice to hold him up as their symbol forty years after his death, he’s become someone you need to have opinions about. Can you separate his art from his scientific fraud? Does the recognizability of his name and the fundraising opportunities it represents outweigh his White supremacy? National Audubon decided that it does; many local Audubon chapters who recently changed their names have decided it does not.

Audubon is messy, fascinating, unreliable, infuriating, and unavoidable. In the podcast, we try to reckon with him as well as we can. Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

• What does it mean when a subspecies disappears? Two recent pieces give us some fascinating, sobering answers. wrote about how the extinction of a herbivorous subspecies of brown bear in California meant losing “an entire way of being alive.” wrote about how arbitrary taxonomic designations helped decide the fate of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow.

• ’s fantastic essay explores what was erased when Lewis and Clark were credited with discovering birds on their expedition to the Pacific.

• has a great new Substack charting America’s fascination with its reptiles, like the alligators you could order in the mail or the fad for wearing live lizards that began at the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

For now I’ll share a post that I originally published back in November 2023 about my favorite piece of lost media. Now get out and find some birds!

For just ten cents a show, movie-goers in Annapolis, Maryland had their choice of silent films at the Republic Theatre. The Destroying Angel told the dramatic (to some, sordid) tale of a young starlet whose succession of lovers all meet an untimely end. Viewers seeking a lighter option chose The Lamb, a comedy Western where a frail New Yorker proves his mettle. For those with kids in tow, however, the more appropriate option was The Spirit of Audubon.

Sitting down to watch The Spirit of Audubon in January, 1916, viewers would have been treated to a 30 minute film that was part drama, part nature documentary, and fully Audubon propaganda following a young girl who was a valiant protector of birds and a young boy who enjoys robbing their nests. After fighting about the proper treatment of birds, both children have the same dream, in which they are visited by the specter of John James Audubon, who spirited them away on a journey to visit the home of pelicans, gulls, and ibises. The children observed the birds “making their nests, feeding their young, making love in bird fashion and doing all the hundreds of things that make birds interesting the world over.”1 

When he awakes, the repentant boy rushes to apologize to his young friend, and finds her at a “big Audubon celebration, which is being held by lovers of birds in honor of the big man who first went on record as the friend of the little feathered things.” After becoming enraptured with the parades and speeches, the young boy and his father pledge to join the society, and the film closes as “the spirit of Audubon rises above the top of the monument and smiles lovingly at his latest adherents.”2

During the Silent Film era, the Audubon Society and other conservation-minded individuals created dozens of motion pictures. Some were dramas produced in collaboration with major studios. Many more were documentaries shot by nature photographers to be used in classrooms and on the lecture circuit. And like most films created in this era, almost all of them have been lost or destroyed, including The Spirit of Audubon. Yet the glimpses that remain, whether in newspapers, photographs, or even the occasional surviving reel, give us some amazing insights into how Americans first viewed birds on the big screen. 

Subscribe now

In the summer of 1915, The Thanhouser Film Company provided the ornithologist, nature photographer, and Audubon Society officer Herbert Job with a “motion picture outfit” to capture the nature scenes for their film. Traveling down to the Gulf coast, Job spent two months recording footage in wildlife refuges along the Florida and Louisiana coast. 

For part of the trip, Job was accompanied by former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had created those wildlife refuges while in the White House. Job turned his camera on the ex-president during their trip, and some footage of the charismatic and barrel-chested Roosevelt made it into The Spirit of Audubon. This marked Teddy’s first (and possibly only) appearance in a “photo drama,”3 where he “incidentally came in for a bit of posing along with the birds.”4

In his summer of filming, Job captured enough footage to complete The Spirit of Audubon, and then some, bringing home almost three miles of film. Footage from this trip was also used for at least four other now-lost nature films released in 1916, including Wild Birds at Home, Ex-President Roosevelt’s Feathered Pets, Egrets and Herons, and Where Wild Fowl Winter. Incredibly, not all of the footage was lost. Some of it was used in a film released ten years later called Roosevelt, Friend of the Birds, which you can watch on the Library of Congress website. 

The Spirit of Audubon was not a unique production. The Massachusetts Audubon Society also released a silent film that mixed documentary footage with plot and actors in their 1920 dramatization of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Birds of Killingworth, which tells the story of the dire consequences a town faces when the citizens decide to kill all of their birds. One magazine predicted that the film would be seen by a million schoolchildren.5

Yet far more numerous than these “photo dramas” were nature documentaries. Every Audubon bulletin I looked through from the 1910s and ‘20s referenced educational moving pictures that captured the country’s bird life. Some of these were produced by major motion picture companies, such as the Fox Film Corporation’s 1922 Feathered Camp Intimates.6 Many more were produced by the Audubon Society, “in order to meet the demand for high-grade educational material, both on the theatrical circuit and for schools and colleges.”7 In 1921 alone, they released seven films from the Pacific Coast states through Goldwyn and the Bray Pictures Corporation, including The Climbing Mazamas, “showing mountain climbers on their trip to the top of Mt. Rainier with some of the wild folk they met.”8 

After it debuted in New York City on October 19, 1915, The Spirit of Audubon was distributed to theaters from Maryland to California, and the Audubon Society acted as its built-in distribution network. At the time, Audubon boasted two million adult members in chapters located in six thousand towns throughout the country, in addition to over five hundred thousand Junior Audubon Society Club members.9 And each of these chapters was urged to “induce managers of local theaters to obtain and exhibit this beautiful and instructive production, in order that it may be seen by children everywhere.”10

And schools, communities, and Audubon chapters followed through. The Spirit of Audubon was shown, for example, at the Children’s Hour in the Brainerd and Alden libraries in Minnesota,11 as well as at the thirteenth annual meeting of the Michigan Audubon Society “as a treat to the visitors and delegates.”12 In public schools, as in Erie, NY, the film was part of a broader bird-oriented curriculum that included bird-house building contests.13

Adapting to film was just one more way that Audubon societies changed with the times. “As everyone knows,” said the president of the Illinois Audubon Society in 1916, “with the coming of the movies, great difficulty is found in many communities in getting any kind of a crowd to attend a lecture of an educational character.” But by arranging with a theater to show a movie or two before a lecture, they could guarantee a standing-room-only crowd, and “whether persons wished to or not, they heard an illustrated talk on the economics of bird life.”14 

Seven years after filming the nature footage for The Spirit of Audubon, Herbert Job traveled to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts “to secure a motion-picture film of the vanishing Heath Hen . . . before the race might become extinct.”15 After centuries of overhunting and habitat destruction, there were fewer than 50 of this Eastern subspecies of Greater Prairie Chicken left, almost all of whom were male. 

Though Job likely didn’t know it, he was living out the last days of the silent film era at the same time as he was documenting the end of the Heath Hen. The Jazz Singer, the first “talking” film, was released in 1927, and by 1928 only one Heath Hen was left. In the birds’ final years, conservationists scrambled to preserve the vanishing Heath Hen, but their efforts came too late. 

As silent films passed into obsolescence in the 1930s, there was no sense that these dying films might also need conserving. Studios cleaned the films out of their warehouses to make space for talkies. Fires in storage vaults destroyed the last copies of other irreplaceable works of history and art. And many moving pictures simply deteriorated out of existence—the nitrate film on which they were recorded was not meant to last a century. Less than 30 percent of all studio-produced silent films still exist, and this number is undoubtedly much lower for the sort of small-scale nature documentaries produced by Audubon. 

Herbert Job’s 1922 film of the Heath Hen is lost, as are most silent films, and all Heath Hens. And while there’s not much hope for finding a wayward flock of Heath Hens, lost films do occasionally resurface. One such moving picture was discovered in 2015 by Edward Minot in his mother’s basement: a single reel from 1932 documenting the last Heath Hen, which now constitutes our last record of this marvelous, extinct creature.16 

There is something poetic about a found film documenting a lost bird. Art and historic records are both precious and ephemeral, and through these old films we can remember, appreciate, and better understand bird and human life from long ago. Yet the value of these precious and fleeting recordings is inconsequential when compared to a being like the Heath Hen — a unique kind of life, forged over millennia, quickly snuffed out, and unforgivably irreplaceable. I’ll keep hoping for more of these lost films to show up, just like I’ll keep hoping for a remnant flock of Heath Hens to reappear. In the meantime, we need to do everything we can to make sure that no one else joins its ranks. 

From 1936 to 1938, writers employed by 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 Americans back to work, and part of the project involved interviewing more than two thousand formerly enslaved people about recollections from their childhoods. 

The mostly-White interviewers carried their own biases to the project, most clearly reflected in their painfully stylized transcription of Black speech. Nevertheless, these interviews, eventually collected in seventeen volumes totaling more than ten thousand pages, are a priceless record of the most shameful chapter of America’s history, described by the last generation who lived through it. Today, the Slave Narratives Collection is digitized and freely available at the Library of Congress.

These interviews chronicle the horrors of slavery—exploitation, humiliation, rape, torture, murder. But they also include the textures of daily life, of small joys and sorrows. They document the ways that men and women sought freedom, not just by fleeing north, but through small acts of resistance and by exerting their own power and expertise in the face of unimaginable adversity. 

Many of them also talked about their relationship with the natural world. For enslaved men and women, birds often meant forced labor. But they could also mean food, and sometimes even freedom and opportunity. At the same time, they were never just a resource to exploit, as Black men and women developed their own ornithology to understand and relate to the country’s birds.

Subscribe now

Victor Duhon, born into slavery in Louisiana, recalled that on his plantation there was “a slave for to hunt all the time. He didn’t do other things.”1 On a South Carolina plantation, Matthias was one such man. Although this position relieved him from working the fields, he was still compelled to go duck hunting six days a week during the winter. While he was one of the very few enslaved people entrusted with a gun, he was only given enough powder and lead every day to make one shot. Every day he would crawl into the marsh and position himself carefully among the reeds, aligning his single shot to bring down as many birds as possible.2 

These constraints often turned huntsmen into exceptional shots. While visiting a Florida plantation in the 1830s, the painter, ornithologist, and enslaver John James Audubon remarked that one enslaved man “kept as a hunter, would shoot from fifty to a hundred and twenty [mallards] in a day, thus supplying the plantation with excellent food.” 3 

But even though they were responsible for feeding the plantation, enslaved hunters couldn’t always partake of the bounty they brought in. For the White masters overseeing a society based entirely on the labor and subjugation of a supposedly inferior race, it was entirely intolerable for equality to exist between White and Black in any segment of life, no matter how small. So it was necessary that even foods, and the animals they came from, be segregated along a hierarchy that paralleled that of masters and slaves. 

Animals considered worthy of sportsmanlike pursuit, like deer, bears, foxes, ducks, turkey, and quail, were seen as embodying noble values and superior meat, and were reserved for masters and their household. Nocturnal animals like raccoons, possums, and owls, as well as those caught by trapping, were thought to have inferior flesh and require no great skill to capture. These were assigned to enslaved people. And so huntsmen brought their entire day’s catch to the central kitchen and divided the game by race and station. As Victor Duhon recalled, “the partridge and the rice birds [the huntsman] killed were cooked for the white folks. The owls and the rabbits and the coons and the possums were cooked for us.”4

To illustrate how common the most prized and expensive game birds once were, writers told what they must have considered amusing stories highlighting the absurdity that game birds considered luxuries were once eaten by slaves. There was an often-repeated but never-substantiated story that canvasback ducks were once so numerous that a “man hiring slaves from another man had to agree not to feed those slaves canvasback ducks more than twice a week.”5 Likewise, prairie chickens were once so numerous that “the negroes themselves [preferred] the coarsest food to this now much-admired Bird.”6

Of course, Black labor was not limited to hunting. Enslaved Africans, in particular women and children, were forced to guard crops against birds. In Georgia and the Carolinas, they were made to drive bobolinks away from the rice fields. In Kentucky, Audubon noted that prairie chickens were “looked upon with more abhorrence than the Crows are at present in Massachusetts and Maine, on account of the mischief they committed among the fruit trees of the orchards,” and farmers forced enslaved people to “drive them away with rattles from morning to night.”7

The deprivation and control under which many enslaved people lived often meant that wild animals they caught themselves, usually at night, were an essential source of meat. Jeff Calhoun, who had grown up in Texas, explained that “if we wanted meat we went to the woods after it, deer, turkey, buffalo and some bear.” He’d also eaten “a little of all meat I guess ceptin’ dog. I eat some hoss and skunk, crow and hawk.”8 And because the hunting was driven so much more by outcome than process, they generally used whatever means were most effective. 

Whites were often disdainful of the ways that enslaved Africans caught birds, perhaps forgetting that most other methods were closed to them. The pioneering ornithologist Alexander Wilson, for example, was disgusted at how “negro boys frequently practise the barbarous mode of catching [killdeer] with a line, at the extremity of which is a crooked pin, with a worm on it.”9

One particularly efficient strategy for catching birds was called bird blinding. Zeb Crowder recalled that in the days before emancipation, his family would carry lit torches into the brush and surround roosting birds at night. “We hit de piles o’ brush after we got ‘round ‘em. When de birds come out we would kill ‘em . . . We killed robins, doves, partridges and other kinds o’ birds. We briled ‘em over coals o’ fire and fried ‘em in fryin’ pans, and sometimes we had a bird stew, wid all de birds we wanted.”10

Relying on nature for food often meant eating whatever animals came their way, which meant for a diverse diet by today’s standards. When he was traveling through New Orleans, John James Audubon saw that “the negroes and the poorer classes purchase [American Coots] to make ‘gombo’”, a use to which cormorants, pelicans, bitterns, wood storks, and gallinules were also employed—all birds that Audubon did not consider very good for eating.  

But subsistence hunting could also mean abundance. Josh Horn recalled a time when passenger pigeons were “thicker than hens and chickens. They would come over at night, and they would darken the sun, there were so many.” Gus Smith described seeing passenger pigeons, “so thick dey broke tree limbs down.” His father once shot “so many pigeons at once that my mother just fed dem to de hogs.”11 Just as often, however, the labor of killing pigeons was forced. Audubon wrote about seeing “the Negroes at the United States’ Salines or Saltworks of Shawanee Town, wearied with killing Pigeons . . . for weeks at a time.”

While he was growing up on a plantation in Georgia, Jim Gillard caught partridges and sold them at a train station for ten cents each. “Game was plentiful in them days,” he recalled. “I never had any trouble catchin’ dem birds.” When he was a young child, Elisha Garey also sold “part’idges what I cotched in traps to dem Yankees what was allus passin’ ‘round.” This independent source of income allowed Elisha to buy candy from the general store.12

There was considerable demand for cage birds in the South, which was met largely through the labors of enslaved Africans who gained extra income trapping birds to sell as pets. The Virginian plantation owner and eventual president Thomas Jefferson owned at least four pet mockingbirds, which he bought from James and Martin Hemmings, men that he’d enslaved. In New Orleans, the uniquely colorful painted buntings in their parrot-like red, blue, and green, were the most common cage bird, brought by enslaved Africans either trapped in cages or taken from their nests.

Because they so often depended on the natural world for sustenance, many Africans learned the habits of birds and techniques for hunting them much better than the sportsmen-slaveholders who pursued birds only for entertainment. Even within the context of slavery, this mastery over wildlife was a form of power. Enslaved huntsmen frequently played the role of hunting guide for plantation owners or their guests, which they could leverage for extra food, pay, or privileges. 

The ability to live off the land could bring something even more significant: freedom. Familiarity with wilderness allowed slaves to escape bondage and establish their own free communities of Maroons in places like Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp or alongside the Seminoles in Florida. This sort of knowledge also helped refugees on their flight northward towards the free states or Canada. Most famously, Harriet Tubman used the call of the barred owl as a signal to alert freedom seekers that it was safe to continue their journey.

During an episode of On Being, the author, poet, professor, and naturalist spoke about how he learned an ornithology from his grandmother in South Carolina “that was mystical before it was scientific,” and only later learned academic ornithology at the university. Lanham described how the beliefs and knowledge that different peoples hold toward birds all constitute unique ornithologies, each of them valid and important, just like the scientific study of birds is valid and important. 

Africans stolen from their homelands, and their descendants born into bondage in America, developed their own ornitholgy. And however valuable birds could be as a resource, they were never just something to be exploited. A certain Uncle Louis was a skilled hunter and woodsman. Every several years, he would leave the plantation for the woods in late summer, because “the woods seems to call me. I jes natcherly has ter go . . . de woods birds and de yard birds goes souf wid de cranes and ducks and wil’ geese and de blackbirds and de crows goes in droves – it seem lack all dat is jes callin’ me.”13

For some, birds were companions or messengers, like whip-poor-wills, who would say “cut de chip out de whiteoak; you better git up to keep frum gitting a whipping,” or the blue jays, who every morning called “‘it’s day, it’s day,’ and you had to git up.”14 For others, birds were metaphysical creatures. Owls were ominous but not necessarily malevolent augurs of death. Mourning doves, according to Martha Young, “know mo’n anybody or anything in de worl’. She know de time anybody gwine die… Sis’ Dove she know about all de craps dat grow out er de groun’ but she ‘special know about corn, fer she plant de fi’st grain er corn dat ever was plant’ in de whole worl.” And then there were blue jays, who according to some had created the earth when all the world was water, by bringing the first dirt.15

Yet as long as slavery persisted, birds were still a domain in which White masters exploited Black life and labor, no matter the wonder they inspired. With his enslaved ancestors in mind, Lanham encouraged modern birders and bird-lovers “to see birds not just as things to list, but to hear the stories of these birds, and travel back in time to understand what they might have exacted on people.”

Nothing seemed to make much of a difference, not planting different trees, not painting their trunks with tar, not even manually scraping away the cocoons. But there was one solution yet to try. New York, too, had recently suffered under the inch worm’s many heels, until several public-spirited citizens had imported house sparrows from England in 1860 and released them in parks throughout the city hoping that the industrious little English sparrows, as they came to be called, would devour the insect pests. And it seemed to have worked—as quickly as the sparrows multiplied, the worms disappeared, and newspapers throughout the country gave the fecund little birds credit.

Philadelphia’s City Council reasoned the sparrows were worth a shot, and dispatched John Bardsley back to his native England to bring some back. Arriving in early 1869, Bardsley caught more than a thousand sparrows with the help of a few local boys. When he returned from Liverpool with the birds under his care, the City Council paid him a hundred dollars for his service.1

In advance of the birds’ release, Philadelphians did everything in their power to welcome the sparrows. “Every conceivable luxury was provided for them,” wrote one newspaper, including bird boxes in the parks and feeding stations regularly resupplied by city employees. Finally, the birds were set free in April, and over the following weeks “the newspapers teemed with the doings of the birds.”2

It took a few years for the sparrows to do their job, but by 1872 “not a measuring worm was to be found.” The Philadelphia Inquirer volunteered that the city’s residents would “cheerfully subscribe to a fund for furnishing them with food for the winter, for did they not exterminate the disgusting measure worms that of old stained their light summer hats and left unsightly trails on their pearly-hued coats and snowy vests?” The newspaper concluded that the now-ubiquitous sparrows were “one of the most pleasant features of . . . this vast extent of brick and mortar, known to the world as Philadelphia.”3

Philadelphia was far from alone. Every city, it seemed, had some grub or caterpillar it would rather do without, and with effective pesticides half a century away, sparrows seemed like the best option available. The same inchworms that infested New York and Philadelphia afflicted the entire Northeast. Taking inspiration from New York, New Haven ordered a shipment of sparrows from England in 1867, as did Boston the following year.

Word of New York’s successes spread quickly through the South. The Galveston Daily News wrote to Central Park’s comptroller to ask about sparrows, hoping that they might also fight the “cotton caterpillar.” Galveston released its first sparrows in 1867. The Atlanta Constitution advised cotton-growers struggling against the army worm “to import goodly numbers of the English sparrow, who hath an unbounded stomach for worms.”4

After grasshoppers ravaged grain crops in Utah, the Deseret News wrote that “a few dozens of these [sparrows] might be imported . . . at trifling expense, and if they did not prove as useful as the gulls did some years ago, in destroying the crickets, they would certainly prove a benefit in destroying the caterpillars.” Salt Lake City released its first sparrows in 1873.5

In Chico, California, one writer suggested that the struggling fruit-growers do “nothing more than what has been done in some of the Eastern States . . . the introduction of the English sparrow . . . will keep an entire orchard clear of pestiferous insects and worms.”6

As far away as Hawaii there were calls to introduce sparrows to fight mosquitoes, which New York’s birds allegedly helped control. The Hawaiian Gazette said that importing two thousand sparrows would do as much for “domestic peace and comfort of our citizens as would the addition of fifty more policemen.”7

Whether sparrows were introduced by public-minded citizens or the city government itself, importing the birds was seen as a municipal project organized in the public’s interest. In Cleveland, one gentleman organized “a club for the purpose of importing sparrows” and invited contributions for the cause, to which The Cleveland Leader added, “a little investment this way would become a public good.” In Lexington, Kentucky, another newspaper praised Major M. C. Johnson and John W. Kearney, Esq. for importing and releasing a few pairs of sparrows “as a matter of public benefit.” And in Brooklyn, New York, a poet voiced his support for the city’s proposal to spend $500 importing another batch of sparrows by writing:8

Brooklyn Eagle, December 2, 1861

A mania for sparrows was spreading through the country, only shortly in advance of the birds themselves. One newspaper called it a boom. Many called it a craze. In Kentucky, where citizens pooled their resources to buy a shipment of sparrows, one paper reported, “Louisville seems inclined to rival the famous tulip mania in its English sparrow frenzy. One thousand sparrows have been contracted for, and all the citizens are sparrow mad.” Another deadpanned, “in a short time we expect to see the sparrow stock quoted regularly on the Louisville ‘Change, and that bull and bear movements in the sparrow market will shake that emporium to its financial center. There will be conspiracies and ‘corners’ in sparrows.”9

At first, cities made arrangements with individuals or bird importers to bring sparrows over directly from Europe. In 1869 The Charleston Daily News explained that “These pretty and sprightly little birds can be easily imported from Liverpool at an insignificant cost, by any of the steamers of our regular line.” Yet within a few years so many cities were clambering for sparrows that the cost of a single pair reached twenty dollars—equivalent to six hundred dollars today.10

After a few years more, however, the price for sparrows had fallen by three quarters and sparrow boosters no longer needed to go abroad for birds. New York’s sparrows had multiplied so prolifically that “a few hundred at least can be spared every year for dissemination over the country.” Cincinnati got its sparrows from New York City, as did Indianapolis, Topeka, and St. Louis. Soon enough, any city with sparrows was exporting to its neighbors. Erie, Pennsylvania got its sparrows from Philadelphia. Fredericksburg, Virginia got its birds from Richmond. An 1889 review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture identified more than a hundred places where sparrows were introduced and admitted that there were undoubtedly scores more that they’d missed.11

House sparrows did a pretty good job of spreading through the country without much human help. Capable of raising four broods of six chicks every year, sparrows breed fast enough that they only need a few years to fill up a city and start pushing into the countryside. Within fifteen years, the six sparrows released in Memphis, Tennessee had multiplied enough to “infest the city and the suburbs for several miles.”12

In spite of the universal expectation that sparrows would gobble up every annoying insect, house sparrows are primarily grain-eaters. So it was not grubs or mosquitoes that fueled their growth, but discarded oats, corn, wheat, and barley pecked from the ground, above all from the horse manure that piled up on every city street. One estimate put the proportion of their diet gleaned from horse droppings at ninety percent.13 All of the birdhouses and feeding stations put up at public expense were hardly necessary—horses gave them all the food they could want, and every drain pipe, eave and cranny in the built environment made for a perfect nesting location.

Sparrows spread from town to town by following the trail of spilled grains left by train cars carrying wheat, sometimes even inadvertently hitching a ride in empty box cars before being released hundreds of miles down the track. But the natural spread of the birds wasn’t nearly quick enough for Americans desperately watching their crops disappear under an onslaught of bugs. Since “the sparrow does not ‘emigrate’ fast enough, nor in sufficient force, to save the fast declining fruit crops,” wrote one Vermont newspaper, humans had to help the birds along.14

In 1873, as the sparrow craze was cresting, Washington D.C.’s Evening Star concluded, “nearly every city in the Union has its colony of English sparrows now.” In the small town of Oxford, Ohio, sparrows were “spreading from farm to farm in every direction” by 1886. In Binghamton, New York, the sparrow was “no longer a city resident, but is finding his way to the small villages, and already is at the farmer’s houses eight and nine miles in the country.” Outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the sparrow “has also made its appearances at all the villages and farm-houses.” Sparrows following grains dropped by muletrains had even established themselves in Death Valley.15

By 1886 the sparrow was found in thirty-five of the thirty-eight states, occupying “the whole or large parts” of thirty-three of them. Since they were first introduced, they had expanded their range at an average rate of 59,000 miles per year—about the size of Illinois. While it took a few decades, by the 1880s ornithologists recognized that they were witnessing something exceptional: “The marvelous rapidity of the Sparrow’s multiplication, the surpassing swiftness of its extension, and the prodigious size of the area it has overspread are without parallel in the history of any bird.”16

Or as the sparrow’s greatest critic, Elliott Coues wrote, “This sturdy and invincible little bird has overrun the whole country.”

It was only then that Americans began to realize that sparrows might be a pest worse than the one they were meant to replace, and that in fact the sparrows had little interest in eating bugs at all. Even worse, they seemed to drive out native birds everywhere they spread. House sparrows became a textbook example of the dangers of species introduction, and in 1900 Congress passed a law banning their importation. But by that point it was far too late.

The sparrow craze is just the beginning of this bird’s troubled history in America. Plenty of others have done a great job writing about what happened next, in particular the so-called Sparrow War that broke out between the bird’s defenders and detractors (here’s a good summary). Last year, I also wrote a piece about how house sparrows were attacked in explicitly nativist terms as unwelcome immigrants displacing native birds. There’s a lot more to say about sparrows, and I might come back to them soon. We’ll see!

Invasive species are rightly considered one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. There are countless examples of a single individual releasing cats, or rabbits, or goats, or mongooses that ultimately wreaked havoc on native ecosystems. None of us would ever be so reckless.

But this is not one of those stories. In the 1860s and 1870s, Americans in just about every town wanted house sparrows, and they did everything they could to make their introductions a success. This wasn’t an example of one person’s bad decision. It was a movement, a bad idea that got out of control. There’s no one we can point fingers at, which means there isn’t an easy answer. The country eventually learned its lesson, but only imperfectly, and much too late.

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, I decided that it would be fun to rank the 100 greatest ones. My task was made easier by Wikipedia’s List of birds by common name, but narrowing down 11,000 names (this is a genuine curated list, I really did look through all of them) turned out to be way harder than I expected. There are FAR TOO MANY GOOD ONES. My short list alone had more than three hundred, and picking the top hundred nearly ended me. It was also so much fun! I considered myself something of a bird name connoisseur, but many of the top names were new to me and so strange and surprising that they left me speechless.

A few weeks ago, I shared the ranked list on Twitter and on Substack notes. If you’ll forgive a slight departure from the usual essays that make up my Substack posts, I’m going to share this list here as well.

Subscribe now

But first, there have been a few fantastic pieces of Bird History by some writers on and off of Substack that deserve a mention.

• James McCommons’s new book, The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds, is the first complete history of the fifty-year movement to transform birds from a natural resource into an indispensable piece of our national heritage. St. Martin’s Press sent me a review copy, which I’ve now crammed with highlights and annotations. It’s been a terrific resource as I work on my own book, and I’m deeply grateful to McCommons for bringing to life so many once-forgotten men and women to whom we owe our gratitude for protecting America’s birds. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. Get it here.

• is in the middle of a terrific series on how the pink flamingo—both the lawn ornament and the ever-beleaguered bird—serve as a mirror to America’s culture, identity, and excesses. It’s been delightful and incisive so far, and there’s more to come. Read part 1 and part 2, and then subscribe to Unnatural Heritage so you don’t miss the rest.

Unnatural Heritage

The American Flamingo, Part 1

Good morning, earthlings…

Read more

6 months ago · 31 likes · 5 comments · Kirk Gordon

• For his Substack , wrote a great piece about how, just decades before the arrival of Columbus, the bird-loving Aztecs took Great-tailed Grackles from their original habitat in the coastal lowlands and introduced them to Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City). After reading his piece, I went back through my eBird checklists from a past trip and was really happy to see that I’d seen Great-tailed Grackles in Mexico City, the modern descendants of a pre-colonial species introduction.

Charismatic Manyfauna

Did the Aztecs introduce a new bird to Mexico City?

In her spectacular recent book Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, historian Camilla Townsend imagines what it must have been like for a troupe of musicians to visit the Aztec Empire capital of Tenochtitlan near the height of the Empire’s power. The city, located where modern-day Mexico City now stands, was built on a massive man-made island in the …

Read more

6 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · William von Herff

And now, here’s the list:

#100: Chad Firefinch

This is no Virginia Rail. Cockiest bird in Central Africa.

#99: Screaming Cowbird

Outscreamed the Screaming Piha to squeak into the top 100.

#98: Happy Wren

Would have been just as content to be left off this list, you can’t ruin their day.

#97: Middle American Leaftosser

When US politicians try to appeal to voters in the heartland, this is who they’re thinking of. But this guy just wants to know what’s under the next leaf.

#96: Handsome Fruiteater

There are three other “handsome” birds (Handsome Spurfowl, Flycatcher, and Sunbird), but these gluttons need representation in the top 100.

#95: Sandwich Tern

Named after a town in England but also two slices of wonderbread, a slather of chunky PB, and a spoonful of raspberry jam

#94: Willie-wagtail

Birds with people names are one of the best sub-categories, and none wears theirs so explicitly as this guy. (Robin, Jackdaw, and Magpie are others, I wrote about them here):

#93: Splendid Fairywren

There are four other “splendids” (Splendid Astrapia, White-eye, Starling, and Sunbird). It’s a tight race between them, but there’s no more ethereal group than the fairywrens.

#92: Zigzag Heron

My vision’s getting blurry just looking at em

#91: Three-wattled Bellbird

There are 33 other birds named for their wattles, including the bizarre and somewhat obscene-looking Wattled Ploughbill, along with four Wattlebirds. But none of them have three.

#90: Weebill

Everything’s little about the smallest bird in Australia but its bill is littlest of all. Decently cute bird but impossibly cute name. How could I say no?

#89: Charming Hummingbird

Charismatic microfauna. Got its name because an ornithologist thought it looked nice, and I don’t disagree. The group noun for hummingbirds is supposedly a charm, although I agree with Nick Lund that these terms of venery are a joke.

#88: Bananaquit

Tiny nectar drinker from the tanager family, named for their banana-yellow color. The best of the ‘quits (Orangequit and grassquits) and the bananas (Bananal Antbird and Eastern / Western Plantain-eaters).

#87: Tiny Hawk

Not a pro skater, but a teeny tiny eentsy weentsy little killer bird. About as big as a starling. Still twice the size of the smallest raptor (the Black-thighed Falconet), but this one’s got a better name.

#86: Rose Robin

There are 100+ birds called robins, all named after a real or imagined and similarity to the European Robin. The nickname spread everywhere the English went, for better or worse. In this case, it’s perfect.

#85: Large Green-Pigeon

Largest of the Green-Pigeons, this hulking bird tells you exactly who it is. A pigeon that’s large and green. This sort of honesty is rare these days and should be recognized.

#84: Greater Roadrunner

Unclear where they ran before roads were invented. The only member of the cuckoo family to make this list. Fun fact: “cuckold” comes from some cuckoos’ practice of laying eggs in other birds’ nests. Not this guy, tho!

#83: Society Kingfisher

After reading Bowling Alone they decided they needed to get more involved in their community. Find them at the Society Islands Elks Club in French Polynesia.

#82: Mealy Amazon

A few hundred years ago someone thought that If you look really closely at this parrot’s back it looked like it was dusted with flour, or.. cornmeal. Not a great fieldmark but I love the name.

#81: Oleaginous Hemispingus

The Oilbird didn’t make the cut but one oily representative still did. The name of this chungus means oily half-finch, which itself would have been a winner.

#80: Cinderella Waxbill

293 birds are “grey”, 32 are “ashy”, and 16 are “cinereous,” which all could have worked for this bird, but some ornithologist with joy in their heart called it Cinderella.

#79: Belcher’s Gull

My apologies to the British explorer Sir Edward Belcher, after whom it’s named, but I can’t take this one seriously.

#78: Noisy Friarbird

Here’s what eBird says: “Typically very loud; emits a variety of harsh, loud squawks.” Noisy indeed. Like their name suggests, friarbirds are all going through various stages of hair loss; this one is entirely bald.

#77: Limpkin

Named for its supposedly funny walk, plus the suffix -kin (like pumpkin, napkin, munchkin), a Middle English diminutive meaning little. These little limpers snack on snails from Florida to Argentina.

#76: Resplendent Quetzal

I get excited about any bird name that’s kept its indigenous roots. In Nauhatl, its name is quetzaltototl, from quetzalli (tail-feather) + tototl (bird). The national bird of Guatemala. Resplendent doesn’t do it justice.

#75: Flightless Steamer-Duck

Patagonian chunk duck. Can’t fly, obviously, and mad about it - known to kill larger birds, using their bony wing nubs. Got its name from the way they flap their wings when they swim fast, looking like paddle steamers.

#74: Restless Flycatcher

Will not sit still. Also known as scissors grinder and dishlicker for its quick raspy call. What I’ve learned here is that Australia is way over-represented in quality names.

#73: Christmas Shearwater

First described on Kirimati, aka Christmas Island. Shearwater (for the way they skim ocean waves) pulls a lot of weight too, as does the fact that they’re in the order of tubenose birds

#72: Apostlebird

Roams Australia in groups of 12 (or 6, or 40, as the case may be). Apparently also goes by grey jumper, lousy Jack, and happy family.

#71: Gang-gang Cockatoo

Gang-gang is also of aboriginal origin, probably related to its call, which sounds like uncorking a wine bottle. Cockatoo comes from 16th century Dutch “kaketoe,” which they borrowed from Malay

#70: Chaco Chachalaca

Say this bird’s name out loud. You’re already happier than you were 8 seconds ago. Chachalaca comes from the Nahuatl word for “to chatter”. eBird transcribes their song as “bink, ka chee chaw raw taw.”

#69: Obscure Berrypecker

If you see a strange bird pecking your berries, and also happen to be in the Arfak Mountains of New Guinea, this could be your bird.

#68: Milky Stork

The pantone people and the bird people have a lot in common. Sometimes you’ve got to dig deep for the perfect word, and in this case the bird’s slightly cream-colored feathers meant milky was the way to go. Only about 2,000 are left in the wild :(

#67: Blue-footed Booby

A classic for a reason. Booby comes from the Spanish “bobo”, meaning stupid or foolish, for their clumsiness on land and undeserving trust of humans.

#66: Emu

Unclear where the name came from (possibly an Arabic word for large bird, via Portuguese?), but in rare company of three-letter bird names (Kea and Tui). There used to be a two-letter bird in Hawaii, the Ou, but it went extinct in 1989.

#65: Monotonous Lark

Larks are known for their beautiful songs, but this one comes up short. eBird says they “incessantly sing a croaking, gurgling, distinctive four-note song every 3-5 seconds for hours on end, day and night.”

#64: Greater Prairie-Chicken

Clearly better than the Lesser Prairie-Chicken (and the Chicken of the Sea, for that matter). From a larger family of gallinaceous, or chicken-like birds.

#63: Wandering Tattler

Narcing their way from Alaska to the South Pacific, sometimes migrating up to 3,000 miles, twice a year

#62: Common Loon

Another classic. And while common might work as an insult, this bird is anything but. Brits call it the Great Northern Diver. William Wood called it a Loon first in 1634, writing “The Loone is an ill shap’d thing like a Cormorant”.

#61: Bearded Mountaineer

Not a rugged climber, just a lil high-altitude Peruvian hummingbird. But look at that beard!

#60: Growling Riflebird

Its black velvety plumage supposedly resembles the uniform of the 19th century British Army Rifle Brigade. Plus, it growls.

#59: Dickcissel

They get their name from their song, which sounds something like “dick dick dick ciss ciss ciss.” eBird says its call is “flatulent.” These prairie birds migrate every year between the tropics and the Great Plains.

#58: Beijing Babbler

Sounds like something J. K. Rowling would name a magical beast. But the bird is very real and boasts an impressive vocabulary.

#57 Magnificent Frigatebird

Also called man o’ war birds. They hunt fish on the wing and sometimes steal from other birds, reminding sailors of warships. The magnificent comes from the males’ enormous inflatable red throat sacks.

#56 Killdeer

Named for its call. Has not yet been known to carry out its threat. Quite nice once you get to know them!

#55: Ancient Murrelet

A tiny species of auk. “Ancient” comes from its gray-streaked feathers that make it look elderly, but I think the name makes it sound mythical and wise, maybe legendary.

#54: Dollarbird

Named for the coin-shaped white spots under its wing that you can see when it’s flying. How long could I get away with saying dollarbird instead of dollar bill?

#53: Robust Woodpecker

A sturdy, strong, powerful, solid, hefty, burly, brawny, vigorous, hardy, resilient, durable, reliable, dependable, full-bodied, stalwart bird.

#52: Paddyfield Pipit

Another name that’s just a joy to say. Wikipedia calls its appearance “undistinguished” and “dumpy”. I think it’s lovely. Found in farmland from Pakistan to the Philippines.

#51: Secretarybird

Its leggy striding gait apparently reminded Dutch settlers in South Africa of an archer, so they gave it the name sagittarius, which survives in its scientific name, and was probably corrupted into secretarius and secretarybird. Another theory is that the plumes on the back of its head look like pens tucked behind an ear.

#50: Squacco Heron

Lots of birds are named after their call but none so persuasively as this one. If a bird squawks, shouldn’t it be called Squacco?

#49: Long-wattled Umbrellabird

One of the more bizarre birds out there. It’s called an umbrellabird for the tuft of feathers hanging over its forehead. And its wattle? It reaches from chin to toe.

#48: Rusty Whistler

Endemic to New Guinea, but sounds more like the name of a cowboy or, I don’t know, a character in Cars.

#47: Quailfinch Indigobird

This name is just four nouns mashed together and needs some unpacking. It’s a poorly-known type of Indigobird, and lays its eggs in the nests of the African Quailfinch. It’s only been logged 4 times on eBird and doesn’t have any photos, but looks basically like the Dusky Indigobird.

#46: Mouse-colored Penduline Tit

Don’t ask me what color “mouse-colored” is, but there are 5 other mouse-colored birds (not to mention titmice, mouse-warblers, and 6 kinds of mousebirds). From a family of tits that makes pendulous, hanging nests.

#45: Zitting Cisticola

Cisticolas (roughly meaning shrub-dwellers) all look about the same and are best told apart by their songs, which they’re named after. Runners up include: Chattering, Bubbling, Rattling, Tinkling, Wailing, Churring, Croaking, Siffling, and Wing-snapping Cisticolas.

#44: Fearful Owl

Wikipedia says: “Its call is similar to a clear human scream.” Got it. Native to the Solomon Islands.

#43: Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler

Reginald Moreau named this bird after his wife. Her actual name is Winifred.

At this point I’ve got to plug Steven Moss, who literally wrote the book on strange bird names, where they came from, and why we love them. His book is called Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler.

#42: Ventriloquial Oriole

As in, ventriloquist. Really torturing the word to turn it into an adjective. Apparently it’s hard to tell where the bird’s call is coming from in the forest canopies of the Philippines and Borneo.

#41: Macaroni Penguin

Named by British sailors referencing its stylish feathered crest, just like the feathers in Yankee Doodle. In 18th century Britain “macaroni” was an insult for excessively fashionable men obsessed with Continental fashions.

#40: Modest Tiger-Parrot

Beautiful, not to mention accomplished, but won’t tell you about it. Females have gorgeous orange and black tiger-like barring on their chest.

#39: Dark-eyed White-eye

An oxymoron with wings. If you ask what color its eyes really are, it will fight you. Tiny range in the Solomon Islands.

#38: Capuchinbird

As freaky as they come. Named after the way their feathers rise up around their bald heads, like the hoods of Capuchin monks. Their call is almost as strange, giving them the nickname calfbird.

#37: Bobolink

Formally, Robert of Lincoln. Named for their tinkling, robotic song. Arthur Bent called it “a bubbling delirium of ecstatic music.” Marathon migrants, traveling from the northern US to southern South America each year..

#36: King-of-Saxony Bird-of-Paradise

This bird has a lot going for it:

• There are many “King” birds. This one actually tells you which one.

• Birds-of-Paradise are the equivalent of legendary birds.

• Winning reason: four hyphens, the most of any bird.

#35: Diabolical Nightjar

Also called satanic nightjar and devilish nightjar, probably a reference to its call. Many nocturnal birds are considered evil omens or just plain scary, but to me this one seems no more evil than the average bird.

#34: Rhinoceros Auklet

Look at the bill and you’ll get the name. eBird calls this cousin of the puffin a “gray seabird shaped like a football.”

#33: Double-eyed Fig Parrot

If you’re feeling mean, call this teensy parrot four-eyes. Named from the pair of blue spots on its face next to its real eyes. Fig parrots live in Australasia and as their name suggests, have a particular fondness for figs (other fruit too).

#32: Andean Cock-of-the-Rock

Its name is a classic, and its appearance lives up to it. The male’s bill disappears almost entirely in its bright orange feathered crest. Nests in rock walls, which is where it gets its name.

#31: Shining Sunbeam

A literal ray of light. From the “brilliants” group of hummingbirds. Only bird with a poem in its eBird description: “You are my sunbeam, my Shining Sunbeam / You make me happy when you display / Aglaeactis cupripennis / Please don’t take my sunbeam away.”

#30: Vampire Ground-Finch

A species of Galapagos finch (ie, Darwin’s Finches) that evolved the taste for blood, which it sometimes drinks by pecking open the skin of Blue-footed Boobies.

#29: Carunculated Caracara

The bright orange wrinkles, or “caruncles” on its face and throat give this bird its name. Caracaras are raptors found throughout the Americas, and they got their name from the Brazilian Tupi word for their call.

#28: Hoary Puffleg

I had to look up the definition of hoary. It describes something gray or white with age, and I can see how that would describe the white feathers on this bird’s face. You can’t see it in this picture but it’s also got nice white fluffy legwarmers.

#27: Chuck-will’s-Widow

A sequence of words that was never uttered until someone tried to put a name to this bird’s call. Closely related to the Whip-poor-will, which deserves an honorable mention.

#26: Chocolate Boobook

A deliciously brown owl from the Philippines. According to eBird, its call sounds like “boop!” One of three chocolate birds (Chocolate-backed Kingfisher; Chocolate-vented Tyrant).

#25: Ticking Doradito

Not a dorito. NOT A DORITO. Even though they have the exact same Spanish etymology (diminutive of “dorado”, or golden, so “little golden thing”). If I could name one bird it would be Dorito Doradito.

#24: Laughing Kookaburra

You knew this one was coming. Modest improvement from its common name in the 1800s, “laughing jackass.” Kookaburra comes from the bird’s name in the Aboriginal language Wiradjuri.

#23: Stark’s Lark

This name is crisp, understated, economical. A two syllable joke. Sets it up with Stark’s before perfectly nailing the landing. I’m not sure how many bird names rhyme, but I laughed out loud when I saw this one.

#22: Squatter Pigeon

Never skips leg day. It’s not completely clear where the name came from, but probably either because it stays low to the ground or because it’s associated with pastures in Northeast Australia where settlers, called “squatters,” grazed livestock.

#21: Invisible Rail

Honestly seems pretty conspicuous for a rail, a family of birds that would all deserve this title. But it’s just really good at hiding, so it’s still relatively unknown. Large, flightless, native to Indonesia.

#20: Blood Pheasant

This bird is from the netherworld (or, the Himalayas, depending on who’s asking), and it wears the blood of its enemies in its feathers.

#19: Bare-faced Go-away-bird

eBird calls it “unusual” and says its call is “a maniacal series of cackles and whines given by multiple birds in chorus.” Has a featherless face, unlike the other two kinds of go-away-birds, which apparently all sound like they’re saying “go away.”

#18: Green Mango

The name makes you think it’s an unripe fruit, but it’s really just a cute hummingbird from Puerto Rico.

#17: Zappey’s Flycatcher

Sounds like a 7 year old kid named it after his imaginary friend. One of the most whimsically named birds. A gorgeous and uncommon bird from East Asia.

#16: Leaf-love

Plenty of birds are named for what they do (flycatchers, kingfishers, foliage-gleaners, flowerpiercers). This bird isn’t a simple lover of leaves, but the pure embodiment of a principle—transcending into oneness with the foliage.

#15: Firewood-Gatherer

South American bird that makes a huge nest of sticks, looking like it’s collecting kindling. In a family of many other fantastic (but not top-100) birds—woodcreepers, scythebills, xenops, earthcreepers, tuftedcheeks, treehunters, treerunners, and spinetails.

#14: Razorbill

With a goth look and a goth name, this sleek seabird is the closest living relative to the Great Auk.

#13: Snoring Rail

Perfectly evocative name. Sounds about like you’d expect. A rarely-seen flightless bird from Indonesia.

#12: Transvolcanic Jay

Trans, and lives in a volcano (or rather, the band of volcanoes stretching across central Mexico). This one was new to me, and better than I could have hoped.

#11: Pipipi

Called the Brown Creeper in its native New Zealand, but American ornithologists use the Maori name because there’s already a Brown Creeper in the US. It’s hard to believe that a bird could have a better name than this one, but there are precisely ten that do.

#10: Strange Weaver

On first appearances no more odd than any of the other weavers. But they’re a real freak, once you get to know them. Found in Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

#9: Morepork

Sounds like a carnivorous frog. Or an order at a BBQ joint. Or a Capitol Hill lobbyist. But actually a small brown owl from New Zealand.

#8: Cut-Throat

Incredibly hard name. But it fits. The males of these otherwise understated birds have a crescent of blood-red scarlet stretching from ear to ear.

#7: Horned Screamer

A classic. Massive, swamp dwelling oddity. Even stranger than its cousins, the Northern Screamer and Southern Screamer. As the name suggests, very loud, and with a massive spike on its forehead.

#6: Inaccessible Island Rail

There’s a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic called Inaccessible Island. And on that island lives a tiny rail, the smallest flightless bird in the world, about the size of a large house sparrow.

#5: Predicted Antwren

Based on genetic analysis of birds in the region, biologists predicted that an undescribed species of antwren ought to exist in the western Amazon. As predicted, they found this new species in 2013, hence the name.

#4: Surfbird

Coolest bird around. Give it a board and a pair of shades, it’s ready to shred. Spot it catching waves (well, just avoiding them) on rocky coastlines from Alaska to Chile.

#3: Supertramp Fantail

This name is breathtaking, bizarre, and entirely unexpected. Despite all appearances, not a fan of the British rock band, but rather named for a biological concept of rapidly colonizing recently disturbed environments, which this one does.

#2: Plains-wanderer

Mythical, austere, even heroic. Stars opposite John Wayne in a couple westerns. Even more mysterious than the name suggests. According to eBird, “unlikely to be observed without deliberate search and professional help.”

Now, as I stand at the precipice of proclaiming one bird name greater than the rest, I look back at the 99 that made the list and past them at 11,000 that didn’t, each unique and valued, and somehow all insufficient to embody the wonder of the birds they describe.

What makes a bird’s name great? That it’s funny? Or original? Are those better than the unexpected, unique, inspiring, delightful, or just perfectly apt? It seems audacious, even reckless, to say one name is better than another, much less proclaim one the greatest of them all.

These names are constructs, mere labels no more intrinsic to a bird than they are to a street or to a star. Yet to name is human, and so is to classify, and to order, and rank. Inventing names, and assembling listicles, are the highest manifestations of the human spirit.

So as a professional and personal duty, and without regard for the friends that may leave me or the enemies I may create with the top spot on this list, I’ve identified the greatest bird name of all time:

#1: Mallard

The name is innate. It is absolute. Its origins stretch beyond memory, beyond time. It is inseparable from the bird it describes. Mallard means duck. Mallard means bird.

Did I get this list right? Did I snub some of your favorites? I want your takes!

Putting this list together was far harder than I expected it to be, and I found dozens of deserving birds that tragically didn’t fit into the top 100 but still deserve some recognition. Here are some honorable mentions:

• African Sacred Ibis

• Bagobo Babbler

• Banda Sea Monarch

• Barred Becard

• Bat-like Spinetail

• Beautiful Sunbird

• Black Jacobin

• Black Berrypecker

• Bohemian Waxwing

• Bounty Shag

• Brolga

• Bruce’s Green Pigeon

• Burnt-necked Eremomela

• Checker-throated Stipplethroat

• Chorister Robin-Chat

• Cinerous Mourner

• Clicking Shrike-Babbler

• Coppersmith Barbet

• Crag-chilia

• Crimson Seedcracker

• Crinckle-collared Manucode

• Croaking Ground Dove

• Dodo

• Donaldson-Smith’s Nightjar

• Drab Hemispingus

• Familiar Chat

• Festive Coquette

• Fiery Minivet

• Fiscal Flycatcher

• Fluffy-backed Tit-babbler

• Gibberbird

• Hardhead

• Kelp Goose

• Lava Gull

• Lemon Dove

• Mewing Kingfisher

• Moustached Tinkerbird

• Nene

• Oilbird

• Okarito Kiwi

• Phainopepla

• Philippine Frogmouth

• Pied Butcherbird

• Pilotbird

• Pyrrholuxia

• Racket-tailed Treepie

• Redhead

• Rock-runner

• Ruff

• Salmon-Crested Cockatoo

• Screaming Cowbird

• Shoebill

• Smew

• Swamp Boubou

• Tiny Tyrant-manakin

• Variable Limestone Babbler

• Vegetarian Finch

• Volcano Junco

• Vulturine Guineafowl

• Welcome Swallow

• Wrinkled Hornbill

• Yellow-scarfed Tanager

Yet during their spring and fall migration, “this mysterious hermit of the alders, this recluse of the boggy thickets, this wood nymph of crepuscular habits,” had a way of popping up in parks, gardens, and even front lawns. “Their haunts are so varied,” explained Bent, “that one may not be surprised to find them almost anywhere.”1

Subscribe now

One of the more unexpected places that a woodcock flew was into an auction store on New York’s Sixth Avenue on July 28, 1880. The store’s owner didn’t have a clue what to do with a woodcock, so he passed it into the more or less capable hands of John Morris, who owned a “cosy little flower and bird store” at Jefferson Market in Greenwich Village.

As far as anyone knew, no one had ever kept a captive woodcock before. But in a previous life, Morris had been a game dealer and had sold thousands of dead woodcocks, along with every other edible bird, to city restaurants and home chefs. It wasn’t much, but it made him about as familiar with the needs of a woodcock as anyone in the city. Morris took a canary breeding cage and covered its floor with dry moss, except for the far end of the cage, in which he placed a box of mud, a bit less than a foot square and three inches deep. Morris knew that woodcocks like worms, and lots of them, so he buried anglers in the mud pit for the woodcock to dig out.

And he named the woodcock Dick.

At first, Morris kept Dick’s cage in his conservatory, but he felt the space was better served by plants, so he hung up the cage in front of his store. From his new perch, Dick drew the attention of every passer-by. The city’s bourgeoisie were abundantly familiar with dead woodcocks, either served on toast or perforated with birdshot, but they’d never seen a live one up close. And so scores of admirers and curiosity-seekers came by Jefferson Market every day to watch Dick preen, nap, and dig around in the mud. Dick was New York’s first celebrity woodcock.

Among his visitors were at least two reporters. One, writing for The New York Times, explained that if curious New Yorkers “ask for Dick, they will be shown a fine specimen of the woodcock, whose tameness and voracity they will pronounce remarkable.” The other, writing for Forest and Stream, the country’s premier sporting periodical, described how Dick cleaned off his bill with his feet after finishing his wormy feast, tucked it under a wing, and closed his eyes “to dream, no doubt, of the swamp where he was born, and where he passed his early days.”2

More than anything, the reporters were amused by the way Morris struggled to hold the eager woodcock back with one hand while he restocked worms in its mud box with the other. Dick found the worms quite irresistible, and rushed back to his mud pit to resume prospecting as soon as Morris let him. Every time Dick ate a worm, wrote the Times reporter, “a comical expression of satisfaction is in his eyes.”

In the following weeks, Dick’s fame only grew, and Forest and Stream published an update two weeks later. “Mr. Morris’s tame woodcock, Dick, continues to excite great interest among sportsmen.” He was “daily visited by numbers of the fraternity, who take great delight in watching the bird.” Morris had moved Dick to a larger cage in the greenhouse behind the store to shield him from the constant noise from the street and from “the persistent attentions of the small boy, who always takes such delight in poking up the animals.”3 The more private quarters seemed to do him well. Here, surrounded by flowers and caged robins, cardinals, bluebirds, and canaries, he put on weight day by day.

Forest and Stream catered to an educated readership of affluent sportsmen and amateur naturalists. Its editor, George Bird Grinnell, was himself a prominent zoologist and recognized that Dick represented an opportunity to study a species that to his knowledge had never before been held in captivity. So he asked Morris to count and weigh the worms he fed Dick to put precise numbers on the diet of a bird whose voracity was “proverbial.”

Morris was happy to comply, and wrote back that the two hundred worms Dick ate every day weighed five and a half ounces. Dick himself weighed only five, meaning that he ate more than his own weight of worms each day. Grinnell was floored by this finding, and wrote in Forest and Stream, “we are at a loss whether to be more astounded at the voracity of the bird or the multitude of the worms which must exist to feed them.”4

In the months after Woodcock Dick first made headlines, other sportsmen wrote to Forest and Stream that they too had been keeping woodcocks. In Montreal, someone found a woodcock in the middle of the city, stunned and with a wound on its forehead that they speculated had come from flying into a telegraph wire. The bird was taken in by a restaurant keeper on St. James street, who, rather than cooking the bird, fed it on worms. It attracted just as many admirers as Woodcock Dick. In upstate New York, A. E. Godeffroy wrote that his groundskeeper had found a woodcock caught in a bunch of corn. In a letter to the editor, he asked, “Can you tell me what I can do in the winter with Mr. Timberdoodle?”5

After reading about Woodcock Dick in Forest and Stream, another New Yorker, F. P. Magoun, realized that he, too, simply must have a woodcock. Magoun didn’t have the patience to wait for one to appear at his front door, however, and like many of the city’s sportsmen, he paid a visit to Morris’s flower shop. “When I did see him I was very much pleased,” he wrote, “and decided to purchase him, which I did.”

Magoun moved his new pet to the second floor of his home on 37th Street, a few blocks south of Bryant Park, and like Morris, fitted out Dick’s cage with a box filled with mud, topped with moss, and stocked daily with the bird’s body weight in worms. After a few weeks, he moved Dick to a larger cage, measuring two feet by four, and decorated with a small hemlock tree. But whether it was the tree, or the cage, or the change in scenery, something made Dick start to deteriorate. He forgot whatever familiarity with people he’d learned and became hysterical when anyone came near his cage.

One afternoon, Magoun came home and found his maid sweeping the floor around Dick’s cage, which sent the bird into a panic. Dick fluttered around madly and crashed into the cage’s wire bars, which left the crown of his head and joints of his wings featherless and bloody. Out of concern for the poor bird’s health, Magoun moved Dick back to his old pen and covered it, hoping that darkness would help calm the bird down. After two days, however, Dick hadn’t improved and would barely touch his worms. The next morning, Magoun found Dick lying dead in his cage.

It had been three months since Dick first arrived in New York. In that time he’d eaten something like twenty thousand worms and touched nearly as many hearts. Magoun felt it was his duty to update the public on the fate of the celebrity bird, which he did in a letter to Forest and Stream on November 11. Closing his account, Magoun wrote, “I never felt so badly about anything before.”6

Now, it seems like the Bryant Park Woodcock has broken containment. Its celebrity status, too, has been confirmed by the inevitable New York Times profile. If you spend any time on social media (twitter is my poison of choice, but these birds are ecumenical), you’ve probably seen a woodcock dance, nap, and slurp up worms, seemingly oblivious to the ogling crowds.

The Bryant Park Woodcock isn’t actually an individual. It’s more of a rotating position, like an alderman or court jester. Every spring and fall, as woodcocks migrate up and down the Atlantic flyway, woodcocks inevitably get pulled into this green postage-stamp surrounded by skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan. It’s long been known to birders that Bryant Park is possibly the most reliable place to get a close-up view of these strange, reclusive birds in the entire country. But now the word has gotten out.

Please forgive the quality of this video I took through my binoculars at Bryant Park in March, 2022. If you’d like, imagine Tarantella Napoletana playing in the background.

Their sudden popularity shouldn’t be a surprise. Woodcocks have a funny face. They make a funny sound. They do a funny dance. There’s arguably no American bird that’s goofier. One Smithsonian Magazine write-up speculated that “the newfound fame of Bryant Park’s woodcocks might be the most attention the species has ever received.”

Any time wild birds make the news is a win in my book. But I will take issue with Smithsonian Magazine’s statement. Like most of the birds I write about here, woodcocks used to be much better known than they are today. I’m not missing my chance to share several centuries of woodcock lore.

As far back as the 1600s, the European colonization of America created a mosaic of regional ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, and each one invented names for the birds they found. For some birds, the list of names got quite long—one writer collected ninety-seven for the Ruddy Duck. This wealth of earthly and often humorous names was nothing but a confusing mess to the American Ornithologists’ Union, however, and in 1886 they published an official list that proved remarkably successful at replacing chaos with order. In the following decades, folk names faded away entirely as the market and subsistence hunters who invented them died off and as new bird-lovers learned “correct” names from field guides.

But with the woodcock—and as far as I’m aware, only the woodcock—have these vernacular names survived. Exceedingly few American birds have widely-known nicknames. Birders call Yellow-rumped Warblers “butter-butts” and Cooper’s Hawks “coops,” but the list isn’t much longer than that. Yet most birders know that “timberdoodle” means woodcock, and real fans still call them Labrador twister and bog-sucker.

When you look at a bird with a lot of old folk names, there’s a good chance it got them because they were widely hunted. And there was no game bird more beloved than the woodcock. As the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush wrote in 1925, “According to the accepted definition of a game bird our Woodcock is supreme. It lies close, rises to a convenient height, offers a quick shot on the wing and when brought to the table is a most luscious and delectable morsel for the epicure.”1

These birds had a way of drawing flowery dedications from the most stoic of hunters. Here’s William Jarvis writing about woodcocks in 1890:

“In the list of birds pursued with dog and gun, there is one that has a lasting claim upon the affections of a sportsman, both on account of its beauty and the mystery that surrounds its ways; a bird of mighty wanderings and daily rest; a bird with eyes large, dark, and deep, in whose depths the glories of an autumnal sky and landscape are reflected in miniature; a bird with the magic power to turn its admirer from all feathered game.”2

And Arthur Cleveland Bent, in 1927:

“This mysterious hermit of the alders, this recluse of the boggy thickets, this wood nymph of crepuscular habits is a common bird and well distributed in our Eastern States, widely known, but not intimately known.”3

Woodcocks weren’t just hunted for fun. They were hunted because people loved to eat them, and would pay a generous price for the privilege. “Thousands of persons besides you and myself are fond of Woodcock shooting,” wrote John James Audubon in 1835. These woodcocks, he continued, were “killed in almost incredible numbers . . . and our markets are amply supplied with it during its season.” In his 1867 survey of every food item for sale in the public markets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Thomas De Voe wrote of the woodcock that “this highly prized bird . . . brings the highest price of any bird brought to our markets. Its flesh is no doubt the most delicate eating of all birds known.”4

According to Audubon, some gourmands ate woodcocks “with all their viscera, worms and insects to boot, the intestines in fact being considered the most savoury parts.” He himself disagreed about the intestines, which he “never conceived suitable articles of food for man.” Even so, he became near-ecstatic remembering the taste of the birds while traveling in Scotland.

The most simple and refined way of eating woodcock was served on toast, but go to a fancy restaurant or hotel and there was no limit to how elaborate the woodcocks could get. Here’s a recipe for “Salmi of Woodcock a la Chasseur,” circa 1890, which was served at Delmonico’s, the most exclusive restaurant in New York City.

To supply these wealthy urban markets, professional hunters from Minnesota to Florida would harvest woodcocks by the barrel—skilled hunters were known to shoot a hundred in a day—and ship them by refrigerated railcar to New York or Chicago. A single barrel could fit four hundred woodcocks, which might sell for three hundred dollars in the 1880s—equivalent to nearly ten thousand dollars today.

Market hunters killed so many of these birds that sportsmen worried that their favorite game animal and pastime would vanish entirely. A perennial refrain, which never quite bore out, was that overhunting by lower-class market and subsistence hunters would drive the woodcock extinct.

Here’s Frank Forester warning about their disappearance in the 1850s:

“Enact! enact! and save our gentle, well-born woodcock; preserve our harmless occupation from the untimely end which threatens it.”5

And a writer for Harper’s Weekly in 1897:

“Altogether he is one of the finest of our American game birds . . . And yet, I fear, this beautiful and wily game bird is doomed to share the fate of the wild-turkey, which has become so scarce and is on the road to extinction . . . The axe is more fatal to the woodcock than the gun. Then, again, the woodcock cannot be preserved as the pheasant is in England . . . So his extermination is certain.6

And William Temple Hornaday, in 1913:

“Either give the woodcock of the eastern United States just ten times the protection that it now has, or bid the species a long farewell.7

And it was this sort of concern that gave birth to the conservation movement. High-class sportsmen used their political leverage to pass laws restricting woodcock hunting to those that hunted them in a sportsmanlike way, a campaign that eventually eliminated the market for game animals entirely, provided absolute protection for non-game birds, and aimed to regulate sustainable use for game birds.

I don’t think woodcocks were ever that close to going extinct, but the concern wasn’t entirely unjustified. Sportsmen had watched turkeys disappear from the east, Heath Hens dwindle and die off, and Passenger Pigeons vanish completely, all because of overhunting.

Since 1918, woodcock hunting has been tightly regulated by federal law. And although there aren’t any reliable population estimates from that era, anecdotes suggest that the following decades saw a recovery in woodcock numbers, supported by strict enforcement of hunting limits and an expansion of their preferred early-succession forest habitat resulting from abandoned farms.

By the 1970s, around 700,000 hunters killed two million woodcocks every year, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considered a sustainable harvest against a total population of five to seven million birds. Since then, the popularity of woodcock hunting has steadily fallen. By 2012, only about 160,000 hunters pursued woodcocks, together harvesting about 350,000 birds each year.

It’s not just woodcock hunters that have been disappearing. The number of woodcocks, too, has fallen by one to two percent every year since the seventies. The same abandoned farms that provided ideal woodcock habitat during the thirties are now mature forests that woodcocks no longer find useful. Combined with fire suppression and suburban development, woodcocks have much less of the young, brushy habitat they depend on. Today there’s somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million woodcocks in America. Returning their population to 1970s levels would require restoring 32,000 square miles of young forest—roughly the area of South Carolina.

Hunting and habitat loss aren’t the only threats that we’ve imposed on these bizarre birds, and this brings us back to Bryant Park. Like many birds, woodcocks migrating by night over cities are confused and drawn in by the glow of streetlights. The lucky ones find an oasis of green amid the miles of concrete and steel. Possibly because their eyes are set so far back on their heads, woodcocks have a particularly hard time navigating urban environments. Every year, thousands are stunned or killed by crashing into windows they confuse for open sky. Unfortunately, many of the birds that land in Bryant Park don’t make it out alive.

Woodcocks aren’t at imminent risk of extinction, like turn-of-the-century sportsmen predicted. But the forces eating away at woodcock numbers all contribute to the deeply concerning loss of three billion birds from North America since 1970. A world with fewer woodcocks is a world less weird and wonderful. Awareness of these birds, and the toll that our built environment exacts on their populations, is indispensable for their protection. But it’s only the first step.

In the two short years leading up to the fair, more than forty thousand carpenters, masons, painters, plumbers, engineers, and architects transformed Chicago’s then-vacant Jackson Park into a Beaux-Arts city. More than two hundred buildings, each a minor architectural marvel, were erected to showcase the latest advances in manufacturing and the greatest accomplishments in art and industry. These buildings, made from iron and wood, were designed to be temporary. But in the world’s first application of spray paint, they were whitewashed to imitate stone so convincingly that the faux-neoclassical fairgrounds earned the nickname The White City.

Even if you haven’t heard of the fair, you’ve probably sung about it—the line “Thine alabaster cities gleam” from “America the Beautiful” is a reference to the White City. To rival the Eiffel Tower, built for a world fair four years earlier, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. built an enormous revolving wheel, with each of its thirty-six bus-sized cabins carrying forty occupants twenty-five stories into the air. Spain built replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, sailed them across the Atlantic, and anchored them in the park’s lagoon. More than twenty-seven million people came to Chicago to see the fair.

One of them came looking for birds.

Frank Chapman was no stranger to birding in unconventional settings. Seven years before, the budding ornithologist from Teaneck, New Jersey went on a now-famous birdwatching expedition in New York’s shopping district to publicize the ravages of the feather trade. Of the seven hundred hat-bearing women that passed him by, he counted five hundred forty-two adorned with the feathers, wings, or entire bodies of woodpeckers, sparrows, orioles, and owls.

Just as he’d seen in the streets of New York, women attending the Chicago fair sported hats with the latest fashions in feathers, but this time, these feathers weren’t much of interest to him. Nor was he much interested in commercial displays of feathers, like the eiderdown robes in the Norway delegation’s building. Now, as a twenty-nine year old staff ornithologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, he was looking for something more scientific.

Yet his search was anything but straightforward. While manufactures, agriculture, mining, electricity, and a dozen other special causes had their own dedicated buildings, there was none dedicated to wildlife. In his report to the American Ornithologists’ Union, he wrote that “two hundred and nine acres covered with exhibits proved as difficult ‘collecting ground’ as the mazes of a tropical forest, and afforded birds quite as excellent opportunities for concealment.”1

As he combed the buildings housing forty-six international delegations, Chapman found small displays of native birds from Cuba, Guatemala, Japan, and Australia. He noticed a grouping of colorful mounted birds from the island of Trinidad, although some of them were “obviously from the mainland.” The best foreign exhibition of birds came from Costa Rica, which presented several hundred tropical birds in glass cases, each “bearing labels of the same character as those used by the Smithsonian Institution.”

Every U.S. state sent a delegation to the fair as well, and many of their buildings housed displays boasting of their native wildlife. Here Illinois reigned supreme, in no small part thanks to the ornithologist C. F. Adams, “whose death, due to overwork,” wrote Chapman, “occurred while he was arranging [the display] in Chicago.” The Illinois display featured dioramas with turkeys, herons, and crossbills in their natural surroundings, as well as cases presenting migrating birds, winter residents, summer residents, and “Stragglers in Illinois.” Chapman also found “a well-arranged collection of State birds” in the Ohio building, and mentioned collections of game birds displayed by North Carolina and Minnesota. He was less impressed by a display of common birds from Brown University “under the decidedly non-committal label of ‘Specimens of Birds either Beneficial or Injurious to the Farmer.”

Plenty of professional taxidermists, both individuals and firms, came to the fair to show off their craft. The country’s preeminent supplier of museum and private collections, Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, had a large display in the fair’s Anthropology Building containing “representatives of almost every branch of the animal kingdom,” including several hundred birds. Among the taxidermists, Chapman judged the panel of game birds shown by F. H. Lattin & Co. to be the most impressive.

Like many of today’s birders, Chapman seemed to feel that captive and domesticated birds were beneath mentioning. But he undoubtedly saw a bunch of live birds too. Ostrich farming was booming in California, and the state advertised their novelty with a pen of ostriches and their chicks. Frederick Law Olmsted was in charge of the fair’s landscaping, and to add some living pops of color he ordered a whole flock of birds to occupy the fair’s central lagoon, including hundreds of ducks and geese, several thousand pigeons, a pair of flamingos and pelicans, four storks, and four snowy egrets.2

But it was in the U.S. Government building that Frank Chapman finally found what he was looking for. The Division of Economic Ornithology, part of the Department of Agriculture, included a display which, he wrote, “as a graphic lesson in the relations of birds to man has probably never been equalled.” Chapman listed off the naturalistic displays illustrating the impact of birds on human affairs: “A Robin worm-hunting on a bit of lawn, attended by its ever-present persecutor, the House Sparrow; Cedarbirds feeding on elm beetles; House Sparrows destroying peach blossoms; Bobolinks in their summer dress, and also as Reed-birds in the rice-fields in the fall; Purple Grackles taking grubs from a lawn; Crows in a field of freshly sprouted corn; Kingbirds devouring bees, and Cuckoos feeding on tussock moths.” Visitors roaming the exhibit could pull open drawers to find bird skins arranged next to the insect, animal, and plant pests that had been found in their stomachs. And for those who wished to attract the services of these helpful birds, the exhibit included an array of birdhouses that might encourage birds to settle near the farm or garden.

The fair’s most extensive display of birds could be found across the Government Building’s grand rotunda at the Smithsonian Museum’s exhibit. One case contained dozens of “the principal game-birds of the world.” One held more than a hundred and fifty South American hummingbirds. Another had fifty birds of paradise. All along one wall, a crowded case held “a systematic collection of the leading representatives of the families of American birds.”

The most instructive exhibit might have been a collection “illustrating the confusion caused by the application of the same popular name to different species of birds,” with a side-by-side comparison of pairs of birds from both sides of the Atlantic, each bearing the name robin, buzzard, quail, partridge, goldfinch, ortolan, redstart, woodcock, blackbird, oriole, sparrow hawk, yellowhammer, and turtle dove. A few cases showed birds frozen in scenes from real life, like a bowerbird arranging its elaborate nest and a shrike impaling a mouse on a thorn. Finally, the Smithsonian gave fair-goers a chance to see mounted specimens of Carolina Parakeets, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, and Passenger Pigeons—birds that they would likely never again see in the wild.

As grand and successful as the World Columbian Exposition was, its ending was catastrophic. Two days before the fair’s closing ceremonies, Chicago’s mayor was assassinated. In the months after the fair closed, the tens of thousands of men it employed drifted back to a city with few jobs as the country reeled from the Panic of 1893. Only three of the fair’s buildings survived planned demolition, stripping for parts, and arson.

Yet the contributions of the fair to American life, both large and small, are not hard to find nearly a hundred and fifty years later. After seeing German chocolate-making machinery at the fair, Milton Hershey decided to switch from making candy to chocolates. Twenty-six-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright hated the fair’s neoclassical architecture, but the rest of the country disagreed—it helped inspire the City Beautiful movement, including the layout of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The fair’s Midway, with its Ferris wheel and other attractions, inspired Coney Island and gave birth to the modern amusement park. Hawaiian performers introduced Americans to hula dancing. Syrian performers introduced Americans to belly dancing, and the ubiquitous “Arabian Riff” was composed at the fair to accompany them. The Pledge of Allegiance was likewise first performed at the fair. Americans got their first taste of Juicy Fruit gum, Quaker Oats, Vienna Sausage, moving sidewalks, and stretched penny souvenirs.

The birds, too, lived on. As the World Columbian Exposition was drawing to a close, the state of Illinois established the Columbian Museum of Chicago, later renamed the Field Museum of Natural History, to preserve artifacts and specimens that had been brought to the city by the fair. More than 50,000 objects from the exposition formed the foundation of the museum’s collections, including hundreds of taxidermied birds.

Every year, celebrations on the twelfth night after Christmas marked the beginning of Carnival season, which would culminate a month and a half later with Mardi Gras. At each of these events, different White men’s social clubs, called krewes, would compete to put on elaborate themed processions and balls. Krewes were a relatively new development, and the Twelfth Night Revelers had formed just three years before. Beginning in 1870, the Revelers led elaborate, often allegorical parades through the city, and they’d already introduced innovations like King’s Cake and trinkets thrown to the crowd that would eventually become indispensable Mardi Gras traditions.

This year, the theme of the parade, and its starting point, were both closely-kept secrets. So as the sun set, the crowds that had flooded Canal Street buzzed with excitement, jockeying for a good position along the brilliantly-lit street. A roar spread through the crowd at the first sight of the heralds leading the procession—three Revelers on horseback dressed as a flamingo, a scarlet ibis, and a reddish egret. Behind them was an arch holding a globe-shaped banner announcing the parade’s theme: The World of Audubon. Behind the banner came a float carrying a man in pure white, seated atop a pillar, representing John James Audubon himself, with paintbrush raised. He was flanked on his right, according to one newspaper account, “by his well-known Indian guide and companion, and on his left his equally well-known negro cook,” presumably enslaved. These two subservient companions explicitly reinforced a racial hierarchy that Audubon lived in his own life, and which the Democratic governor and his supporters hoped to restore.1

In the tributes to Audubon that flooded newspapers after the parade, many began, like that of the Times-Picayune, by saying “His genius is too well known and appreciated to need comment here.” In the twenty-two years since Audubon’s death, the mythology around his life and art had only grown. Audubon was born in the French colony of Saint-Dominque, today’s Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner—facts that he’d spend his life trying to obscure. When he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1803 at eighteen years old, he fabricated his passport to say that he’d been born in French Louisiana, a lie that led the state to embrace him as their own. Audubon wouldn’t actually reach New Orleans until 1808, when he spent a few years in the city as a businessman, returning for a few years more in 1820 to paint birds. Though he was in no respect a Louisianian, the state considered him their favorite son.

Audubon came at the head of a procession of fifteen floats, all pulled by horses and supporting a cast of revelers dressed as Audubon’s birds acting out humorous and allegorical scenes. As fanciful as these scenes were, the designers of the costumes tried to be as faithful as they could to Audubon’s original paintings. The birds on the float weren’t generic—in nearly every case an educated spectator could guess the species and the meaning it carried. “In selecting from the works of the immortal Audubon the models and the inspiration of their pageant,” wrote a reporter for The New-Orleans Times, “the Twelfth Night Revelers have tendered a delicate and graceful tribute to the greatest artist America has ever produced.” These are the floats that came after, painted by Charles Briton in 1873, who was also their designer:

Float 1: Parrot Teaching School. A teacher, clearly a now-extinct Carolina parakeet, stands at the head of an unruly class of macaws and cockatoos. The macaw at the front of the class wears a dunce cap. In this float, as with those that followed, each bird was portrayed by a man wearing an elaborate costume and enthusiastically acting his part.

Float 2: The Sick Owl and Attendants. A miserable, sick owl is surrounded by a host of animals, none of whom seem to be of much help. From left to right, the animals seem to be a saw-whet owl; a woodcock (or possibly a kiwi?); a frog; a bewigged “hawk owl” writing either a prescription or the sick owl’s last will and testament; a scaup duck; the ailing snowy owl; and a final great horned owl that one newspaper called “a monument of preternatural stupidity and indecision.”2

Float 3: The Dove’s Wedding. A cardinal (get it?) in all his priestly vestments performs the wedding ceremony for a ground dove and a “White Dove.” They’re joined in celebration by a roseate spoonbill, a “red bird,” and a “gold and purple finch.”

Float 4: The Kingfisher’s Banquet. This “admirable burlesque of the old feudal banquet hall” featured, from left to right, a common (European) kingfisher, a dodo, an oystercatcher, a tufted puffin, a boat-billed heron, a belted kingfisher, a great auk mother and children, and a frigatebird—then called man-o’-war bird, hence the nautical outfit. These last two, according to one observer, “were about the drunkest birds any one ever saw.”

Float 5: The Political Barnyard Meeting. In this clearly allegorical scene, the smoothtalking fox wins the admiration of an enthusiastic crowd of barnyard fowl, “the very tenderest morsels known,” including geese, a mallard, a hen, a rooster, and what I believe is supposed to be a guineafowl, third from the left. Here’s the interpretation of one newspaper: “Poor foolish fowls, they were evidently ‘taken in’ by the oily words of the wily fox—true type of a certain class of politicians—and like the followers of these politicians to be lured in by his smooth talk and fair promises only to prove his victims in the end.”3

Float 6: The Woodpecker’s Workshop. A bird that the newspapers call a Chicken Hawk (looking more like a peregrine falcon) reads aloud to a seated bobwhite and four busy carpenters. The three woodpeckers on the right are clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker, a red-headed woodpecker, and a pileated woodpecker. The green, red, and white woodpecker in the center-left is more of a mystery. I’d guess it’s supposed to be some sort of tropical woodpecker, but I couldn’t find any that come close—if you recognize the bird please speak up!

Float 7: The Battle Royal. Another political allegory, this one international. America’s bald eagle sits on an elevated dais, flanked by eagles representing Mexico (with the snake) and France (with the shield and military uniform). The three watch a deadly conflict play out between Russia’s eagle (with two heads) and Prussia’s (with one). A newspaper provided the interpretation based on rising tensions in Europe: “The whole was only a foreshadowing of what may come when Russia, jealous of the growing might and glory of Prussia, shall hurl her millions at her.”

Float 8: The Bird Club. Birds here include: red-headed woodpecker, great egret, horned grebe, yellow-crowned night heron, whooping crane, and a royal flycatcher, which newspapers called a “king toddy.” I can’t find it in the picture, but newspapers also mention “a Canvas-back Duck in a melancholy state of inebriation.” Journalists watching the parade interpreted this debaucherous scene as a critique of “club men at their revels,” and a society “disposed to overlook such little failings in individuals who can afford it.”

Float 9: The Mocking Bird’s Choir. Here we have a group of creatures all known for their song: the mockingbird as conductor, a bluebird with a guitar, a lark on the organ, a canary on the flute, a Cape May warbler on violin, and a bullfrog on the bass. What caught my attention here is that two separate newspapers label the violinist as a Cape May warbler—a species that incredibly few non-birders today could identify. It’s clear that the parade’s designers wanted to do justice to Audubon’s work, and that they had a well-justified faith in the abilities of the spectators.

Float 10: The Birth of Tom Tit. Young Tom bursts from an egg resting on a stump, while his adoring mother and father—a Carolina chickadee and tufted titmouse—look on. They’re joined by what newspapers identify as a barn swallow and a seagull. On the left two jovial sportsmen join in celebration: a woodcock (a popular game bird, here with roles reversed, loading his musket), and a curlew.

Float 11: The Grand Turk-ey. A graphic play on the two meanings of the word. This might be the most disturbing image I’ve come across in all my years of research. A turkey dressed as an Ottoman Sultan, seated by his wife, is presented with the head of a chef who must have displeased him. As one journalist interprets the scene, with less than a decade separating him from the end of American slavery: “that awful, grinning head is the head of a negro, and the raiment which clothes the body says, in the jacket and apron, that it belonged to servitude. Justice is appeased, no doubt.”4

Float 12: The Cocks of the Walk. A parade of the proudest gentlemen of the bird kingdom. From left, a game cock holding boxing gloves, followed by a silver pheasant, a “Buff Rooster,” a a “Multon Rooster” with a snowy egret and a tricolored heron (formerly called a Louisiana heron) hanging on each arm, and finally a peacock and his golden pheasant lady on their horses.

Float 13: Crows in Council. Here’s the float that speaks most clearly to elite White opinions of the state’s political situation. A collection of black birds—a vulture, crow, rook, ravens, a bat, and what looks to me like a smooth-billed ani—gathered at Louisiana’s statehouse, mocking African American legislators. One journalist who attended the parade littered his account with racist tropes, leaving no doubt as to what he thought of Reconstruction:

“At the rostrum, behind which the arch stands, is a venerable but excited crow, who pounds wildly on the desk with a most energetic umbrella. He is the presiding genius of the scene, as you may read in the overwhelming importance of his mien, the unaccustomed splendor of his dress and the fierce truculence of his glance . . . . A pert looking bat is secretary, and regards with impatience the length of brother raven’s discourse; for his turn comes next, and these little organic forms of office are sweet to the nouveaux arrives. A solemn rook in livery, with imposing cap and radiant staff of office, sits bolt upright in his chair, his eyes closed in the rapt ecstasy of his sense of elevation . . . . beside him, carpet-bag in hand, the ominous carrion crow uprears his ugly front.”5

Float 14: The Bird Ball. Eight colorful birds dance around a maypole to a cricket’s serenade. Some, like the magpie, bluebird, and blue jay would have been easy for spectators to recognize. The newspapers identify the other birds, undoubtedly with some help from the float’s designer, as some of the most fantastical birds on earth: a red bird-of-paradise, a greater bird-of-paradise, and two hummingbirds: a tufted coquette and a white-booted rackettail.

Float 15: The Pelican. The final float of the parade was the symbol of the state, feeding fish to three of her restless chicks. One journalist wished for this to mean an end to Federal interference, whose corollary was, of course, the wolf whistle of states’ rights: “May we not accept this as a promise that our mother State will yet minister to her loving children as was her wont? That the time will come when we may once again be a happy and contented family, and need to take no charity at the stranger’s hand?”6

The next morning, the city turned its attention back to the political crisis. While the various factions managed to avoid violence for a few more days, peace would not last much longer. In April, White paramilitary forces attacked the Black militia at Colfax, slaughtering as many as a hundred and fifty men after they’d surrendered. The following year, five thousand White and mostly ex-Confederate militia attacked and seized the statehouse, overwhelming the outnumbered, integrated Republican militia and municipal police, before Federal forces arrived three days later. Over the following years attacks like this continued, eventually leading to the fall of the Republican government and contributing to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. African Americans would be excluded from the state’s politics for another ninety years.

While I was researching my last piece on game dinners, I saw a small reference to the 1873 Twelfth Night parade. I was intrigued, but didn’t dream that such a rich visual record of the event might still exist. I’d like to thank Zoe Grueskin and Tyler Gunther for their help digging it up! Zoe goes birding in novels at her Substack All The Birds In. Tyler doubles as the medieval pageant designer Greedy Peasant—follow him on Instagram and Patreon.

And finally, this might be my last post for a little bit—over at the Bird History household we’re expecting a baby in early March! Stay tuned…

Subscribe now

Beside each centerpiece, guests found an elaborately-decorated menu listing the animals who had given their lives for the occasion, including but not limited to: fox squirrel, gray squirrel, whitefish, black bass, black bear, blackbird, buffalo, cinnamon bear, silver-tip bear, mountain sheep, antelope, elk, raccoon, opossum, jackrabbit, English hare, Canada goose, canvasback duck, black duck, gray duck, dusky duck, wood duck, longtail duck, pintail duck, mallard duck, gadwall duck, shoveler duck, scaup duck, butterball duck, buffle-headed duck, bobwhite, golden plover, prairie chicken, reed birds, rice birds, ruffed grouse, pin-tailed grouse, sparrow, snipe, brant, pheasant, oysters, and turtle.

Then there were the ornamental dishes. Diners could look around the room and spot: “Pyramid of Game, en Bellevue; Boned Quail, in Plumage; Red Winged Starling, au Naturel; Pin-tailed Grouse in Feather; Rabbit Watching the Hunter; Blackbirds on Tree; The Coon at Home.” One newspaper confidently declared, with some reason, that John Drake’s event was “undoubtedly the grandest game dinner ever given in the United States.2

By this point, John Drake’s game dinners were, according to an 1886 article in the St. Paul Daily Globe, “almost as much an institutional part of Chicago as the stock yards.” The historian David Shields considered them the most famous culinary events of Gilded Age America. Drake put on his first game dinner back in 1855, when he was 29 years old and when Chicago was just 18. That year, he bought an ownership share of Chicago’s most prominent hotel, Tremont House, and began his tenure as proprietor with dinner served to fifty guests and comprising a relatively modest twenty species of game, including venison, prairie chicken, quail, wood duck, rabbit, turkey, passenger pigeon, mallard, teal, widgeon, canvasback, snipe, sandhill crane, and bear. Every subsequent year he made it his professional obligation to expose his diners to an ever-greater assortment of game.3

When Tremont House burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Drake, like the city, built back bigger and better. He took over management of the newly-built Grand Pacific Hotel where he resumed his game dinners on a scale which he hoped would make up for their four-year absence. His first year back, one reporter editorialized that his chefs “vigorously studied Cuvier, Audubon, Wilson, Buffon, and Baird, in the hope that they might find some member of the animal kingdom that flew in the air, ambled upon the earth, or lived in the sea, hitherto unheard of, to be added to the ‘game dinner’ bill of fare as a surprise.”4 The resumption of this feast in a hotel rising from the ashes came to represent Chicago’s resiliency, and thereafter became a highly-anticipated civic ritual.

As Chicago’s suburbs and stockyards filled in the marshes and prairies where Drake had once sourced his game, the city’s growing network of railroads made it just as easy to ship fresh and frozen game from the Chesapeake or California as from Illinois. “The position of Chicago on the prairies and within easy reach alike of the seaboard and the great plains, gives her gastronomes exceptional advantages,” said one writer in the sporting magazine Forest and Stream.5 Its location and stockyards made Chicago the game capital of America.

It wasn’t just the lucky attendees of Drake’s dinners who ate woodcock and quail, of course. Markets throughout the country offered a wide selection of wild birds and mammals to anyone who fancied eating them. But the game dinners offered by upscale hotels and restaurants meant more than gathering around a carved turkey. These were celebrations—one could say orgies—of America’s abundant wildlife, and their reputation extended around the world. In 1898 the Australian magazine Table Talk called game dinners “an American institution.”6

In the 19th century, America’s cuisine was synonymous with its game, best displayed not through an accomplished command of technique or masterful use of spices, but through its seemingly limitless number and diversity of edible animals. To honor the visit of British minister Lord Napier to the US Capitol in 1859, for example, the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. served 1,800 guests a grand banquet of “canvas-back ducks from the Delaware, reed birds from the Savannah, wild turkeys from Kentucky, prairie hens from Iowa, mutton from the Cumberland mountains, venison from North Carolina, and other ‘native American’ dishes.”7

Game dinners represented the wildness that defined America, all gathered together on a banquet table. America’s identity was bound up in its rapidly-receding frontier. By 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed, passenger pigeons had just about disappeared from the wild, and bison seemed destined for the same fate. But railroads were still shipping ducks and prairie chickens from the Great Plains to coastal cities by the ton so that diners in New York and Boston could still take a bite of something American, something wild.

Newspapers throughout the country discovered that Drake’s game dinners made great copy, and in breathless paragraphs they emphasized that the entire country’s resources were encapsulated in one night’s menu:

“All the fowls that cleave the clouds from the lakes to the gulf, all the beasts that ruminate over the broad plains of the Southwest, or run wild in the rocky fastnesses of the Sierras contributed to the feast. Reed birds and rice birds from the dank marshes of the sunny South; quails, prairie chickens, jack snipes, plovers and partridges from the Illinois meadows; blue-winged teals and butterball ducks from the crystal lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota; brants from the far north, sage hens from the Colorado plains, wild turkey and gray squirrels from the forests of the Northwest, a whiff of Northern pinelands, a reminiscence of magnolia blooms from Southern forests—all these were there.”8

But as the century wore on, game was not quite so available as it always had been, and Drake was forced to draw from far-flung lakes and marshes out of necessity. This was not a welcome development among the gentlemen hunters who made up the sporting class, who were becoming ever more critical of the market systems that brought these beasts to the insatiable urban masses and in the process drained the country of the animals which sportsmen were finding increasingly difficult to find. One sportsman complained that “for the dinner of 1888, as may be seen, [Drake] fairly ransacked the Rockies to the sea.”9

By this point, Drake was getting old and tired. He couldn’t keep up these logistical and culinary feats much longer, and the advance of laws advocated by sportsmen to end the commercialization of wild animals made it more challenging, and often legally dubious, to procure the same game he’d purchased in years past. Another sportsman wrote of the 1891 dinner, that “unless Mr. Drake was fortunate enough to have his quails, prairie chickens and partridges given to him by admiring friends, he broke the game law of Illinois, which forbids their being sold at any time.”10 Drake served his last game dinner in 1893, and he died the following year. He would host a total of 38 of these dinners, which would never again be equaled.

To be clear, sportsmen were not opposed to game dinners themselves. What they objected to was the way proprietors like John Drake sourced their meat. Wild animals were not meant to be bought and sold, they believed, but rather hunted in a sportsmanlike way. A true sportsman, instructed J. H. Langille in 1895, hunts by “shooting only game proper, and that is never out of season, taking an animal on the run, and the bird on the wing in order to give each a chance for its life.”11

Unlike Drake’s massive, commercial, public affairs, sportsmen had their own take on the game dinner. Beginning in the 1840s, sportsmen had begun organizing into clubs and associations to advocate for the protection of game, proliferating to more than 954 organizations throughout the country by 1891. Like many of these clubs, the Lackawanna Game and Fish Association, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, formed in response to “the rapid development of this section, with its consequent inroads upon fish and game, threatening their utmost extinction.” Association members supported the cause of game protection by distributing summaries of the state’s game laws to farmers, stocking local lakes with trout and salmon, and planting wild rice in lakes to attract wild ducks.12

But at its core, sportsmanship was about recreation, and the Lackawanna Game and Fish association did plenty of that too. For the Lackawanna club, like most other clubs throughout the country, the main event on their social calendar was the annual assembly, which was frequently paired with a pigeon shooting contest or a game dinner, and featured “every seasonable dish of game indigenous to this locality as well as a notable contribution from friends at the Far West.”13

The food for these dinners was often procured through “side hunts,” where club members divided up into teams and competed to see which side could kill the most animals over one or two days. Similarly, the New Orleans Gun Club challenged the Montgomery, Alabama Gun Club in October, 1877 to “join in a grand competitive shooting match for a game dinner.” At the conclusion of their shoot, all the animals they’ve killed would be “counted and turned over to a favorite restaurant, to be served up in a banquet, the losing club paying all the expenses.” Under their scoring system, robins would be worth 1 point; doves, 2; snipe, 8; quail, 10; mallards, 15; squirrels, rabbits, and other ducks, 10; hawks or owls, 25; woodcock, 25; prairie chickens, 30; geese, 50; turkeys, 250; deer, 500; bear, 1,000.14

Many of these clubs proved far more effective at shooting game than protecting it, as suggested by op eds sent by critical sportsmen to Forest and Stream, like one from 1880, which reads “The large clubs of New York and vicinity, both for shooting and the protection of game, seem to have entirely lost sight of the real object of their organization and have degenerated into a system of periodical dinners and post prandial bombastry.”15

These tensions led to a rift at the 1880 annual dinner of the Worcester Sportsmen’s Club of Massachusetts. Following a successful campaign by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to ban the sport of pigeon-shooting, members of the sportsmen’s club narrowly voted to have a glass ball shooting competition (precursors to the clay pigeons that trap shooters target today) rather than their traditional annual side-hunt.

But “although the day was simply perfect . . . . this departure of the club from the old custom was by no means satisfactory to a large number of the members,” who decided to go ahead and have their “old-time hunt and dinner” regardless. These rump sportsmen went ahead with their shoot, split into teams, slaughtered all the game they could find, and laid out their haul on a long table to be counted and scored. The pile of animal carcasses brought back by Captain Houghton’s side added up to 1,360 points, and they were declared the winners. Then the two sides reunited for dinner at the Bay State House where they ate the piles of partridges, woodcock, and quail they’d shot, augmented by deer, antelope, goose, and buffalo tongue sent by one A. B. F. Kinney, “who had just returned from his Western hunting trip on the excursion car ‘Jerome Marble.’”16

Unsurprisingly, the sort of hunting that supplied game dinners, both by market hunters and by relatively unrestrained sportsmen, was unsustainable for wildlife, and with good reason these orgiastic game dinners seem like a relic of a less prudent time. But one artifact from the game-dinner era is still very much with us. In 1900 the ornithologist Frank Chapman proposed the Christmas Bird Count as an alternative to the sportsmen’s side-hunt competitions, a festive and competitive wintertime census that would count birds rather than kill them. The CBCs, as they’re abbreviated, have proven to be incredibly valuable resources for tracking long-term trends in bird abundance. What started as game dinners has become the longest-running citizen science survey in the world.

Subscribe now

With all the ink that’s been spilled about foreign species like house sparrows and European starlings that have become established in the United States, I was surprised how little I could find written about American birds that have become naturalized in other countries. And American birds have, in fact, become quite widespread.

Just like they did in the United States, European settlers established acclimatization societies in other countries they colonized, which then imported American birds. Just like the sportsmen who imported pheasants and chukars in America, wealthy sportsmen in other parts of the world sought out American game birds to enhance their options when they felt the ones evolution provided had come up short. And no matter whether birds are American, European, African, or Australian in origin, exotic pets have a way of escaping containment.

As soon as Europeans reached the new world, they began an aggressive exchange of animal life across the Atlantic Ocean. Birds that were particularly novel or economically useful were the first ones to travel. Only twenty years after Columbus reached the Western Hemisphere, for example, domesticated turkeys from Mexico were being cultivated in Spain and spreading rapidly through the continent. In the early 1600s Samuel de Champlain sent King Louis XIII of France a gift of several pairs of Canada geese. Enough shipments followed that by the mid-1700s Canada geese had established populations throughout France, England, and Ireland. It didn’t take long for them to become just as annoying to European park-goers as they are to their American counterparts.

Bobwhites quickly became a favorite game bird among American colonists, and it wasn’t long before they too were exported abroad. By 1812 Alexander Wilson could write that they had been introduced to Jamaica, “where they appear to thrive greatly.” There were attempts to naturalize bobwhites in England by 1831, and by 1854 they had been set free in France. One shipment of bobwhites to Europe included 5,000 live birds. According to John Phillips, writing for the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1928, there was also an attempt “on quite a large scale” to introduce bobwhites in China, “but most of them arrived in bad condition after their long journey, so that nothing ever came of it.”1

It’s easy to see the spread of some birds as all but inevitable. Turkeys, chickens, and pigeons are so useful that people all over the world have gone to great lengths to import and cultivate them. But these introductions are the exception—more often, introductions depend on the decisions and motivations of just one or two individuals, as well as a hundred historical contingencies and a fair bit of luck.

This is the case for the California quail in Chile, which first arrived in 1864 when a man named William Groves moved to Valparaiso with a dozen quails he brought from California. He kept the birds on his farm until they escaped and became established in the wild. Twenty years later, another American settler in Chile imported quail from San Francisco and released them deliberately. By 1914, they could commonly be found for sale in public markets, both alive and dead. In 1920, a man named Carlos Reed brought fifty California quail from Chile to Argentina, and seeing promising results there he shipped over another four thousand in 1922. Today, California quail are widespread in western Argentina. In Chile, their range stretches nine hundred miles north to south.2

Plenty of like-minded Europeans tried to introduce American songbirds in their countries as well. An 1892 newspaper article from Eagle River, Wisconsin described how “A number of experiments have been made, in Germany as well as England, having in view the acclimatization and propagation in the open of some of the prettiest American birds.” Most of these were small-scale attempts, as with “Baron von Cramm, a wealthy nobleman with a hobby for birds,” who released several pairs of cardinals on his estate which survived through the winter and raised a brood of chicks in the wild the following spring. The same newspaper reported that mockingbirds, catbirds, rose-breasted grosbeaks, blue jays, purple finches, and even summer tanagers “have been doing nicely in the open in different parts of Germany.”3

One German ornithologist, Dr. Carl Russ, said that several American birds were “easy to acclimatize over there, and that because of several sterling qualities possessed by all of them they would make very valuable acquisitions to the list of European birds.” Russ advocated for introducing American birds like the mockingbird because it is “one of the largest and most voracious destroyers of insects, hence of great benefit to the agriculturist.” In spite of these sentiments, none of these birds were ever released in numbers great enough to establish self-sustaining populations, and ultimately they never took hold.

However interested they were in introducing foreign birds to their home countries, the Europeans who colonized islands in the Pacific were far more aggressive. Because these islands are so remote, their plants and animals descend from the rare few species that occasionally managed to arrive from distant mainlands. That isolation produced ecosystems with limited diversity and many unfilled niches, making it particularly easy for introduced species to become established, and particularly destructive to native species when they do. They were perfect settings for settlers to live out their fantasies of ecological domination.

In 1938 a man by the name of Eastham Guild wrote to The Avicultural Magazine that while Tahiti was a tropical paradise in most respects, “for some reason there is practically no bird life.” In his letter, he detailed his attempts to remedy the situation. “Since the climatic conditions were favourable and the profusion of grasses, weeds, and flowers provided a variety of foods,” he wrote, “I could see no reason why certain small birds from other countries of similar climate should not thrive here.” Over the next two years, he released over 9,000 birds representing 54 species, among them California quail, western bluebirds, mountain bluebirds, scarlet tanagers, lazuli buntings, Anna’s hummingbirds, and pygmy nuthatches from the United States. Some of these succeeded in nesting once or twice after they were released, but most disappeared into the forest and were never seen again. While fifteen species of foreign birds eventually became established in Tahiti, the American birds introduced by Eastham Guild were not among them.4

In New Zealand, American birds had a little more success. In 1922 George Thomas wrote a report compiling all of the attempts to naturalize foreign species of animals and plants in New Zealand, including at least one hundred and thirty kinds of birds, fifteen of which were American. Like most attempted introductions the world over, many in New Zealand were so feeble that they never gave the hapless birds a chance. New Zealand’s government imported some canvasback ducks in 1905, but only two survived the journey. That same year they imported American black ducks, of which ten survived the trip and reared young, but none of these seem to have gotten established. Between 1867 and 1908, settlers also periodically released a small number of wood ducks without any more luck.5

As in other countries, game birds were the main focus of introductions. Twenty-two sharp-tailed grouse from Utah were released in 1876, and seventeen prairie chickens from Topeka, Kansas were released in 1879. Neither of these species became established, and the dozens of mountain quail they released a few years later fared no better. In 1898 someone released four hundred bobwhites, but these too had disappeared by 1909.

Not all of their attempts were destined for failure. California quail were first introduced in 1867, and large numbers were released periodically in the following years by local acclimatization societies. These birds took hold well enough that before long they graduated to the status of agricultural pest. In 1905 the government imported several dozen Canada geese, which were distributed to acclimatization societies throughout the country and released at lakes, and by 1922 they were considered an established species. Wild turkeys were also frequently released, and achieved an enduring popularity as a game bird.

The American bird that became naturalized most recently may also be the one that’s caused the most damage. In the 1950s, a group of ruddy ducks escaped from wildfowl collections in England, began breeding in the wild, and then spread throughout continental Europe. The problem with ruddy ducks is that they interbreed with the closely-related white-headed ducks, whose population is threatened. Spain and England sponsored programs to cull ruddy ducks, which largely—but not entirely—killed off the birds in their territory, although at considerable expense.

The quest to move birds around the world is a colonial project. It has been practiced almost exclusively by settlers seeking to improve the land they have colonized, or import new and exciting species from lands their countrymen have settled. In the process, birds are reduced to little more than trophies or commodities. They’re removed from the context from which they evolved—it doesn’t matter that the birds are American, they might as well be Ugandan or Chinese. They’re judged solely on their aesthetics or quality as a game bird, with little thought for the impact they might have on the ecological communities they land in.

As far as I can tell, there are just six American birds whose naturalized overseas populations have held on to the present day. Wood ducks, ruddy ducks, and Canada geese are all widespread in Western Europe. There’s a thriving population of California quail in Argentina and Chile, and they also run wild in Corsica and New Zealand. Northern bobwhites are common in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and are occasionally seen in northern Italy. The only country where wild turkeys are considered naturalized is New Zealand, but the domesticated ones are cultivated the world over.

What’s surprising isn’t that there are California quail living in Chile or Canada geese living in New Zealand, but that there aren’t more species that became established. Most attempts at acclimatization, both in America and abroad, don’t become self-sustaining. With what we now know about invasion biology, it’s startling to see how cavalierly birds were introduced, both at home and abroad, just a few generations back. It’s a wonder that the number of introduced species that became naturalized is not higher, and it’s not for lack of trying.

In the June 1902 issue of the London-based Avicultural Magazine, Reverend Farrar dispensed some advice to amateurs in the hobby, those who had built their aviary but hadn’t yet decided which birds to stick in it. Go to dealers of good repute, he suggested, and don’t spring for cheap bargains. Buy birds in the summer, then keep them in quarantine for a few weeks. As to which ones to buy, Farrar put together a list of twenty-eight recommendations for beginners. Among them he suggests white-eyes from East Asia, which look like “a little girl wearing granny’s specs”; oriental magpie-robins, from India, which are “always getting into mischief”; and superb tanagers, from Brazil, which are “fairly hardy,” and “lovely even in death.” Zebra waxbills, from southern Africa, were affordable and widely available. “Let us thank God,” he proclaimed, “that there are birds within the reach of all!”2 With a small investment, anyone could have a collection of birds spanning every corner of the world.

Subscribe now

Among the birds that Farrar felt compelled to recommend, there were also three from the United States, namely the scarlet tanager, which “will always delight and surprise with its beauty,” the Virginia cardinal, which “enlivens the dulness of winter like the scarlet coat of the huntsman on the snow,” and the painted bunting, “a gorgeous fellow.” These most colorful and charismatic of America’s wild species once formed part of a global community of exotic birds, one small part of the colonial project of capturing the world’s brightest and most interesting creatures from the imperial frontier and bringing them back to Europe as pets. Outside of their native contexts, each of these birds took their place as live decor, household entertainment, status symbol, or collectible to the “specialist hobbyists who collect animals like other people collect stamps.”3

As soon as Europeans reached the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean became a busy highway transporting people, livestock, crops, weeds, bugs, and diseases between the continents. While colonizers were most interested in extracting “merchantable commodities” and sending them back to Europe, novelties were an important part of the exchange as well. Affluent English settlers imported nightingales, bullfinches, starlings, and linnets to remind them of the English countryside, and in return they sent back the most eye-catching birds that America could offer.

The northern cardinal’s stunning crimson feathers quickly made it one of the most popular exports. In 1688, one English traveler wrote about how boys in Virginia would catch and sell cardinals “to the Merchants for about six Pence apiece; by whom they are brought for England.” In an English guide to cage birds published in 1740, the cardinal (which it calls “The Red Bird” or “Virginia Nightingale”) was only one of two foreign birds mentioned—the other was the ubiquitous canary. Later guides considered the cardinal “too well known to require description, everyone is well acquainted with the brilliant crimson plumage of the male.”4

America’s export in cage birds stayed small-scale, if steady, until the mid-1800s, when German firms set up efficient supply chains to bring canaries to the United States and return to Europe with their American counterparts. As one British guide explained in 1878, “Large numbers of Indigo-birds are brought to Europe every summer, and mostly by German Canary dealers, who go out to America with German Canaries and Bullfinches, and bring back Indigo-birds and Nonpareil Finches.” This was the reason, the guide went on, that imported American birds were “as a rule, offered for sale in German canary-cages.”5

Mockingbirds were another immensely popular export. Although their gray-and-white plumage is comparatively drab, their impressive ability to mimic any other bird’s song, or any other noise for that matter, made them favorite pets both at home and abroad. Ranking cage birds could be as much a question of patriotism as preference, and one British guide defended the superiority of their native nightingale against the foreign upstart: “According to American writers, the Mocking-bird is, of all cage-birds, the very best songster, an opinion which is, however, not generally shared in Europe.” Another book weighted in with typical English dryness: “Enthusiastic American writers have named the Cardinal Grosbeak ‘Virginian Nightingale,’ and have described his song as equal or superior to that of the European Nightingale. Tastes differ.”6 These minor disagreements didn’t stop thousands of Germans, English, French, and Scandinavians from keeping cardinals and mockingbirds as pets.

While most American birds couldn’t boast the same colors as parrots and tanagers imported from the tropics, one advantage they did have was their tolerance of cold weather. The eastern bluebird, according to one guide, “thrives well in open-air aviaries, and is easily kept for years without artificial heat in winter.” Another guide recommended the indigo bunting, which “being a Northern bird, is somewhat better adapted to withstand the cold climates.” All the same, one writer remarked in 1896 that he found it “somewhat curious that fewer birds should be imported from America than from South Africa or Australia.”7

Most American cage birds were known by different names in the trade than they were domestically. Painted buntings, found in the American south, are a riot of blue, red, and green, and this exuberant color scheme earned them the name nonpareil, meaning “without equal” in French. In his 1888 guide to pet birds, George Holden wrote how they were “largely exported to the various European countries, where of late years they have become great favorites . . . At Havre and Paris immense numbers of them are sold yearly.”8

Eastern bluebirds were another popular export, and they too went by a confusing array of names. In England they were called Blue Robins and Blue Nightingales. Their German name translated “Blue Cottage Songster,” because allegedly, “wherever a settler builds a cottage in North America, there the Blue-bird greets him, approaches his dwelling with entire confidence, and forthwith builds his nest.” For the most dedicated aviculturists, the greatest prize was to succeed in breeding birds in captivity. Bluebirds reached this landmark by 1888, by which point “all the zoological gardens of Europe breed them so extensively, that there is no need of exporting them to supply the demand.”9

But most other birds were tougher nuts to crack. Rev. C. D. Farrar gives us a sense of the passion this sort of project could inspire: “A wise man has somewhere said ‘that if you want to know what a man is, examine his castles in the air.’ Here is one of mine, to breed the American Cat-bird.” It didn’t help that importers almost exclusively brought over colorful singing males and left their drab and silent female counterparts back in America. With indigo buntings, for example, “among every hundred males imported there are only a very few females, and it is by no means easy to obtain a hen-bird when such a one happens to be wanted.”10

Cardinals, mockingbirds, painted buntings, scarlet tanagers, and rose-breasted grosbeaks were all shipped wholesale and widely available, but nearly every other American bird, it seems, was also shipped overseas at some point. In Germany, the red-shouldered meadow-starling (red-winged blackbird) was “one of the most abundantly, annually, and regularly seen of Starlings in the market,” while the boat-tailed troupial (boat-tailed grackle) “only comes into the market extremely rarely.” The Swainson’s thrush “comes only singly from time to time in the bird market, yet it has appeared several times in the great bird shows in Berlin.” The Baltimore hangnest (Baltimore oriole) “has always been common in the German Gardens,” and “in the bird market it is always readily bought.” Blue jays were a common sight at zoos, but “on account of its high price . . . it is rarely to be found in private collections.”11

While these birds all seem like more or less conventional picks, there was really no limit to what birds an enthusiast might keep. Turning a wild bird into a pet was as simple (or as complicated) as getting it in a cage. One letter from an English writer to Avicultural Magazine describes an experiment keeping burrowing owls: “In captivity these little Owls are very easily kept… Mr. Meade-Waldo, who has bred this species several times in his aviaries, tells me that the young ones burrow as soon as they can run.”12 An 1888 price list from an American dealer in cage birds gives a sense of the great variety one might find, listing “woodpeckers, any variety,” flamingos, ravens, “crows, tame and trained,” alongside foreign birds like macaws, cockatoos, and ostriches. The only limitation was what the market could provide.

Even though the United States was a relatively minor exporter, the international market still drained enough songbirds from its forests to cause alarm. As early as 1808, the ornithologist Alexander Wilson noticed that the trapping of mockingbirds around Philadelphia had “rendered this bird extremely scarce for an extent of several miles around the city.” The bird protection movement which began in the 1880s with opposition to the plume trade and market hunting also addressed the market for cage birds. Beginning in 1886 one state after another passed a model law that banned the killing, capture, and sale of songbirds, and by 1906 one U.S. Department of Agriculture report concluded that “the once extensive trade in native American birds has dwindled to the vanishing point.” While small batches of cardinals or mockingbirds were still occasionally smuggled to Europe, “the life of the trade is gone.”13

Across the Atlantic, Europeans watched the diminishing supply of American songbirds with dismay. In 1892 a Wisconsin newspaper reported that “the exportations of American birds has of late diminished in number, due to laws prohibiting this which have gone into effect in a number of our States.” From there, American birds only became harder to buy, and a British cage bird guide from 1909 wrote conclusively that birds like American Goldfinches used to be regularly imported until “this traffic [was] put a stop to by the existing laws for the protection of birds in the United States.” By 1920 American birds like the Indigo Bunting were “not easy to get nowadays.” If Europeans still wanted to legally import North America’s birds, they’d have to look to Mexico.14

There’s an ironic hypocrisy in the United States ending the export of their wild songbirds when they did. Since 1918, the capture and export of America’s wild birds has been federally prohibited. But for another seventy years, the United States kept importing wild-caught birds from the rest of the world. Until they finally ended the practice in 1994, the United States was the world’s largest market for wild-caught parrots. The hundreds of thousands of wild birds we imported from Latin America, Africa, and Asia drove some species to the brink of extinction. While America quickly recognized the damaging impact that exporting its wild birds had on its own biodiversity, it took nearly a century to address the harm it was causing abroad.

On its face, this doesn’t sound like a winning recipe for The Best Book of All Time. Even after dozens of attempts, I have a hard time articulating why it deserves the title. I could say something about Caro’s prose, the extent of his research, his compassion for little people as he writes about big men. The best I can offer is that the literary world he creates inspires a sort of nostalgia in me that I haven’t felt since I read Harry Potter as a child.

I’d never heard of The Power Broker until a grad school classmate invited me to read it in a book club purpose-built to tackle the volume over the course of a year. After I finished the book (as I continue to remind the other book club members, I was the only one who actually did), I went on to read everything else Caro has written.

Robert Caro spent a decade writing The Power Broker, and for his efforts won a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, his only project has been chronicling the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. Fifty years, four volumes, and 3,522 pages later, Caro has only covered LBJ’s life up to the first few months of his presidency. Caro, at ninety years old, is only now writing the book covering Johnson’s time in the Oval Office. I hope he finishes soon.

Three years ago, I was talking with my good friend and fellow book club member Molly about the idea of a singular talent dedicating their sixty-year career to writing about just two people. We arrived at a question: If you were in his position, what would you spend your life writing about? I said, “I don’t know, probably something about birds and American history.”

Molly said, “you should write that book.”

I had never written before, aside from term papers and government reports. I went to school for public policy. Aside from the forty or so books on American history I read each year, I’d never formally studied the subject. But for some reason, this conversation put a worm in my brain.

I started reading, just to see what was out there, and to see what wasn’t. I already knew a bit about some pioneering ornithologists, but I wanted to know about everyone else. For the vast majority of Americans over the last four hundred years—people who professed no engrossing interest in birds—how did birds show up in their lives? This is the book I wanted to read, but no one had written it yet.

So I read some more, and then I started to write. I learned about how John James Audubon ate every bird that he painted. I learned that nearly everyone used to sleep on a featherbed, and that packing one took the feathers from 1,700 passenger pigeons. I learned that if you were rich, you ate canvasback duck, and if you weren’t, you ate robin pie. I learned that the battle to keep cats from killing birds goes back more than a century, that millions of kids used to celebrate Bird Day, that house sparrows were attacked in nativist terms, and that Italian immigrants were attacked for hunting songbirds. Learning and sharing these stories has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.

When I moved to New York City earlier this year, I decided to take a few months to focus on writing full-time and see where things might go. Thanks to my incredibly supportive wife, I had the time and space to try to bring this book into the world. This summer, I wrote a book proposal. In the fall, I found terrific literary agents that immediately understood the book’s vision. Three weeks ago, we submitted the proposal to publishers.

And last Monday, I got a book deal.

I’m grateful that my book has found a home at Holt, and that they’ve given me the freedom to spend the next year or two working on it full-time. Sharing stories about our evolving relationship with birds in this newsletter has been a wonderful experience—it’s turned me into a writer!—and I’m excited to unite those stories into a single narrative that follows our relationship with birds from before colonization to today.

Republic of Feathers will tell the story of how Americans went from viewing birds as a resource that only existed to be exploited, through their transformation into beings worth protecting in their own right. This was a cultural, moral, economic, and legal revolution that turned birds from commodities into wards of the state, recognizing them as a priceless part of our national heritage. Birds have always been central to America’s economy, values, laws, divisions, and identity. The way we’ve treated them reflects tensions between freedom and control, belonging and exclusion, abundance and restraint—the most enduring contradictions in American life.

America is the market hunters that drove passenger pigeons extinct, and the children who mourned their passing. America is the wealthy White northerners who fought to protect birds, and the southern Blacks who they persecuted for using birds for subsistence. America is the land and all the beings who live on it. It’s the geese and crows and robins, and it’s the gaping void where the ivory-billed woodpecker once lived. It’s the foreign starlings and sparrows who made America their own, who have been reviled and slaughtered ever since. America is the migrating warblers that make a mockery of national boundaries. It’s the wetlands that ducks call home, and the wetlands dredged to make room for suburbs and soybeans. These are many histories—billions of histories—but they’re also one history. And that’s the one I’m going to tell.

American colonizers and their descendants have had many relationships with the country’s birds over the last four hundred years, and Indigenous Americans have had their own relationships with birds for thousands of years longer. Right now we’re tasked with imagining models of coexistence that allow bird populations to thrive alongside prosperous, just, and healthy human populations. Fortunately, we don’t have to pull these models from the ether. Many of them have been explored before, and battles to make them reality have been fought and won. Over the centuries there’s so much we have learned, and so much we’ve forgotten. I hope that this book will not just uncover past worlds, but reveal worlds that could exist again.

And now—I need to write the book! I don’t have a release date yet, but it will be a few years before the book comes out. I’ll share big updates as they come in this newsletter. For the next year or two, I’m going to focus on grinding out this book. This might mean that my posts become a little shorter or less frequent. But! They will keep coming—I have a spreadsheet of around 150 topics I haven’t been able to share yet, and they’re burning a hole in my pocket.

Finally, THANK YOU! You’ve shown me—and shown my publisher—that there’s an interest in this kind of story, that it’s worth understanding where our relationship with nature comes from, and that these stories matter.

Last week, I talked with the journalist Ryan Goldberg about his new book, Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds. While Ryan started his career in sports reporting, his life took a turn when he started birding in New York City about ten years ago. In Bird City, he takes a look at the army of volunteers helping birds coexist with people in the country’s most densely-packed metropolis—the city is as indispensable for its birds as it is dangerous. What really drew me to his writing was the way he connected the birds we see—or don’t see—to the decisions made over the last century and a half. The city’s birdscape today is a product of introduced starlings, rehabilitated rivers, and manufactured wetlands, just like tomorrow’s birdscape will be a result of the conservation decisions we make today.

You can find more of Ryan’s work here and buy Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds here. Be sure to subscribe to his substack! The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Robert: New York City gets enough attention for its arts and business and politics, and New Yorkers tend to think that the world revolves around the city. So why should people in the rest of the country care about New York City’s birds?

Ryan: Yeah, we do have some New York exceptionalism here. I think people should care because what happens in New York happens in all cities in America. I wrote the book because I live here, but if I lived in Chicago, I could have easily written a bird city about Chicago or Dallas or Houston or LA. The stories of the people whose lives revolve around birds here and the work that they’re doing on conservation apply to any other city.

Clearly the country and the world is moving toward more urbanization. Seventy percent of the global population will be living in cities by 2050. What’s happening here, as far as decisions on the landscape, decisions about conservation can be examples or cautionary tales for the rest of the country. What happens here matters because we’re going to be crowding into cities and we need to find a way to make room for birds and biodiversity.

In your book, you express some discomfort with the way that we talk about introduced birds like sparrows and starlings in an almost exclusively negative light. At the same time, we live in a city that itself is a non-native environment. What place do sparrows, starlings, pigeons have in New York City?

Yeah, it’s such a hard question because the general feeling among birders is that these are pests. I think if they see their numbers declining, they kind of rejoice inside. But these are birds that actually are declining here. And even in their native range in Europe, they have seen pretty steep declines.

I was surprised in the reading of the book that their numbers in the city are just a quarter of what they were in the 70s?

Yeah, even much fewer. Their Christmas Bird Count in New York City at peak was somewhere around 750,000 starlings in the 60s and 70s. And now it’s just several thousand. Even that is a reflection of land use decisions and use of chemicals. Even starlings are not immune to our changes to the landscape and our decisions we make on farmland and open space.

These birds actually occupy a really great place for introducing people to birds. Once you get into birding, you very quickly shift over to wondering, what are the native birds? What are the migrating birds? But the number one bird that’s brought to the Wild Bird Fund for rehabilitation is the pigeon. Most people actually do see these birds first, and they may never start birding, but that doesn’t mean that they have less of an interest or care for the birds of the city.

When you point people to starlings that have never seen them before, they’re really taken by how beautiful they can look. Some of the ways that people thought these birds were detrimental to native species a while ago, I don’t really think that’s the case anymore. Their numbers are just not as great. They have enough buildings to nest in and enough of these liminal spaces to occupy that native birds aren’t going to occupy anyway.

Starlings were my spark bird as well, so I owe them that.

When we think about birds in the city, we often think about how we can stop the city from killing birds, from flying into windows, from destroying habitat, and be the bare minimum as a stopover point during migration. But in your book, you talk about some formerly threatened birds like Peregrine Falcons and Grasshopper Sparrows that are actually thriving in New York City, maybe better than anywhere else in the region or even the country. How is it that New York City is providing a uniquely valuable habitat?

The Peregrine Falcon has been a winner here. And that is because the built environment of New York mimics the habitat that they would be looking for in the wild. Skyscrapers and bridges are tall perches from which they can command the landscape, and peregrines have an instinctual need to look out over everything that allows them to hunt over open water and open ground.

Peregrines were reintroduced after they were wiped out completely by DDT from the eastern US. They were reintroduced to New York in the early 80s by the Peregrine Fund. The peregrines that are nesting here, they’re just pure, urban creatures. They’ve never seen a cliff in their life. The introduction of these non-native birds like starlings and pigeons has also provided them with an abundance of prey. Peregrine falcons in New York are almost exclusively hunting pigeons. These decisions that we make on the landscape, around the city, how we build the environment has allowed this symbol of wilderness to thrive in the most urban places.

The Grasshopper Sparrow is so interesting because it is nesting in really dense numbers at what was once the largest landfill in the country, Fresh Kills in Staten Island. They’re nesting in what is now a tall grass prairie on top of 150 million tons of capped trash. Fresh Kills was a landfill, but before that it was a tidal marsh. This new iteration of it has no precedent for that area. This place now has seen essentially three drastically different ecosystems in 70 years, from tidal wetlands to trash dump to now, a tall grass prairie. And now that it’s been built, the birds are finding it. Birds will fill the spaces that we’ve created for them, and do so really quickly.

I really appreciate that you capture the city’s dynamism, that in the last 70 years, the city’s experienced a lot of dramatic ecological changes, with new wetlands being created, rivers being polluted and cleaned up. Could you talk about how bird life has changed since then?

The biggest change has been with the wading birds that have moved into these islands of wilderness within New York Harbor. In the last 150 years, wading birds went from being hunted almost to extinction for women’s hats and the fashion trade in the late 1800s, to then being protected and saved from the brink. But it wasn’t for another 50 years or so until they started returning to New York City.

And it also coincides with the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act in the early 70s. The biggest change has been that Great Egrets started nesting on these islands within the still very polluted New York Harbor. And speaking of dynamism, a lot of the islands were actually artificial. They were created to house quarantine hospitals for millions of immigrants coming to New York in the early 1900s.

And so in the crumbling ruins of hospitals on other structures on these islands, these birds moved in. New York City Bird Alliance has been monitoring the population through their Harbor Herons Program, and they say this is like the largest colony of nesting birds anywhere in the Northeast, including ten different species of wading birds. But those numbers are actually now declining again because of sea level rise, because of predators like raccoons moving on to the islands. A few birds like Black Crown Night Herons and Glossy Ibises are actually having really drastic declines in their numbers. It just goes to show how quickly things change.

There are other wading birds from the south that are coming north because of climate change. For several years now, there’s been sightings of Anhingas and Wood Storks in New York City, and it probably won’t be long before those harbor heron colonies will be joined by new southern species.

You have trends on one hand, like sea level rise, global warming, range expansion, while also kind of balancing the very specific needs of particular species.

I feel like the speed with which even threatened birds like Grasshopper Sparrows have moved into habitats here is just an expression of how badly they need these areas, and how just with a little bit of willpower and investment, you can create it for them.

There’s been a lot of investment in Fresh Kills. This is a multi-decade process to cap that landfill. But green roofs can also be a really important migratory stopover. Some of the smallest parks in New York are migrant traps. So I do feel like there’s so much more we can do in the city. It takes a real shift in mentality, though, to see all the concrete as an opportunity for planting pollinator gardens. I feel like New York really lags in that sense.

I spent time in Montreal this summer, and there were wildflowers everywhere in people’s front yards, there were hardly any lawns. There were just wildflowers everywhere, native plants in people’s yards, on the sidewalks, every curb cut seemed to be an opportunity for some type of rain garden, and a place for native plants. New York can do so much more of that. So when I look around, I think there’s so many more opportunities to create more habitat in the city.

Could you talk about more of the changes that you’d like to see to make the city more bird friendly?

I’d love to see the city invest more in the parks department as the keeper of so many of these really important natural spaces. The parks department is funded at 0.5% of the budget, which is rock bottom, and it pales in comparison to other cities that spend sometimes upward of two or three percent of their overall budget on parks. None of these spaces are really natural anymore. All these refuges, they have to be managed. Birds are not going to drop into a place that is crowded out with invasive plants.

I would love to see more education around the importance of the city’s parks as migratory stopovers for birds. That Prospect Park and Central Park aren’t just our backyard, they are really life and death places, they truly are places of survival for these birds that are crossing continents. I would love to see more messaging and education letting people know that there’s this incredible natural phenomenon that’s taking place like all around us.

A lot of the reporting in your book is about the boots on the ground, the volunteers and employees that are doing what is sometimes backbreaking work, like tearing out invasive plants, planting natives, monitoring collisions with glass windows. Can you talk about the difference those people make?

These are people that care so much about safeguarding birds that they’re willing to get up in the dark to go monitor collisions. In the book I talk about Melissa Breyer, who’s been monitoring collisions at the World Trade Center since 2020, and has witnessed mass collision events there. She’s getting out there in the dark and just doing round after round. And that work matters.

Like it really matters, the stuff Melissa and other volunteers for Project Safe Flight have found, have been able to make enough news that a law was passed in 2020 to require bird-safe materials on all new buildings in New York. That is the result of Project Safe Flight. It’s the result of volunteers doing the heartbreaking work of finding dead and injured birds, and sending letters and calling their elected officials that led up to the passage of that law.

This is the reason that we have all these great places to go birding in New York. Somebody else I talked about in the book, Peter Dorosh, has been doing the backbreaking work to improve the habitat in Prospect Park. We get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, which are areas that are planted with native trees that provide food to the birds, while he’s doing that labor to make it so others can enjoy it.

Since COVID, there’s obviously been a huge increase in interest in birding. But I have this idea that the hobby hasn’t connected fully to activism to create a movement around bird conservation, that there isn’t a political constituency that’s proportional to the number of people who bird as a hobby. What do you think it would take to turn all of the casual birders into activists?

I think one thing that might work is for people to join clubs or organizations that do that work. I’m a member of the Brooklyn Bird Club. It’s an all-volunteer organization. We’ve been around a long time, and the club has done a lot around conservation, just by writing letters and joining up with other groups.

One example of that is Ridgewood Reservoir, which is on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. For about 10 years the city was threatening to bulldoze it to turn into athletic fields. And it was a collection of birders, local community activists, and environmentalists that fought the city to preserve it, because within that reservoir is this incredible swamp forest that had grown in the basins once they were drained. And they won!

Channeling birders into existing organizations that are doing great conservation work like New York City Bird Alliance, the Linnaean Society, every borough has a group. There’s a lot of conservation groups, at least in New York City. Having the backing of a group that’s been around a while and has the ear of elected officials really helps.

Local Law 15 [requiring bird-safe glass] was an example of that as well. What changed for that law to pass was probably that all of a sudden there were hundreds of new birders that were now sending letters and contacting their elected officials to build support for that bill.

One of my favorite lines I’ve found is about the founding of the Brooklyn Bird Club in 1909. Somebody writing about it a few years later said, “a small but earnest group of bird-students had ridden their hobby in Prospect Park. They did not know one another, but the field-glasses carried were ‘open sesame’ to acquaintanceship.”1 What has this looked like for you?

I joined the Brooklyn Bird Club in 2016, and the club opened its doors to me on the first walks I went on. I loved being able to join a group that has this type of long history, knowing that I was joining this urban naturalist tradition that until that point I didn’t even know existed. Being able to see myself not as just some individual doing this, but as part of a tradition of birding in New York. And to feel like I could also contribute in my own way.

So many of my friends are birders now. I think of all the people I’ve met and become friends with that I would have just never met in any other walk of life. That may apply to any hobby, but I do think birding attracts people from a broad range of interests and backgrounds and professions and age. And that’s a wonderful aspect to it.

And I feel like birding kept me living in New York, which seems like such a weird thing to say. You’d be like “oh, I’m into nature and the outdoors so I’m gonna leave New York and move to somewhere with lots of hiking trails out my door.” But actually birding in New York kept me here. It’s because you can see so much of migration here and it’s pretty spectacular.

But it’s also because of the community. And I think that’s grown with the pandemic. The Brooklyn Bird Club’s membership has more than doubled. And the walks that the club puts on—and I lead some of those walks—we get like 30, 40 people sometimes. And the beginner walks that the club puts on now sometimes attract 70 or 80 people. Why are people doing this? I think it’s just genuinely that people want not only to connect with nature but maybe connect with other people who are interested in something similar. People are yearning to get off their devices and see what’s alive around them.

Through writing this book, how has your relationship with birds in New York City changed?

While I was writing the book I became so fascinated by this concept of morning flight, this phenomenon of birds, after they’ve landed in the morning reorienting around the landscape and finding places where you can see large numbers taking off again as they move around the city. I recently did that from the roof of my office building in Gowanus and it was incredible—standing up there on a cold October morning and seeing hundreds of yellow-rumped warblers and dozens of flickers flying over this total concrete landscape heading north into the wind with the Smith and 9th Street subway bridge behind them. I love going to experience morning flight even though I’m still learning how to identify birds in flight. I look for those opportunities to actually see active migration in the city. The people who showed it to me over the course of this book… it gets under your skin to be able to actually see birds moving around the city like that. To see them actually migrating is really stirring.

You can buy Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds here. And be sure to subscribe to his substack!

The disappearance of the Passenger Pigeon caught Americans entirely by surprise. In 1882 there were massive pigeon roosts that stretched mile after mile, so large that they could supply markets with birds measured in the millions. By 1885, pigeons only gathered by the hundreds, or thousands at most. By 1887 any pigeon sighting was considered remarkable. Thirty years later, a game dealer remembered how the pigeons “went as a cannon-ball dropped into the ocean, now in plain sight, then a splash, a circle of ripples—and nothing… as if the earth had swallowed them.” As they experienced the dawning realization that no wayward flock would miraculously reappear, Americans began searching for someone to hold responsible for their destruction.1

Some blamed sportsmen, who had killed an incomprehensibly large number of birds in the field and in their trap shooting competitions. Sportsmen, in spite of their warm memories of time spent behind a gun, were very comfortable shifting the blame to market hunters. “It wasn’t done by sportsmen,” wrote William Leffingwell, in 1890, “for no man having the heart of a sportsman could go into a roost of pigeons and strike down the innocent fledgling with a club,” nor was it the sportsman “who shipped the birds in barrels to the market, or in crates to the shooting-matches.”2

Speaking on behalf of market hunters, H. Clay Merritt pleaded innocence and instead blamed environmental destruction, arguing that the birds disappeared “not by the onslaught of the hunters, however severe, but by the onward sweep of those mechanical forces which have converted wild lands into smiling and cultivated fields.”3

Whatever the cause, staring into the abyss that the pigeons left behind brought the realization that the forces that destroyed the world’s most abundant bird might soon have the same effect on other species. The Saturday Evening Post ran an article in 1899 warning that “The birds are passing away. Many of the most beautiful species are nearing the vanishing point, and whole genera are destined soon to become as extinct as the dodo and the great auk.”4 Sportsmen, conservationists, hunters, and ornithologists had watched bird populations of all kinds plummet and further extinctions seemed all but inevitable.

Of all of the voices warning of the steady march toward extinction, William Temple Hornaday might have had the loudest. After watching the Passenger Pigeon vanish from the earth, he established a reserve population of bison at the Bronx Zoo, where he was a director, to prevent them from sharing the same fate. Surveying the country, he saw dozens more species barreling toward extinction, a thought that stared him in the face “every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw.” In 1913, Hornaday published Our Vanishing Wildlife, a graphic and forceful assessment of the threats facing the country’s remaining animals, which included a list of the birds he considered to be next in line for oblivion.

Hornaday predicted that the Whooping Crane “will almost certainly be the next North American species to be totally exterminated.” The survival of the California Condor “hangs on a very slender thread,” while Trumpeter Swans were “so nearly extinct that a doubting ornithological club of Boston refused to believe on hearsay evidence that the New York Zoological Park contained a pair of living birds.”

Pinnated, Sharp-tailed, and Sage Grouse were all “absolutely certain to become totally extinct, within a short period of years, unless the conditions surrounding them are immediately and radically changed for the better.” The American Woodcock was “steadily disappearing, and presently will become extinct, unless it is accorded better protection.” He predicted that shore birds as a whole “will be the first to be exterminated in America as a group. Of all our birds, these are the most illy fitted to survive.”

Who did he blame for this devastation? Hornaday had a list for that too. Sportsmen, of course, had denuded the land of game birds as they killed for pleasure, as had the market hunters who killed for profit. Hornaday dedicated an entire chapter to the “Slaughter of Song-Birds By Italians” and another to the “Destruction of Song-Birds By Southern Negroes and Poor Whites.” Birds were preyed on by feral cats, while their nests were raided by thoughtless boys. The spread of agriculture and industry had displaced birds from forest, marsh, and prairie, since “red-winged blackbirds and real estate booms can not inhabit the same swamps contemporaneously.” It wasn’t any one party that was clearing the country of birds. Rather, it was all of them together: civilization was a disease.

Much of America’s wildlife, it seemed, was incompatible with modern life. Some birds, just like some humans, were not meant to survive alongside America’s inevitable expansion. “Before the relentless march of civilization, the wild Indian, the bison and many of the wild birds must inevitably disappear.” Hornaday ranted bitterly that “we cannot change conditions that are as inexorable as death itself. The wild life must either adjust itself to the conditions that civilized man imposes upon it, or perish.”

In the face of this devastation, some writers began considering a future without birds. If America’s native species couldn’t withstand the pressures of civilization, maybe the solution was to introduce foreign ones that could. “Almost every state in the Union has awakened to the fact that our native wild life is fast disappearing as civilization and cultivation are wending their way over mountain and plain,” wrote one South Dakota game warden, “and at the present time great effort is being made to introduce varieties of wild game birds that will thrive in close proximity to the habitations of man.” Another wrote darkly, that “since our people are resolutely bent on the destruction of our native birds, it may be fortunate that there exists a foreign species of such a character that… cannot by any possible human efforts be extirpated. When all our native species are gone, we may be happy to hear the unmusical chatter of the House Sparrow.”5

In 1885, readers of Forest and Stream found an essay imagining a not-too-distant America wiped clean of wildlife. In this speculative fiction set in 1950, a father takes a canoe ride with his son and mourns how man’s greed and recklessness had destroyed the incredible avian diversity he remembered from his youth. Every bird with color in its wings had been killed to adorn a woman’s hat, while every bird larger than a sparrow had been killed by sportsmen and market hunters for their meat. Robins, purple finches, bobolinks, orioles, and goldfinches were “almost all gone now. The stomachs of men and the bonnets of women have made way with them.”6

Even private game reserves and the most remote stretches of wilderness “were eventually invaded by the march of improvement.” Swamps once frequented by woodcocks “were cleared and drained to make meadows, the copses cut away to gain a few more rods for tillage, and so the woodcock were destroyed and banished.” Paddling to a quiet lake, the canoeists saw that “Not even a heron waded the black shallows, nor kingfisher clattered above them; not a sign of wild life was to be seen.” Heartbroken at this desolate scene, the father cried, “This is all so changed from what it was when I was a boy that I cannot bear to look upon it. The axe and fire—man’s greed and carelessness and spirit of wanton destructiveness have spoiled it all.”

Fortunately, this world hasn’t come to pass, and one of the most important narratives of the 20th century is the story of how we avoided this fate. Stopping the commercial slaughter of birds was a big part of it, as was setting aside land for wildlife refuges. But just leaving birds alone has been far from sufficient. The species brought to the edge of extinction in the 19th century have survived through the 20th by actively assisting them to survive in a land transformed by civilization. We’ve had to remake the world into one we can share.

Sometimes it has been as simple as creating wildlife reserves—erecting a metaphorical fence across which development and exploitation shall not cross. Other times, we’ve had to reclaim land from agriculture, as with the strings of manufactured wetlands providing stopover points for waterfowl as they move up and down their migratory flyways. It has taken constant vigilance and intervention to reign in recreational, agricultural, and industrial excesses—cleaning rivers, banning DDT, curtailing hunting—to keep the world habitable for birds. And in some cases it’s taken removing birds from the wild for their own protection, as with Whooping Cranes and California Condors, who have only survived through hand-rearing and assisted reproduction. These birds were brought to the verge of extinction by civilization, and now they can only survive through civilization’s continued intervention.

Some of the birds on Hornaday’s list were not at the literal brink of extinction—the distribution of Band-tailed Pigeons and Great Egrets is, respectively, hemispheric and global, for example. And the birds themselves deserve credit for their resiliency. Many species have managed just fine in cities and suburbs; some have benefited tremendously from the changes we’ve wrought upon the land. The worst predictions of Hornaday and his peers were likely overstated.

Even so, the survival of cranes and condors is no more inevitable than was the extinction of Passenger Pigeons. And it was precisely the alarm over their destruction that mobilized concrete, and eventually radical actions to protect the country’s birds. These actions were too late for the Heath Hen, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and Eskimo Curlew. But with those tragic exceptions aside, I find it remarkable that all of the other species Hornaday marked for extinction are still with us today.

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, invited me to come on her podcast The Thing With Feathers to talk about some of these bizarre bird names, as well as Passenger Pigeons, feather fashions, and the lessons we can learn from earlier generations of bird activists. Courtney is a pastor, author, and birder, on top of being a deeply warm and generous person, and I feel lucky to have been brought into her orbit. You shouldn’t stop after listening to our interview. She’s also had memorable conversations with Amy Tan, Kenn Kaufman, and scores of other thoughtful, brilliant people about birds and the hope and meaning they bring to our lives.

Keep Looking Up

106: Robert Francis, Bird Historian

I love birds. I’m fascinated by American history. But there is not enough writing out there about birds and history! Enter: Robert Francis, whose wonderful Substack, Bird History, is a delight of parrots and passenger pigeons, feathered hats and conservation treaties…

Listen now

a year ago · 2 likes · Courtney Ellis and Robert Francis

A little over two years ago I sent out my first post on Substack. Since then, I’ve learned so much about America’s history. I’ve gained a greater respect for and understanding of the birds and people who came before us. I’d also like to think that I’ve become a better writer and more reflective person. But maybe the best thing I’ve gotten out of this writing project is relationships with other writers. It’s given me a chance to meet thoughtful, curious, and creative people like Courtney who are putting in the work to understand their relationship with the more-than-human world, and then sharing what they’ve learned with you and me.

In those two years, I’ve sent out 49 posts, totaling a little under 100,000 words. That makes this post number 50! To mark the occasion, I’m going to take a leaf out of ’s book by reaching back into the archives and sharing some stats, highlights, and superlatives. In the select snippets I’ve pulled from some of my previous posts below, I hope I can show you something new.

Subscribe now

First post: How Robins Got Their Name

From way back on August 5, 2023. While I cringe a little bit every time I open up my earliest posts, it’s also reassuring to realize that I’ve become a better writer and more careful researcher over the last two years.

During the 15th century, the English had an endearing practice of granting common human names to the birds that lived among them. Virtually every bird in that era had a name, and most of them, like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow have been long forgotten. Polly Parrot has stuck around, and Tom Tit and Jenny Wren are still sometimes found in children’s rhymes. Other human names, however, have been incorporated so durably as to almost entirely obscure their origin. The Magpie was once simply called “pie.” The English named these birds Margaret, which was then abbreviated to Maggie, and finally left at Mag Pie. The vocal, crow-like Jackdaw was also once just a “daw” named “Jack.”

The English also gave their ubiquitous and beloved orange-bellied, orb-shaped bird a human name. The first Anglo-Saxon name for the Eurasian Robin was ruddoc, meaning “little red one.” By the medieval period, its name evolved to redbreast (the term orange only entered the English language when the fruit of the same name reached Great Britain a century later). They chose the satisfyingly alliterative name Robin for the redbreast, which became so identified with the bird that Redbreast was dropped because it seemed redundant.

Most read post: The First Cat War

From January 25, 2024.

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.” Even casually, people had to pick a side. Carl Van Vechten quipped that “One is permitted to assume an attitude of placid indifference in the matter of elephants, cockatoos, H. G. Wells, Sweden, roast beef, Puccini, and even Mormonism, but in the matter of cats it seems necessary to take a firm stand.”

Least read post: The Extinction of the Eskimo Curlew

This was my second Substack post, published August 6, 2023. According to Substack, it’s been read a grand total of 90 times!

The Eskimo Curlew was a medium-sized shorebird—about as long and heavy as a loaf of bread—with mottled brown feathers and spindly legs, perfect for wading in shallow water. Like all curlews, this bird had a long, narrow, downward-curving bill. And like other long-distance migrants, they lived in perpetual summer, taking advantage of the explosion of insect life packed into the short breeding seasons near the extremes of the northern and southern hemispheres.

While only a portion of the curlew population passed over New England on their voyage south, every curlew traveled through the heart of America as they journeyed north in the spring, and it was here that the true size of their population was observed—and exposed to market hunters. Gunners in the great plains called them Prairie Pigeons for their resemblance to the enormous flocks of Passenger Pigeons in the east. Hunters from Texas to Nebraska shot birds by the wagonfull for pleasure or profit, sometimes killing more than they could carry and leaving the excess in “piles as large as a couple tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot.”

Most liked post: Dining with Robins

Originally published December 10, 2024.

In the 1830s, the painter-ornithologist John James Audubon witnessed “a sort of jubilee among the gunners” in southern states when robins returned for the winter. There, “the havoc made among them with bows and arrows, blowpipes, guns, and traps of different sorts” meant that hunters could “stand round the foot of a tree loaded with berries, and shoot the greater part of the day, so fast do the flocks of Robins succeed each other.” With so many “fat and juicy” birds being killed throughout the season, robins could be found abundantly in Southern markets and sell for as little as two for a penny.2 Virtually every town had an open-air market where shoppers were sure to find robins piled in barrels or tied up in strings next to ducks, geese, quail, and woodcocks.

Most new subscribers: Economic Ornithology

I originally published this piece on January 10, 2024. It somehow made its way to Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway, who invited me to appear on her podcast Odd Lots a month later to talk about it. Give it a listen here!

After the turn of the century, conservationists, as well as much of the general public, had a justifiable fear that many species of birds might soon disappear if drastic action were not taken for their protection. Thanks to overhunting, Passenger Pigeons and Carolina Parakeets had disappeared from the wild, and many ducks, swans, and egrets seemed destined for the same fate. The devastation brought out by insect hordes, without birds to hold them at bay, felt like an immediate threat. The famous ornithologist Frank Chapman said that “economic ornithologists now agree that, without the services rendered by birds, the ravages of the animals they prey upon would render the earth uninhabitable,” while National Geographic predicted that if birds disappeared, “not only would successful agriculture become impossible, but the destruction of the greater part of vegetation would follow.” With these statements in mind, the claim that “every bird that lives on insect life is worth its weight in gold to mankind” did not seem like much of an exaggeration.

The one my dad said was his favorite: Trash Birds

From May 29, 2025. I wrote this piece for the Nature Writing in Cities course I took at the New York Botanical Garden, taught by the fantastic . If you enjoy my writing, you’ll love Russell’s. He has a Substack called Landlubber, where he writes about the places where land meets water and humans meet nature. Do yourself a favor and subscribe!

House Sparrows seemed to belong in the city, and exemplified the city’s worst attributes. Unlike the sweet songs of other backyard birds, the sparrow’s grating squeak “harmonizes perfectly with the jarring sounds of man’s contriving” and “the clatter of iron-shod wheels over city pavements.” Their plumage was no more attractive than their song, and their behavior was somehow even worse. Their “clumsy, straggling nests” were strewn with “rubbish of all sorts and colors,” while their relationships were characterized by “combats, brawls, forcible divorce, and persecution of the unfortunate.” Worst of all, they seemed to chase from the city its resident native birds. A 1923 manual for birdhouses described how, “By squatter’s right, by sneaky intrusion, or by open assault, this foreign intruder takes possession of bird boxes, destroys eggs and young, and gradually presses blue birds, house wrens, chickadees, swallows, robins, and purple martins beyond the borders of their rightful heritage.”

My favorite piece: Carolina Parakeets

For several years I’ve kept John James Audubon’s painting of the Carolina Parakeet as my phone background as a reminder of the birds we’ve lost and the birds we can still save. I wrote a three-part series as a meditation of what it was like to share a world with these incredible creatures and what meaning we can find in their lives even after their extinction.

What was remarkable about these birds, though, was that they stuck around once the leaves fell from the trees. Parrots are tropical birds. Nearly all of them live in areas where it’s balmy year-round. Not so the Carolina Parakeet, whose green feathers were as conspicuous in winter as they were camouflaged in summer. Alexander Wilson once saw a flock flying and squawking through a February blizzard along the banks of the Ohio river. And in 1780, a large flight of the birds landed near Albany in the middle of winter, which so alarmed the “more ignorant Dutch settlers” that “they imagined, in dreadful consternation, that it portended nothing less calamitous than the destruction of the world.”

My thesis: Why I Write About Birds

From January 21, 2025.

America is the market hunters that drove passenger pigeons extinct, and the children who mourned their passing. America is the wealthy white northerners who fought to protect birds, and the immigrants and southern Blacks who they persecuted for using them as sustenance. America is the land, and all the beings who live on it. It’s the geese and crows and robins, and it’s the gaping void where five billion passenger pigeons once lived. It’s the foreign starlings and sparrows who made America their own, who have been reviled and slaughtered ever since. America is the migrating warblers that make a mockery of national boundaries. It’s the wetlands that ducks call home, and the wetlands dredged to make room for suburbs and soybeans. These are many histories —billions of histories—but they’re also one history. And that’s the one I’m trying to tell.

The print I’ve sent most frequently to paid subscribers

I’d like to close with a note of gratitude for everyone who’s upgraded to a paid subscription. These go for $6 a month or $60 a year, and I offer one of my hand-made linocut prints as a little thank-you to everyone who subscribes. This support has been immensely helpful as I try my hand at being a full-time writer, but it’s meant just as much as a vote of confidence that this project is worthwhile, that it’s filling an important niche. Researching and writing about America’s birds has been a more fulfilling and fascinating venture than I could have imagined, and I’m deeply grateful to have you along for the ride.

The bird you see here is a Ruddy Duck. Whether you find it in California, North Dakota, or Massachusetts, the powder-blue bill, white cheeks, chestnut body, and cocky sprig of a tail will tell you it’s a male Ruddy Duck. Every field guide, online database, and state hunting guide you consult will agree on its name: that’s a Ruddy Duck.

This is something of a manufactured consensus, however, and a relatively new one at that. Go back a hundred years, and the proper name for this duck depended on whichever state, river, or pond that you found yourself. It went by blatherskite in Virginia, bobber on the Potomac River, buck-ruddy in Wisconsin, bumble-bee-buzzer in Arkansas, and chunk duck in New York. Travel around the United States, and you could hear local hunters call it hardtack, sleepy duck, stub-and-twist, wiretail, dummy duck, dicky, dinky, dipper, dopper, dumb-bird, and god-damn. In 1923 Waldo McAtee collected 92 folk names that people throughout the country had given the duck, each one representing a unique way of knowing and relating to the bird.1

The profusion of names for this odd duck was by no means an exception. Nearly every bird was bestowed with an extensive collection of names, varying by community and locality, that have been all but forgotten to us today. Cedar Waxwings were cherry-birds and chatterers. Buffleheads were king butterball and Scotch dipper. Screech Owls were called little dukelet and shivering owl. Even the ubiquitous Mallard went by green-head, English duck, or French duck, depending on who you asked.

Subscribe now

A country as large and diverse as the United States naturally gave rise to an incredible proliferation of local names. Each group of European immigrants developed ways of describing local birds in their own native language. Birds that were hunted for market or for sport developed the greatest number of names, since those were the birds that people interacted with most frequently. The market hunters who spent their lives chasing and harvesting these birds grew intimately familiar with their quarry, and were responsible for coming up with many inventive names.

Waldo McAtee dedicated much of his life to cataloguing and celebrating the country’s many folk names, and through his research he developed an admiration for the people who came up with them. He explained how the nation’s hunters and backwoodsmen “were men of originality and force of character, and names invented by them had interest, charm, or humor—a tang of the boisterous out-of-doors in which they were conferred and a spirit and utter appropriateness that commend them to all men.”

Coining names for birds was more than a practical necessity. It was an expression of joy, creativity, and humor. “Our gunners seem to delight in inventing new names for the objects of their sport,” wrote McAtee, and the staggering half a million2 local and regional bird names he collected during a long career demonstrated what he called “American prolificness in nomenclature.”

In spite of their overwhelming variety, the names that colonists applied to America’s birds generally fell into a handful of categories.3 Some of the names they took from birds in England and applied them haphazardly in America. Foremost among these was the Robin, a small red-breasted flycatcher, who gave its name to America’s red-breasted thrush. Colonists liberally applied this name to other birds as well. They called the Eastern Bluebird blue robin, the Baltimore Oriole was golden robin, and the Eastern Towhee was ground robin. Our sparrows, warblers, and vultures were similarly all named after unrelated but superficially similar birds that colonists were familiar with back in Europe.

Then there were names suggested by a bird’s voice. Bitterns were called slug-toot and hit-log, for example, after their strange resonant call, while Canada Geese were crybabies. Some names were derived from a bird’s behavior. For shooting out a stream of excrement whenever they took off, Green Herons earned the name shitepoke. American Woodcocks were called Labrador twisters for their looping display flight. Other names came from a bird’s appearance. Mergansers were sawbills, nighthawks were bullbats, and coots were chicken-ducks.

To these categories, McAtee added folk names that came from misunderstandings or shifts in pronunciation. People called cormorants McCormack in New Jersey. Canada Geese went by Kennedy in Nebraska. Widgeons were Norwegians (Utah), Great Blue Herons were blue herrings (Kansas), and Sandhill Cranes were Sam Hill cranes (Texas). A personal favorite is sibitron (New Jersey), which seems to be a contraction of “it’s a bittern.”4

To most Americans, this situation was perfectly normal. Everyone knew the names of the birds in their backyards, and hunters knew the names of birds in their patches. Neighbors agreed on what birds were called, and didn’t concern themselves that people a hundred or a thousand miles away had decided on different ones. To residents of Edgartown, Massachusetts, for example, Black Scoters had always been pumpkin-blossom coots, and it was never too much of a bother to explain as much to a confused outsider.

But to the nation’s ornithologists, this disorder meant trouble. The foundation of science was taxonomy, and the foundation of taxonomy was assigning a unique Latin binomial to each identifiable and distinct species. When America’s most esteemed ornithologists gathered together in 1883 to form the American Ornithological Union (AOU), the country’s first national ornithological organization, one of their first orders of business was to address the “unstable and far from uniform system of nomenclature” then in place.5 When God created the world, he chose Adam to name its beasts. In America, the birds would be named by committee.

It took three years of work for the ornithologists on the Committee on the Revision of the Classification and Nomenclature of the Birds of North America to complete their authoritative Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of North American Birds. By the time they finished, they had established a standard process for assigning scientific names to birds and officially catalogued the 768 species and subspecies of birds then known to frequent the United States and Canada.

In addition to assigning each bird its Latin binomial, the committee members also gave it a common name in English, explaining that “Vernacular names, though having no standing in scientific nomenclature, and being not strictly subject to the law of priority, have still an importance that demands the due exercise of care in their selection.” Picking a single name would help address the confusion that resulted from the proliferation of folk names: “It not infrequently happens that well-known, abundant, and familiar species have several nearly equally familiar vernacular designations, in which case the most euphonious and otherwise most fitting should be selected and given prominence.”6

While scientists saw this exercise as a remarkable achievement, most Americans shrugged in response. Few were even aware that the names they’d been using their whole life were now considered incorrect. Two years after the AOU’s list was published, Gurdon Trumbull wrote that “Many of those English names which perhaps we all ought to adopt, such as ‘Hooded Merganser,’ ‘Hudsonian Godwit,’ ‘Bartramian Sandpiper,’ ‘Pectoral Sandpiper,’ etc., are used about as little by the inhabitants of the United States generally as the strictly scientific names,” while the folk names the AOU meant to replace were “as familiar in certain localities as ‘cow,’ ‘dog,’ and ‘cat.’”7

In his 1888 book Names and Portraits of Birds which Interest Gunners, With Descriptions in Language Understanded of the People, Trumbull collected hundreds of names by which game birds were known throughout the Eastern states. Part of his motivation in assembling these names was that in their absence, ornithologists “had the field much to themselves, giving us their long lists of scientific synonyms with little rivalry from the gunners’ side of the house.”

Trumbull was writing for an educated audience, and he knew the biases they carried against unlearned backwoodsmen. He felt it necessary to remind judgmental readers that memorizing a bird’s Latin name didn’t mean you actually knew the bird. Trumbull patiently explained that “names which appear to us absurdly grotesque and outlandish are mediums of communication between men as wise as ourselves, though educated in a different school,” a type of knowledge that sprang from experience rather than book learning. Sailors, farmers, fishermen, and above all hunters coined names which preserved a unique way of relating to nature and “should command respect.” Trumbull continued: “It is just now painfully popular to misrepresent and malign the so-called ‘pot-hunters;’ yet these dear old fellows taught us pretty much all we know about hunting, and from them ornithology has gathered its most important contributions.”

While the AOU’s naming committee was still deliberating, a somewhat more fiery dissenter wrote to the ornithological journal the Auk that he had “no doubt that scientific names are entirely in the hands of scientists, but it seems to be overlooked that popular names are just as completely in the hands of the people.” Ernest Seton criticized the “so-called popular, but really translated, scientific or spurious English names given to our birds” by ornithologists in their ivory towers. “If you show to an ‘out-wester’ the two birds mentioned above as Baird’s Bunting and Leconte’s Sparrow, and tell him that these are their names, he will probably correct you, and say one is a ‘Scrub Sparrow,’ the other a ‘Yellow Sparrow.’”8

Not all names invented by ornithologists were faulty in Seton’s eyes. If they were “short, distinctive, and, if possible, descriptive,” they would help spread the knowledge of and interest in birds. Junco and Vireo, for example, were “the only successful artificial names” that Seton could come up with, both of them having been translated from the Latin scientific names given these unique American families of birds. These were just as snappy and memorable as other names devised through earthy American inventiveness that had obtained official status, like Roadrunner, Bobolink, Canvasback, and Bufflehead. But he regarded honorifics (Wilson’s Snipe, Swainson’s Hawk), geographic terms (Nashville Warbler, Virginia Rail), and clunky descriptions (Red-shouldered Hawk, Black-throated Blue Warbler) as purely provisional until a better name could be identified.

Seton’s concern was less about which name was most “correct”—if such a thing could even be said to exist—but rather which names fostered the most interest and positive communication about birds among the common people. “Names like Blackburnian Warbler, Nashville Warbler, Clay-colored Sparrow, Townsend’s Solitaire, are utterly impossible,” he argued. “They are clumsy, meaningless, un-English and detrimental… If the ornithologists had set out definitely to build an eternal barrier to popular interest in birds, they could not have done it better than by establishing such impossible names as are cited above.” Seton predicted that these inadequate descriptions could not stand the test of time. “Such clumsy names as White-throated Sparrow, Black-and-White Warbler, Red-shouldered Hawk, are, of course, not names at all, but cumbrous descriptions and doomed to failure.”9

Of course, the AOU still calls those birds the White-throated Sparrow, the Black-and-White Warbler, and the Red-shouldered Hawk, and as a result, so do we (it’s worth noting that these names outlived the American Ornithological Union, which was renamed the American Ornithological Society in 2016).

The formalization of bird knowledge was a project that embodied generational change. Children learned correct names from books, and then field guides, while the older generation who knew only local names died off. Even as he was documenting the country’s folk names, Walter McAtee was watching them disappear: “As the period of professional gunning was approaching its end, however, travel became more general, bird names were transferred more freely, and new names were introduced by the more book-learned amateur sportsmen.”10 Old bird guides used to list alternative names in each species entry, but they don’t any more. They don’t need to. The only name worth knowing is the one that the AOS has selected.

It’s hard not to see a national, unified naming system as an inevitable product of modernity. Folk names work well, both in past and present times, in small and stable communities where names are a matter of consensus and tradition. But having official names seems like a necessity in a world of national laws, markets, and regulations. If you can be prosecuted for killing the wrong type of bird, it’s important that we can all agree what that kind of bird that is. Field guides, scientific language, conservation programs, and the birding app on your phone all demand this sort of shared understanding, and the AOU’s (excuse me, AOS’s) official list list, now in its seventh edition, is the one they all rely on for consensus.

It feels funny to have a small group of unelected ornithologists be responsible for telling me what to call the bird outside my window, but I suppose it’s only appropriate that in a world organized by bureaucracy our bird names should also be determined by committee. Is this the right process for deciding how birds should be named? I really don’t know, and I don’t know if there’s a better one out there. Of course their decisions, and their invented principles for reaching those decisions, will be limited and imperfect. Their successors will debate those rules and processes, and names will change accordingly. And we’ll ultimately accept the names they come up with, same as we’ve done since 1886.

When I was writing my piece about America’s wild parrots, it would have been really helpful to find a single source tracking foreign bird imports by species and over time. But this would have made things too easy. America’s official policies around importing foreign birds were pretty haphazard throughout the 20th century, and official record-keeping for birds crossing America’s borders was just as sporadic. The government didn’t always require that birds be declared at the border, and even when they did, they didn’t always do a good job recording and reporting their species, numbers, or countries of origin. But the data we do have access to (or, at least, that I was able to find) still paints a really interesting story.

From 1901 to 1942, the Bureau of Biological Survey (precursor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) collected data on bird imports, although they only recorded broad family groups rather than individual species. Throughout this period, canaries were clearly the bird of the masses (I wrote about the popularity of canaries in a previous piece). Most years saw Americans importing between four and ten times as many canaries as all other pet birds combined. In that period, foreign bird imports totaled 10.2 million canaries and 2.5 million “miscellaneous birds,” a category that included 575,000 parrots. Most of the parrots that came to the U.S. in this era were budgerigars and lovebirds. Even so, one report indicates that by 1928 a third of all known parrot species had been imported to the United States.1

During World War II, live animal imports to the United States mostly halted, and so did the country’s efforts to collect systematic data on imported animals. From 1942 to 1965, there doesn’t seem to be any reliable information on the number of birds entering the country. It wasn’t until 1966 that the U.S. resumed the requirement that all foreign animals, including birds, be declared at customs. Even then, canaries and parrots were exempted from this requirement until 1970, meaning that they were vastly undercounted until their reporting was also mandated.

The most granular data I’ve been able to find is for 1970 and 1971, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released detailed reports listing the number of birds from each bird species imported to the United States, including their country of origin. The reports are extremely specific—in 1971, for example, the U.S. imported 6 Fairy Penguins from Australia, 1,408 Blue and Yellow Macaws from Colombia, 25,238 Monk Parakeets from Paraguay, 115,598 Yellow-winged Parakeets from Peru, 20 Scops Owls from India, 10 Sword-billed Hummingbirds from Ecuador, 18 Keel-billed Toucans from Panama, and 20,486 Hill Mynahs from Thailand. These were some of the 966,561 individual birds representing about 750 species that were imported from 63 countries that year. Here’s a sample of some of the data included in that report.

And then midway through 1972, an outbreak of Newcastle Disease led to a complete halt to bird imports for two years to protect domestic poultry. Bird imports only resumed with the imposition of a required 30-day quarantine for birds entering the country. This created a much more formal process for bringing birds into the country, although I haven’t been able to find where the government keeps this data.

And there’s a chance it wouldn’t be accurate even if I could find it. One expert who gave testimony during a 1992 congressional hearing on the Wild Bird Conservation Act explained that many shipments of foreign birds weren’t inspected, and even those that were often misidentified the birds:2

Read more

On the day I was making my own move to New York, some of these parrots gave me their welcome. As I was picking up a U-Haul across the river in New Jersey, a pair flew screeching overhead, which could only have been a good omen. Now that five months have passed and I’m comfortably settled in Brooklyn, I figured it was time to visit the parakeets on their own turf.

I took a little pilgrimage to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery last Tuesday to visit the best-known colony of parrots in the city, and they let me know they were there before I’d even stepped inside. I parked my bike and rounded the corner and immediately spotted a trio perched on top of a tall pine tree chattering contentedly.

Monk Parakeets are not difficult birds to find. Unlike most parrots, which nest in abandoned tree cavities, Monk Parakeets are unique in constructing massive colonial nests out of sticks. Brooklyn’s parrots chose as their home the giant stone Gothic Revival gate that looms over the cemetery’s entrance, which now sports a messy stick nest that grows from the gate’s tower like a fungus. Every few minutes I saw a different green-and-white parrot poke its head out of one of the many tunnels leading into the nest. I imagine the parrots must be very comfortable inside, and just as comfortable everywhere they’ve brought their architectural blueprints.

There are Monk Parakeet colonies in the Bronx and Queens. Connecticut has parakeets, and so does New Jersey. Boston and Chicago are as un-tropical as it gets, but they have Monk Parakeets too. They’re the most widespread wild parrot in America, but they’re far from the only kind. San Diego is home to nine kinds of parrots, and Los Angeles has fifteen. Twenty species of parrots have been found breeding in Florida. Across the United States there are twenty-five parrot species that have become naturalized, and another thirty-one have been spotted in the wild since 2002.1 But no matter how delightful these birds are, they come with baggage. Every wild parrot in the United States is an unintended remnant of the global pet trade.

Even before the United States was a country, Americans were importing parrots from the tropics. But bringing them over on ships was expensive, especially when so many of the birds didn’t survive the journey. Parrots rarely came in numbers large enough to seed a successful wild colony. An outbreak of parrot fever that sickened hundreds of people and killed dozens in 1929 made the country a lot more cautious about keeping parrots (as Jill Lepore wrote in a fantastic New Yorker article, it also led to the establishment of the National Institutes of Health). Imports fell further when the country sank into the depression and stopped entirely during World War II.

This all changed when the war ended. Air transport routes exploded across the globe, making it feasible to ship hundreds of parrots at a time in voyages measured in hours rather than days or weeks. At the same time, the boom in post-war prosperity opened up exotic pets to a larger array of middle-class families. Before long, the United States was importing hundreds of thousands of parrots every year.

Inevitably, some of these birds escaped. It wasn’t exhausted pet owners releasing one or two parrots at a time that established wild colonies, however. It was cages and crates spilling out entire flocks that rooted parrots in the wild.

The story of every population of wild parrots in America begins in a similar way, with an accident or a fire, with negligence or exasperation. Unlike the acclimatization societies that brought House Sparrows and European Starlings to America, no one intended to establish parrots here.

Intentional or not, the arrival of a new species to a new land seems just as significant spiritually as it is ecologically. Each parrot colony ought to be memorialized with its own Romulus and Remus. Yet another thing these stories have in common is that no one knows for sure how the birds got here. Urban legends are as close as we can get.

Pasadena’s Red-crowned Parrots probably escaped when a pet store caught on fire and the owner released the birds rather than watch them go up in smoke. Phoenix’s Rosy-faced Lovebirds were probably seeded by a hobbyist releasing a hundred birds after his aviary was hit by a monsoon. San Diego’s parrots might have been released by smugglers carrying birds across the border from Mexico. Some of Los Angeles’s parrots are rumored to descend from birds released when Busch Gardens closed in the 1970s. Others might have been released during the 1992 riots. That, at least, is what people say.2

San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Orlando each have their own unique assortment of parrots for reasons that are more historically contingent than ecological. Miami and Los Angeles have more parrots than anywhere else in America, for example, because those cities were the largest transportation hubs for imported exotic birds. A city’s particular population of parrots is mostly a question of which birds happened to escape.

But it also helped that the residents of these balmy southern cities had stocked their neighborhoods with all the exotic plants these exotic birds needed to survive. Parrots made their nests in non-native palm trees, they ate fruits from non-native ornamental plants. They even learned to frequent birdfeeders for an easy meal. This concentration of assets is found only in urban areas, so that is where the parrots have stayed.

Wild parrots seemed to be a relatively benign presence in the United States. Monk Parakeet nests on telephone poles caused the occasional power outage, but otherwise parrots mostly left crops alone and didn’t compete with native birds for food or real estate. All this time, however, the real damage was accruing in the parrots’ countries of origin. The hundreds of thousands of parrots that Americans imported each year constituted an assault on species that did not have the numbers or resiliency to supply such an aggressive trade.

In response to these ravages on their endemic wildlife, one country after another issued bans on exporting wild birds. Mexico, for example, passed an export ban in 1982, but living next to the world’s largest bird importer meant that there was still good money to be made from smuggling. In 1986 the Department of Justice estimated that more than 150,000 birds crossed the U.S–Mexico border illegally every year. Elsewhere, smugglers moved birds through countries that did not have export bans. Venezuela simply shipped its birds through Guyana, Gambia shipped its birds through Senegal, and Brazil shipped its birds through Argentina.3

Belatedly, American conservationists began to recognize the impact of the pet trade on global parrot populations, while animal rights activists raised the alarm that the wild parrot trade inflicted a shocking amount of animal cruelty. Capturing nestlings, holding them in cramped and unsanitary conditions, shipping them thousands of miles by air, and then isolating them for months in quarantine proved to be extremely hard on little bird bodies. As many as sixty percent of trafficked parrots died between being taken from the wild and their eventual sale, and more than 330,000 died in transit or in quarantine between 1985 and 1990.4

Following lobbying from conservation organizations, New York passed a law banning the sale of wild-caught birds in 1984 and New Jersey did the same seven years later. Major pet store chains decided to no longer sell wild-caught birds, while all of America’s airlines and scores of foreign carriers determined that they would no longer transport wild-caught birds for market. A 1991 New York Times op-ed warned any reader thinking about buying a parrot to interrogate the pet store owner to make sure their birds were captive-bred.

But the bird trade didn’t disappear as these concerns became more widely known; in fact it only got bigger. Imports of wild birds peaked between 1986 and 1988, when nearly two million birds, 43 percent of which were parrots, entered the United States from 85 different countries of origin. As late as 1991 the United States was still importing 800,000 birds a year, at least half of which were parrots, making it the largest market for birds in the world.

On July 31, 1992, James Wyerman walked into the U.S. Capitol accompanied by a Goffin’s Cockatoo. Wyerman had come to D.C. to testify in favor of the Wild Bird Conservation Act, a piece of legislation that would all but eliminate the country’s commercial bird trade. As he sat before the thirteen senators who made up the Senate Subcommittee on Environmental Protection, he explained the damage America’s appetite for exotic birds was doing to the world’s wildlife.

The Goffin’s Cockatoo in the committee room was a captive-bred bird, explained Wyerman, but more than 70,000 Goffin’s Cockatoos (known to ornithologists as Tanimbar Corellas) had been imported from Indonesia’s Tanimbar Islands between 1983 and 1989. So many birds were being stolen from their nests that the species was at risk of going extinct within the next five years. Nearly all of the Goffin’s Cockatoos were destined for the United States as a result of what Wyerman called “Baretta Syndrome,” a surge in demand for five species of cockatoos that looked like the one owned by the titular detective in the television show Baretta. Each of these cockatoo species was now at risk of extinction, and it was solely because of America’s demand for pet birds.

The same story was playing out with dozens of other birds the world over. As Wyerman explained, “consumers in this country have unknowingly fueled a global pet trade that threatens the extinction of many bird species, causes the suffering or death of millions of individual birds and undermines the laws of many foreign countries.”5

Fortunately, these arguments resonated with politicians on both sides of the aisle. When President George H. W. Bush signed the bill into law three months later, he praised it for helping “to prevent any further decimation of wild bird populations.” The law’s effect was nearly immediate. From one year to the next, parrot imports fell from the hundreds of thousands to just a few hundred. It also took the bottom from the global market in birds. Between 1990 and 1999, the number of parrots sold by the five biggest bird-exporting countries (Argentina, Guyana, Indonesia, Senegal, and Tanzania) fell from 245,000 to just 57,000.6

The Wild Bird Conservation Act closed a fifty-year period of aggressive and large-scale dislocation of the world’s avian biodiversity. More birds were forcibly migrated during those years than at any other time in history. The twenty-five kinds of parrots that eventually became established in American cities represent just a fraction of the species that were ultimately imported. An estimated ten million parrots from more than a hundred different species were brought to the United States. And those are just the parrots. The U.S. imported birds representing a staggering 1,540 species from 72 different countries between 1968 and 1972 alone.7

The longing for exotic pets, and the industries it gave rise to, left the world with a new and unpredictable geography of avian life. Millions of birds were shipped across oceans that they were never meant to cross. Thousands of species were dispersed around the world according to the whims of fashion. And then the large-scale, legal, and commercial trafficking of birds suddenly came to a halt, like a song abruptly ending during a global game of musical chairs. Parrots were left to thrive wherever they were planted.

It’s a challenging irony that the parrots now scattered across the United States constitute a genetic reservoir for birds who are threatened with extinction in their original range. More Red-crowned Amazons live in Los Angeles and Texas than in their native Northeastern Mexico. Yet the global trade in parrots is precisely the reason that so few Red-crowned Amazons are left. The status of Goffman’s Cockatoos, the other Baretta parrots, and dozens of species more is just as precarious. Nearly a third of the world’s 374 species of parrots are considered vulnerable or endangered.

A year ago, I wrote a three part series about the Carolina Parakeet and its extinction in 1918. I can’t help but wonder if it might have been saved if there had been a similar genetic reservoir in some other country. Instead, we lost our one widespread native species of parrot—and gained at least twenty-five new ones. The Carolina Parakeet called North America home for five million years. We can only wonder what these new arrivals will make of this land in another five million.

Subscribe now

What I saw out my airplane window was a land wiped clean of its native plants, native animals, and native peoples. After massacring the Lakota and imprisoning the survivors on reservations, White settlers slaughtered the bison and plowed up the prairie, replacing them both with commodities that could slot neatly into the national economy. Native game birds fared little better. In 1894 William Sirrine wrote that the prairie’s turkeys, grouse, and prairie-chickens were all “steadily going the disastrous way of the buffalo.”1 This left the settlers needing something they could hunt, an alien bird that could survive in the alien ecological regime they had ushered in.

Americans of means began trying to bring Ring-necked Pheasants to the new world almost as soon as the country was colonized. None of them, including New York’s governor in 1733, George Washington in 1787, and Benjamin Franklin’s son-in-law in 1790, had any success establishing the birds in the wild. It wasn’t until 1880, when the U.S. Consul in Shanghai shipped pheasants from China to his brother in Oregon, that the birds finally made themselves at home.

Oregon’s pheasants multiplied so rapidly that the state officially opened up its birds to hunting in 1892, and on the first day of the season, hunters harvested 50,000 birds. In captivity, pheasant hens can lay as many as 75 eggs in a season, and the game farms that proliferated throughout the country cranked out pheasants by the thousands. The rest of the country was eager to get in on the action, and by 1910 Oregon’s largest game farm had shipped birds to buyers in 28 states.

A dozen of these birds went to Herbert Hagman, Henry Schalkle, and Harland Packard of Redfield, South Dakota in 1910. The pheasants they released into the wild managed to survive the winter, which helped Herbert, Henry, and Harland rally more of Redfield’s hunters to the cause. With their pooled resources they imported another 57 pheasants the following year.2

Their fledgling efforts got the attention of South Dakota’s Game Department, which decided to introduce pheasants at scale. Between 1914 and 1918, the state released another seven thousand birds. By 1919, South Dakota’s game department judged that Redmond’s pheasants were ready for the real test. On October 30, they subjected the pheasants to an inaugural one-day hunting season, where one thousand hunters harvested two hundred birds. From that beachhead, pheasants and pheasant hunting exploded across the state.

The sort of introductions that established pheasants in South Dakota—small-scale releases by enthusiastic individuals, large-scale liberations by state game departments—were happening all over the United States. But it was only in South Dakota that people made pheasants part of their identity.

In 1941, Russell Rice estimated that South Dakotans had killed more than 20 million pheasants since they were first introduced. Pheasant season, he wrote, “has become an institution, almost as much a part of fall as corn husking or Thanksgiving.” The town of Redfield branded itself “The Pheasant City” and adopted pheasants as its school mascot. Forty miles north, Aberdeen hosted an annual Golden Pheasant Festival, featuring “a full week of entertainment, agricultural and industrial exhibits, and general merrymaking,” which “celebrates the beginning of the pheasant hunting season.”3

South Dakotans figured out pretty quickly that there was good money to be made from pheasants. The state gained a reputation as the best spot for pheasant hunting in the country and began drawing tens of thousands of visiting hunters each year. Even through the depression, Rice could write that “hotels and rooming houses are crowded to capacity” during pheasant season, while “cafes and restaurants experience a boom, gasoline sales soar to new heights, and stores handling shotgun shells are hard pressed to keep a supply on hand.”4

In 1943, representative Paul Kretschmar proposed that the state make their relationship with pheasants official. In a speech to the state legislature, Kretschmar argued for pheasants to be named South Dakota’s state bird. Just like South Dakotans, he reasoned, pheasants were a hearty mix of immigrant stock. Just like South Dakotans, pheasants had proven able to “weather the hardships” of “droughts, cold and storms.” Just like South Dakotans, the pheasant stayed in the state year round, through weather both foul and fair, unlike migratory songbirds who fled as soon as temperatures plunged. Beyond these parallels, the bird ingratiated itself to the state’s residents by yielding its body as “an excellent table delicacy; a fine sporting bird; it is a source of substantial income to the State.”5 On February 3, 1943, South Dakota’s House of Representatives voted 60 to 7 to adopt pheasants as an official symbol. Two weeks later, the governor signed the bird into law.

In 1936 Seth Gordon explained what made South Dakota such an ideal habitat for pheasants. Much of the state was “covered with vast cornfields, from which the corn is husked from the stalks, leaving the fodder and the corn missed in harvesting in the fields for winter cover and food. Adjacent to the cornfields are large swamps and sloughs covered with heavy grass and reeds of the kind which pheasants crave for added shelter and roosting cover.”6

On that same land, native turkeys, grouse, and prairie-chickens unfortunately came up wanting. “The case of Eurasian v. American game birds is fully made out,” wrote Waldo McAtee for the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey in 1929. “The native birds had equal opportunity with the foreign ones to respond to feeding and legal protection, yet with their advantage of close adaptation to country and climate, and priority of occupation, they failed to make good.” Pheasants had become the hunters’ workhorse, coming back stronger after every punishing open season. The “less hardy” native birds, in contrast, were “now objects of care and conservation.”7

Tourism and farming are South Dakota’s two primary industries, and it is a great irony that they stand in conflict with each other. When agriculture suffers, pheasants thrive. The drought and depression of the dust bowl years led many farmers to abandon their land, leaving the ground fallow and expanding pheasant habitat. Many more farmers traded their plows for swords once the United States entered the Second World War. Fuel rationing lowered the number of acres under cultivation, while plentiful rains gave pheasants all the plant cover they needed. And so it was at the expense of agriculture that South Dakota’s pheasants reached their all-time peak of 16 million in 1945.

Their fortune turned as soon as the war ended. Soldiers returned home and returned to tilling the land, but they also brought back their guns and began hunting with a vengeance. A more threatening development occurred when the United States began exporting grain to China and the Soviet Union in the seventies. This increased crop prices and encouraged farmers to cultivate the marginal land that they’d previously neglected—land that pheasants depended on for survival. By 1976 the state’s pheasant population fell to just 1.4 million birds.8

Since then, agriculture has only grown more intensive. Small, messy farms once provided pheasants with an ideal habitat in their fencerows, wetlands, shelterbelts, and field corners, but these have largely disappeared as farms consolidated into massive feedlots and agrobusinesses. Herbicides have cleared pheasants’ cover, and pesticides have killed their insect food. All of these changes work together to turn cropland into an ecological wasteland.

The biggest factor determining America’s pheasant population is the global price of grain. It’s not weather, or predators, or hunters. It’s whether farmers find it worthwhile to grow crops on their least productive land. The difference between pheasants thriving and pheasants disappearing is the difference between farmers cultivating 95 percent or 100 percent of their acreage.

As much tourism and hunting that pheasants bring to the state, there is no question of what South Dakota’s core economic driver really is. Counting revenue from hotels, car rentals, hunting licenses, and deluxe hunting packages, pheasants brought $223 million to the state in 2013. Agriculture, on the other hand, yielded $25.6 billion, more than a hundred times as much.

Even though most pheasants live on private land, public policies determine how intensively that land is cultivated. On one side of the equation, farm subsidies encourage farmers to grow crops on their most marginal acres. On the other side is the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a part of the Farm Bill that since 1985 has paid farmers to replace crops with trees and native grasses on erosion-prone and environmentally sensitive land.

Income from CRP alone doesn’t come close to equaling profits farmers stand to make from planting the same land with crops. The Reagan-era initiative pays farmers somewhere from $10 to $300 per acre to leave land fallow, at best a third of what they might make from growing corn. But if that land can also grow pheasants, revenue from hunters can more than make up the difference.

It’s not just pheasants that stand to benefit from the CRP, however. Removing the land from cultivation has a far-reaching impact on native species as well. When farmers convert corn into pollinator meadows, native grasses, and stands of native trees, they create accidental reserves for threatened native birds in the process. America has lost half of its original shortgrass prairie and more than ninety percent of its tallgrass prairie. Longspurs, bobolinks, and harriers all depend on the restoration of these ecosystems.9

Pheasant habitats created on CRP acres fall far short of a pristine, unbroken prairie maintained by bison and fire. Land cultivated for pheasants doesn’t meet the needs of the most threatened species, like the prairie-chickens that pheasants were originally meant to replace. But farmers aren’t making a choice between pheasant habitat and prairie-chicken habitat. They’re choosing between pheasant habitat and soybeans. Farmers can only be expected to preserve native habitat if it is financially competitive with the crops they might instead grow, and for South Dakotans, pheasants are the best way of making that happen.

Today, South Dakota’s pheasant population is as healthy as ever. Partners in Flight estimates the global population of Ring-necked Pheasants at fifty million birds. While this number fluctuates widely from year to year, South Dakota accounts for somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the world population. In 2024, pheasant hunters in South Dakota harvested 1.3 million birds, the highest number since 2011.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with my home state’s chosen bird. I’m happy to celebrate an introduced species’ complicated past and present, and although I’m not a hunter I think that hunting is one of the most significant and timeless relationships that we can have with wildlife. But to the extent that we treat pheasants as only existing to be hunted, we do them and ourselves a disservice. Although they were brought over for that purpose, and continue to be managed with that goal, they also represent the imperfect equilibrium between the native and non-native, human and non-human communities that exist in conflict and coexistence.

My cynical side is tempted to retort that pheasants have done well in South Dakota in the same sense that cows and chickens have done well. People want pheasants, and South Dakota has figured out better than anywhere else how to produce a lot of them. But this isn’t giving pheasants enough credit. We’ve made the Midwest a game park, but pheasants have made it their home.

I can’t finish a post about South Dakota’s state bird without sending you straight to Amy Stewart’s Substack, It’s Good to Be Here. Right now, Amy’s writing the authoritative book on the movement to create state birds and all of the strange battles and conservation victories that emerged as a result. It should be no surprise that I cannot wait for it to come out. Somehow Amy paints just as well as she writes, and each of her posts comes illustrated in watercolor. Do yourself a favor and subscribe now!

Subscribe now