Birds in the Colonies

In 1748, a Swedish traveler arrived in a country whose birds were already disappearing.

For the first two centuries that Europeans colonized what’s now the United States, very few people wrote about birds. We know lots of people ate them, put them in cages, watched them in their gardens, and chased them away from their crops. But there are just not that many sources that add color to those interactions.  

The few individuals that dedicated more than a paragraph to birds in the 1600s and 1700s appear like rare bolts of lightning that briefly illuminate what was otherwise a long, dark night. The brightest of these bolts might have been a Swedish naturalist named Peter Kalm, who visited Britain’s North American colonies from 1748 to 1751. Kalm was dispatched by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to bring back plants and seeds that might prove useful to Sweden’s economy. But Kalm was irrepressibly curious, and during his travels he kept careful notes about everything he saw, from bugs to fish to waterfalls to dirt. He also dedicated more than twenty pages to birds. The writing he left behind is a rich record of how humans experienced the more-than-human world on the eve of the Revolutionary War. 

A painting of Peter Kalm from 1764

Consistent with his assignment to find plants and animals that might serve farmers back in Sweden, Kalm showed a lot of interest in American attempts to domesticate wild birds. The most edible native bird was, of course, the turkey, but these had been a familiar sight throughout Europe since they were first imported from Mexico around 1510. When Kalm saw the wild American turkeys that “run about in the woods of this country,” he found that they “differ in nothing from our tame ones, except in their superior size, and redder, though more palatable flesh.” 

Colonists experimented by mixing wild turkeys with domesticated ones and created large and hearty new breeds. But they also tried taming any bird that had a little meat on its bones. They’d steal eggs from wild geese and stick them in the nests of domesticated birds, and more often than not the kidnapped birds stuck around. They’d also catch wild partridges and passenger pigeons that came to eat scraps with barnyard chickens. These pet pigeons “were made so tame as to fly out and return again.”

Turkeys spread like wildfire through Europe during the 1500s. Here’s a trio from the French naturalist Pierre Belon’s 1555 book L'Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux.

Birds weren’t always an asset to farmers, though. Swedish colonists in New Jersey made it clear what they thought about grackles by naming the birds Maize Thieves. Massive swarms of these iridescent blackbirds “fly in incredible swarms in autumn; and it can hardly be conceived whence such immense numbers of them should come. When they rise in the air they darken the sky, and make it look quite black.” Because they gobbled up so many crops, “the odium of the inhabitants against them is carried so far” that Pennsylvania and New Jersey passed laws offering a three-pence bounty on every dozen birds killed.

Colonies in New England issued similar bounties, but the results were not exactly what they’d hoped for. Vengeful farmers succeeded in killing so many grackles that “they are very rarely seen, and in a few places only.” But in 1749, “an immense quantity of worms appeared on the meadows, which devoured the grass, and did great damage, the people have abated their enmity against the maize thieves.” These birds, it seemed, ate bugs as well as grain, and the colonists found out the hard way that it was only their presence that kept the pest population in check. 

But to Kalm, and to the colonists, birds were more than just resources. They could be a source of beauty and wonder, and none more so than the hummingbird. These teeny creatures are unique to the Americas and were far smaller and far more colorful than any bird Kalm would have seen in Europe. “Of all the rare birds of North America,” he wrote, “the Humming-bird is the most admirable, or at least most worthy of particular attention.” 

Another early American naturalist, Mark Catesby, painted this ruby-throated hummingbird for his 1731 book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.

The Swedish naturalist was clearly delighted by watching hummingbirds in his garden. “It is indeed a diverting spectacle,” he said, “to see these little active creatures flying about the flowers like bees, and sucking their juices with their long and narrow bills.” But he was surprised how aggressive the birds could be: “When several of them were on the same bed, there was always a violent combat between them … they attacked with such impetuosity, that it would seem as if the strongest would pierce its antagonist through and through with its long bill.” 

Hummingbirds were doing what now?

Kalm observed that if they planted the right flowers around their house, “an inhabitant of the country is sure to have a number of these beautiful and agreeable little birds before his windows all the summer long.” Of course, there were others that were not satisfied with just watching the birds. “Several people have caught some humming-birds, on account of their singular beauty, and have put them into cages, where they died for want of a proper food.”

There were other birds that seemed to make for better pets. Kalm met colonists that kept pet mockingbirds “on account of their skill in imitating the note of almost every bird they hear.” Americans believed that they were “the best singing bird, though its plumage be very simple, and not showy at all.” Cardinals were another popular cage bird, and they were even exported back to London. They were a little more risky to keep, however, because “they have such strength in their bill, that when you hold your hand to them they pinch it so hard as to cause the blood to issue forth.”

The title page from the English translation of Peter Kalm’s journals.

Kalm’s most remarkable observation, however, was that America didn’t have as many birds as it used to. While the colonies might seem young to us now, a hundred and forty years of colonization was more than enough to change the face of the land and destroy many of its inhabitants.

Just one generation before, birds — or at least the ones worth eating — were abundant. Older colonists fondly remembered how rivers and lakes were “quite covered with all sorts of water fowl.” They remembered how the forests had been filled with turkeys and partridges. One “Swede above ninety years old assured me, that he had in his youth killed twenty-three ducks at a shot.” 

But now, wherever he went, he “heard great complaints of the great decrease of eatable fowl, not only in this province, but in all the parts of North America.” No matter who he talked to, the refrain was the same. Go back sixty or seventy years, and “a single person could kill eighty ducks in a morning; but at present you frequently wait in vain for a single one.” Flocks of turkeys used to wander the forests, but now “a person is tired with walking” before finding any. “All the old Swedes and Englishmen, born in America, whom I ever questioned,” wrote Kalm, “asserted that there were not near so many birds fit for eating at present, as there used to be when they were children, and that their decrease was visible.”

Mark Catesby’s 1731 portrait of a Whooping Crane. Earlier colonists used to find these birds “by the hundreds in the spring,” but by the time Kalm arrived, the birds were already rare.

What had happened to all of the birds? According to Kalm, “The cause of this diminution is not difficult to find.” The blame lay squarely with the colonizers. “Since the arrival of great crowds of Europeans,” he explained, “things are greatly changed; the country is well peopled, and the woods are cut down; the people increasing in this country, they have by hunting and shooting in part extirpated the birds, in part scared them away.” 

He wished that hunters would show a little restraint, especially in the spring, so that birds could raise their chicks in peace and replenish the population. But instead, “people still take both eggs, mother, and young indifferently, because no regulations are made to the contrary.” And even if there were laws passed to protect birds, he didn’t think they’d make a difference, since “the spirit of freedom which prevails in the country would not suffer them to be obeyed.” 

Kalm’s ideas came a hundred years before anyone was ready to hear them. By the time the federal government got around to passing and enforcing a law protecting the country’s birds in 1918, it would be too late for widely-hunted birds like the Passenger Pigeon and Eskimo Curlew. The scarcity of wildfowl that Kalm found in New Jersey would stretch all the way to the Pacific.  Kalm’s journals are a great resource for understanding life in the American colonies, but just as much, they were an oracle of what was to come.

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Note: Last week, I ended my post about Carolina Parakeets by saying that my next article would be about the parrot’s extinction. As always, I underestimated how long it would take to write, so I’m posting this quick interlude first!