Birds and Slavery

Enslaved men and women in America’s South developed their own ornithology. To them, birds meant forced labor. But they also meant food, opportunity, and sometimes even freedom.

From 1936 to 1938, an army of formerly-unemployed writers hired under the Works Progress Administration traveled South to collect the life histories of aging women and men born into slavery. The Federal Writers Project was just one of many depression-era initiatives designed to get blue- and white-collared Americans back to work, and part of the project involved interviewing more than two thousand formerly enslaved people about recollections from their childhood under the country’s “peculiar institution.” 

Eventually collected in seventeen volumes totaling more than ten thousand pages, these interviews are a priceless record of the most shameful chapter of America’s history, described by the last generation who experienced it. Today, the Slave Narratives Collection is digitized and freely available at the Library of Congress. It’s the most moving primary source I’ve ever read.

From left to right, Betty Farrow, Felix Haywood, Mose Hursley, and Rose Fay were born into slavery and shared their memories of bondage through interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938 as part of the Federal Writers Project.

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.

Birds meant forced labor

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 slaves 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 slave-owner 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 parallelled 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 the slaves. 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

Bobolinks, which were commonly called “rice birds,” were considered a major pest on rice-growing plantations of the south. The birds would descend by the tens of thousands to eat the young grains.

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 their slaves to “drive them away with rattles from morning to night.”⁷

The January 5, 1867 issue of Harper’s Weekly included this full-page depiction of the rice production cycle on a Georgia plantation, which relied entirely on Black labor. Pictured at bottom is the rice bird, or bobolink.

Birds Meant Food

The degree of deprivation and control under which slaves lived generally meant that the only meat they ate was what they caught for themselves, usually at night. 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 blindin.” 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

Audubon’s painting of a “wood ibiss”, which are today called wood storks. According to Audubon, “they are very tough and oily, and therefore are not fit for food. The negroes, however, eat them.” He added that “many of the negroes of Louisiana destroy these birds when young for the sake of the oil which their flesh contains, and which they use in greasing machines.”

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.”

Birds meant freedom

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 “pep’mint 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.

John Singleton Copley’s 1767 painting, “Young Lady with a Bird and Dog” shows an affluent Bostonian girl with a pet Red-headed Lovebird, a species native to western Africa. These birds were stolen from their homeland and sold in America by Boston merchants who made far more money selling human cargo.

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.

African American Ornithologies

During an episode of On Being, the author, poet, professor, and naturalist J. Drew Lanham 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. 

The Africans who were stolen from their homes and purchased by Americans and forced to live and work and die in a strange land developed their own ornithology. 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 augers 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, J. Drew 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.”

1. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams-Duhon. 1936, p. 307-308. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.

2. Proctor, Nicolas W.. Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South. University Press of Virginia, 2002, p.127

3. Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography, vol. 3. United Kingdom: Black, 1835.

4. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams-Duhon. 1936, p. 307-308. Manuscript/Mixed Material.

5. Brotherhood, Lillian. “The Canvasback Duck.” The Nature-study Review, vol. 16, no. 9. United States: M.A. Bigelow, 1920.

6. Lewis, Elisha Jarrett. The American Sportsman: Containing Hints to Sportsmen, Notes on Shooting, and the Habits of the Game Birds, and Wild Fowl of America. United States, Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1855, p. 148.

7. Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography, vol. 2. United Kingdom: Black, 1835.

8. Proctor, Nicolas W.. Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South. University Press of Virginia, 2002, p.150

9. Wilson, Alexander., Ord, George. American Ornithology, Or The Natural History of the Birds of the United States United States: Collins, 1829.

10. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 1, Adams-Hunter. 1936, p. 199-200. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn111/.

11. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 10, Missouri, Abbot-Younger. 1936, p. 322. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn100/.

12. Pasierowska, Rachael Lindsay. “Introduction:“Beasts, Birds, and Bondsmen: Animal and Slave Interactions in Atlantic World Slavery.”.” PhD diss., Rice University, 2021.

13. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 1, Alabama, Aarons-Young. to 1937, 1936, p. 263-264. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn010/.

14. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 2, Eddington-Hunter. 1936, p. 43-44. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn142/.

15. Ingersoll, Ernest. Birds in Legend, Fable and Folklore. United Kingdom: Longmans, Green and Company, 1923.