Birds For Me And None For Thee
Sportsmen were the first to protect America’s birds – by reserving birds for themselves
A few months ago I wrote a piece for Bird History about eating robins. When I started researching the article, I figured it would be something short and straightforward: “Isn’t it interesting that people used to eat robins? Here are some recipes.” Of course, once I started digging in, I learned that the story was a lot more complicated. There were racial, class, and geographic divides between people who saw robins as food and people who didn’t. More than changing tastes, the conflicts between people over banning their sale was really the meat of the story.
More often than not, this is what happens when I sit down to write. I think I have a good idea of where a story starts and ends, but once I get into the research I realize I don’t have half of it (and as a result, it takes me much longer to get something out!). This has proven abundantly true as I’ve started this series on the birth of bird protection in America.
In the first two pieces, I talked about the fashion for feathered hats and the immense slaughter of birds required to supply the industry. I figured that the next post would tell how the outrage against the destruction of these birds began to mobilize ornithologists and then the general public to push for laws that protected plume-bearing birds.
But the more I learned about these proto-conservationists, the more I realized that they were not inventing a new movement, but building on the work that sportsmen had been leading in game protection for forty or fifty years. The fact is, by the time the conservation movement was born, the country was already full of laws protecting birds and other wildlife. Although these laws were extremely ineffective, I realized I couldn’t very well launch into the dawn of conservation without talking about the sportsmen who had spent decades (ineffectually, self-interestedly, but still, necessarily) laying its groundwork.
The system we have today for preserving America’s birds emerged from a coalition between two unlikely allies – conservationists that wanted to protect birds, and sportsmen that wanted to kill them. The story of conservation follows these two threads over decades of cooperation and conflict. I already introduced the first thread; it’s time for me to introduce the other.
The last time anyone had seen a wild turkey in Connecticut was 1813. In New York, it was 1844, and 1851 for Massachusetts. The big, juicy birds lumbering meatily through the forests were too attractive for hunters to resist, so they shot them until there were no more. And it wasn't just turkeys. By the time William Turnbull conducted his survey of wild birds in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in 1869, he found that virtually every bird in the region was decreasing in numbers, if it hadn’t disappeared entirely. Carolina Parakeets, Pinnated Grouse, and Sandhill Cranes had not been seen in Pennsylvania in years. The massive flocks of wading birds and waterfowl that visited the Delaware River were growing smaller every year “so that there is every reason to fear that, in the course of a few years more, they also may disappear.”1
Turnbull’s study only confirmed the fears of wealthy hunters across the country: birds were disappearing from the land. One sportsman worried that legions of hunters were “destroying birds faster than nature can supply the loss,” meaning that “the days of fowl shooting will at some time not very distant come to an end.” Another old sportsman sighed that with so few birds about, “it is almost useless for one to keep a dog and gun nowadays.”2
The disappearance of these birds threatened the sportsman’s way of life. It threatened to negate their investment in skill and equipment, their relationships with hunting dog and hunting companion. It was not just a favorite hobby that was endangered, it was an identity. And for threatening their beloved pastime, these sportsmen knew who to blame.
In an 1887 issue of Outing Magazine, one commentator wrote wistfully of the days before emancipation. “Even as late as twenty years ago, there was no lack of game” in Louisiana, but “the emancipation of the negro changed all this. The first idea of the free negro was to become possessed of an old shot gun of some kind, a rejected army musket or rifle… The effect of arming some hundred thousand negro men and boys with shot guns can be imagined.”3
This was the conventional wisdom among the sporting class both north and south, that African Americans were guilty of an indiscriminate slaughter of songbird and game bird alike, both in and out of season. “The South as a section,” wrote the New York-based magazine Forest and Stream in 1873, “is sadly deficient in game laws, which are especially needed at this time, when almost every gunner one meets is an irresponsible negro.”4 The way they hunted was not just improper; it was immoral.
Nearly as despised were poor whites likewise hunting for subsistence, condescendingly referred to as pot hunters. “Of all the disagreeable characters that a well-bred Sportsman is likely to be thrown in contact with,” wrote Elisha Lewis in 1855, “that of a Pot Hunter is the most disgusting, the most selfish, the most unmanly, the most heartless … without regard to etiquette, humanity, law, or even the common decencies of life.” These unscrupulous hunters did not discriminate between proper game and useful birds that were better kept alive. Too many innocent songbirds became “the prey of an idle vagabond, who has nothing else to do but to kill these friends and companions of the husbandman.”5
The worst threat, however, were those who hunted birds for the market. American cuisine in the 19th century was defined by the country’s wild game. Poorer families ate passenger pigeons, which were abundant, cheap, and not very good. The middle class splurged on ducks, geese and whatever assortment of wild birds vendors happened to have in stock at the moment. Upper-class diners enjoyed the highest-class birds – woodcocks, plovers on toast, and above all, canvasbacks, the aristocrats of the duck family. Keeping towns and cities continually supplied with a fresh stock of game depended on an army of professional hunters that slaughtered birds at an industrial scale.
The number of birds that market hunters vacuumed from the Chesapeake, from the Mississippi delta, from northern forests, from the great plains, from prairie pothole lakes, and from the country’s disappearing wetlands and shipped to urban and overseas markets was sobering. As early as 1864 one New York City game dealer received twenty tons of prairie chickens in a single shipment, probably containing twenty thousand birds. Some of the larger dealers might sell two hundred thousand birds in a six-month period. A single market hunter who kept a meticulous log of his career tabulated that over his forty-five years of shooting, he killed nearly a hundred and forty thousand birds. Forest and Stream reported in 1881 on a St. Louis company that shipped “1,600 dozens of quail, 1,700 dozens of prairie chickens and 700 dozens of wild turkeys” to London as part of a single order.6
It wasn’t just how many birds they killed that threatened wildlife, but the methods they used to do it. Some would hunt birds during the spring breeding season, when birds were especially vulnerable, and prevent them from raising another generation. They used massive punt-guns – cannons on row-boats – to blast hundreds of ducks at a time. Pigeon hunters would cast spring-loaded nets over bait, capturing thousands of pigeons with a single throw. Duck hunters would go out at night and hold birds transfixed with lanterns lifted above the water, or use fire to asphyxiate birds at night as they roosted. These strategies, so sportsmen claimed, wiped out huge numbers of birds and drove the survivors away.
Surveying the barbaric assault that beset birds from society’s most undesirable elements, one concerned writer wondered “how long will the country be able to bear this sort of thing, and still have enough left for the sportsmen?”7
Low-class and racially inferior hunters were not just a threat to the wealthy hunters’ game, they threatened their status as well. And to separate themselves from the unwashed masses, elite hunters began developing a new ethic around hunting which came to be called sportsmanship.
To sportsmen, hunting was meant to be a trial of skill, composure, perseverance, and knowledge, rather than merely a way of putting food on the table. It also demanded restraint, discernment, and self-control – attributes dearly lacking among unprincipled subsistence hunters. Sportsmen argued that hunting was meant to be challenging, a contest of the hunter’s experience against the bird’s abilities. And so different targets and methods of shooting were arrayed along a moral hierarchy. Espousing hunting practices consistent with these ideals often made getting a kill more difficult, like hunting birds “on the wing” rather than shooting sitting ducks. By prioritizing the pursuit of hunting over its end result, sportsmen distanced themselves from those who brought home game out of necessity.8
As one writer counseled, “the sportsman must be a gentleman, 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.”9 Some birds, long hunted for the market or to feed a family, earned a reprieve from upstanding sportsmen. Birds that were considered harmless, that did not give good sport, that were too beautiful or too small were no longer, quite literally, fair game.
It’s fascinating to see birds move from game to non-game categories in sportsmen’s writing. In 1873, for example, Forest and Stream printed gleeful instructions for hunting small shorebirds, remarking that wounded plovers acted as “nature’s decoys,” attracting the concerned attention of dozens of their kin, at which point, “now was the time to let them have it.” By 1896, sportsmen disapproved of this behavior. “To my mind,” wrote Stoddard Goodhue in Harper’s Weekly, “the smaller bay birds are fit prey for the conscienceless market-hunter rather than worthy objects of pursuit for the sportsmen.”10
The most important distinction between the sportsman and the market hunter was that the sportsman shot for pleasure, while the market hunter killed for profit. This didn’t mean that sportsmen shot fewer birds – their game bags were often just as large as those of market hunters – but instead of selling their kill, they gave it away to friends and neighbors. This largesse not only showed that they were free from the economic necessity of hunting, it also allowed them to “go forth and slay without sparing and with a clear conscience.”11
By defining themselves against the people who hunted out of necessity, sportsmen justified their own slaughter of birds while condemning the hunting practices of everyone else. In essence, they claimed that they were hunting correctly, while everyone who hunted differently was unethical, cruel, barbaric, uncultured, and uncaring. And this distinction was reinforced by the adoption of particular behaviors, particular equipment, particular clothing, even particular breeds of dogs, which all required significant financial and social resources.
Drawing these lines by race and class was probably the entire point. As the historian Nicolas Proctor argued in his book Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South, sportsmanship was used more as an instrument of exclusion than a deeply ingrained code of behavior. If no one else was watching, it was the rare sportsman who was above taking an easy pot shot.
But to preserve America’s dwindling supply of game birds for themselves, it was not enough to adopt a unified code of conduct. They had to make sure that everyone else followed it too, and they set out to change the laws to make sure that they had no choice. In my next piece, I’m going to talk about how sportsmen organized as a class to pass laws to criminalize unsportsmanlike hunting in every state of the nation, and how these laws ultimately failed to protect birds.
The Wild Turkey: Biology and Management. United States: Stackpole Books, 1992, p. 12; William Paterson Turnbull. The Birds of East Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 1869, p. 61-62.
“A Sign of the Times.” Forest and Stream, May 25, 1882, p. 323; “The Decrease in Game Birds.” Forest and Stream, October 27, 1881, p. 249.
Outing Magazine. “Game Preserving in Louisiana.” Vol. 11, no. 6. March 1888, p. 532.
Forest and Stream, vol. 1, 1873, p. 395.
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. 84; American Agriculturist. New York, May 1859. Volume 18, no. 5.
Elliot, D. G., 1865. “The ‘Game Birds’ of the United States.” in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1864. Washington: Government Printing Office, p. 383; Martin, Edward. “Confessions of a Market Shooter.” Outing Magazine: The Outdoor Magazine of Human Interest. United States: W. B. Holland, 1914.
“Where Some Game Goes To.” Forest and Stream. March 17, 1881, p. 123.
Proctor, Nicolas W.. Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South. University Press of Virginia, 2002, p.21.
Langille, J. H. “Our Birds.” Fifty-Fourth Annual Report of the New York State Agricultural Society for the Year 1894. Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer. 1895.
Forest and Stream, vol. 1, 1873, p. 27; Stoddard Goodhue. “A Long-Billed and Long-Legged Fraternity.” Harper’s Weekly, January 25, 1896, vol. 40, p. 92.
Proctor, Nicolas W.. Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South. University Press of Virginia, 2002, p.56.
Wonderful piece again! I am glad to know of the 1855 work. I have been reading Forest & Stream from 1890 and there is an anti-immigrant thread with regard to market hunters, who were "Bohemian" and Italian. Also, there are so many examples of poor enforcement of game laws (or no enforcement) including the occasional game warden who is on the take or in violation of the laws himself.
Always fascinating – thank you.