Black Birds, Black Powder
DuPont's Campaign to Exterminate the Crow
Note: Last month, Zoe Grueskin interviewed me for Audubon about how I got started writing Bird History, the process for researching each story, and why learning about the history of exploiting and protecting birds is so important. Check out the Q&A here!
Farmers, industrialists, homemakers, and mechanics leafing through a 1918 issue of DuPont Magazine could find articles on the history of the rubber industry, advice on using dynamite for plowing, and advertisements for car paints. Readers found articles evaluating the merits of various finishes for wooden floors, descriptions of advancements in materials used for bookbinding, and endless examples of how DuPont products supported the war effort in Europe. On top of all that, subscribers who opened the magazine dedicated to publicizing the products of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company could also find a monthly column on the evils of crows.
“The record of the crow is like its coat – about as black as black can be,” began the first article of the series, in which a certain C. O. Le Compte outlined why every farmer, every sportsman, every American should not only hate the crow but work for its eradication. The thieving birds stole grain, and raised the price of corn and wheat. They ate the eggs of game birds, diminishing the population of wild ducks and quail. They feasted on carrion, and in so doing spread diseases. Perhaps worst of all, they murdered the nestlings of the insectivorous birds who were responsible for protecting farmers’ crops. Le Compte reminded readers that “birds alone can keep in check the ravages of insects.” And so, he reasoned, “crows destroy birds, birds destroy insects, insects destroy crops — therefore, kill the crows and save the crops.”1
Writers exhausted themselves inventing epithets to pin to crows and drain any sympathy farmers and sportsmen might still retain. Crows were “black devils,” “black marauders,” “elusive robbers,” “the wily black destroyer,” and “the Hun of the bird world.” It wasn’t enough that “old Corvus” was destructive to crops, livestock, and wildlife. It was also entirely useless on aesthetic grounds. The crow’s calls were “unmusical and harsh and hateful to our feathered friends and to us.”2
Each of Le Compte’s articles included a story or two of a grateful farmer that rewarded him with praise, cash, or a bowl of strawberries and cream for the skillful service he provided in ridding the land of its resident gang of marauding crows. As one chicken farmer supposedly told him, “Those crows you were shooting have carried off seventy of our chickens. I have tried hard to kill them, but could not do so. When wife and I saw you shooting them, we said, ‘We must give those men a treat.’”3
Despite showing “almost human intelligence,” farmers preemptively condemned every bird to death. Le Compte reasoned that in the distant past the crow may have helped to “preserve some equilibrium, some balance in the economy of nature,” but “there seems to be no excuse for his existence now.”4
As it turned out, these articles were perfectly timed to coincide with an event which the Du Pont corporation called the “National Crow Shoot.” The magazine’s editors explained how DuPont was launching the contest “in the interests of the conservation of grain and the protection of game and insectivorous birds.” Participating in the contest, they claimed, wasn’t just economically sensible, it was also patriotic. With the ravages of the First World War front of mind, killing crows would help conserve grain, “and thus prove an important factor in meeting America’s obligation to feed the world during these critical years.”5
The aim of the contest was simple: shoot as many crows as possible. The prizes offered to participants were more symbolic than monetary, since “conservation is the purpose of this war against the crow … particularly when results are helping Uncle Sam feed Europe as well as the United States.” Everyone who shot more than 25 crows would be sent a bronze lapel button, with silver and gold buttons going to the top shooters in each state.
DuPont did their best to advertise the contest in outdoors and hunting magazines. But as soon as the contest was launched, the Audubon Society responded with dismay in the pages of their own periodical. “So it seems that the Crow tribe is to be slaughtered,” said one writer in Bird Lore. “There is no law, either state or Federal, protecting the Crow, and there appears to be a sentiment in many quarters that the crow is a bad actor, and the world would be better off if the last member of his tribe should be gathered to his ancestors.”6
The idea that crows were preferable dead to alive was not unique to DuPont. In their own magazine, the National Rifle Association emphasized that “the destruction of the crow is a matter of the utmost importance” and encouraged its readers to “clean up the old gun, gather together a lot of buckshot, and then transplant the shot into many crows.” Minnesota’s Division of Game and Fish called killing crows “The Sportsman’s Summer Duty.”7
And DuPont’s contest was only the latest campaign to incentivize the crow’s destruction. More than a dozen states had tried out bounties on crows, from Kansas’s five cents per head to Rhode Island’s twenty-five. Yet despite their widespread adoption, bounties had a minimal impact on crow numbers. As one U.S. Department of Agriculture review concluded in 1918, “bounty systems against crows will continue to result in meager returns for the money invested.”8 Just like wolves, bobcats, bald eagles and coyotes, crows were one more undesirable animal whose populations were to be controlled — if not eliminated entirely — for the benefit of farmers and hunters.
However widely they were hated, crows still had their defenders. The Bureau of Biological Survey — the same government agency tasked with slaughtering undesirable predators in the West — conducted a study on the crow’s “economic status,” which indicated that crows were at least as helpful as they were harmful.
While the report conceded that crows could be damaging to corn and other crops, it also refuted some of the more hysterical claims of crow critics, dismissing crow attacks on young lambs and pigs as “negligible” and finding no evidence that they spread disease. The Bureau also emphasized that much of a crow’s diet came from the most harmful insects to crops, making them just as useful as other insectivorous birds.
Based on their review of the contents of 2,118 crow stomachs, the Bureau concluded that “while it would be unwise to give it absolute protection, and thus afford the farmer no recourse when the bird is doing damage, it would be equally unwise to adopt the policy of killing every crow that comes within gunshot.”
Audubon societies criticized DuPont’s crow-killing contest more directly. In Bird Lore, one author argued that the contest was based on dated stereotypes rather than scientific evidence. But more damningly, he suspected that the real reason for the campaign had nothing to do with crow crimes at all: “the Powder Company that originated and is fostering this movement advises dealers in sporting goods to encourage the killing of Crows as it means an increased sale of cartridges.”9
The urgency behind launching the contest was not caused by a sudden increase in the crows’ depredations, alleged Audubon, but rather that, with the war in Europe coming to an end, DuPont had to find some way to “continue the sale of powder now that the the demand for this commodity across the seas has been so largely reduced.”
After all, the contest wasn’t about killing crows by whatever means was the most effective. “To receive credit in the contest,” read the conditions for participation, “Crows must be killed with shot-gun or rifle.” What’s more, every contestant’s submission had to be countersigned by an ammunition dealer. It wasn’t the birds that mattered, so much as the DuPont powder that was used to kill them.
When 1919 came to a close, F. A. Graper of Custer Park, Illinois, clinched first place in DuPont’s contest, having spent the year slaughtering 678 crows. Given how much energy DuPont put into publicizing their event, it’s a bit surprising that only twenty thousand crows “paid the penalty,” although DuPont speculated that another twenty thousand were killed and not reported.
But if you asked the contest’s proponents, the most important impact was cultural. Harry LaDue wrote that participants “became enthusiastic over the opportunity to tramp the fields during the closed season and to match their wits against the wily black destroyer,” while “sporting goods dealers found it almost impossible to meet the demand for crow calls and decoys.” In what was almost certainly an exaggeration, he claimed that “Many skeptical hunters discovered that crow hunting furnished an abundance of thrills and some pronounced it even more thrilling than hunting for game-birds.”10
This continual insistence that crow hunting was every bit as exciting as hunting ducks and quail always had something of an air of desperation to it. Pennsylvania Game News boasted in 1935 that “each year crow shooting is becoming more and more popular.” Two years later they could only offer that “relatively few sportsmen realize the sport to be had from crow shooting.” No matter how much ink they spilled, public relations campaigns could never turn crows into a game bird.
With contests and bounties proving minimally effective in ridding crows from the land, states experimented with ever more explosive methods of controlling nuisance populations. Pennsylvania’s Game Commission prompted a public relations disaster in 1937 when they floated the idea of using dynamite (another DuPont product) to destroy crow roosts “in cases of emergency.” Two years later, Illinois went ahead with the approach and blew up 328,000 crows in one massive roost.
But as the years went on, advancements in farm scale and technology accomplished what shotgun shells couldn’t. Pesticides meant that farmers didn’t need to rely on song birds to control harmful insects, and the agglomeration of family farms into massive corporate affairs meant that even the largest flock of crows couldn’t affect the bottom line too much. Crows were downgraded from the “farmer’s chief enemy” to just one more cost of doing business.11
Today, crow hunting is as popular as it’s ever been – which is to say, not very. The birds received federal protected status when they were belatedly added to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1971, but nearly every state offers an open season for hunting the birds and places no restriction on how many you can kill.
The articles on crow hunting that emerge every so often usually carry the familiar insistence that it is, in fact, worth your time. “I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was,” wrote Andrea Crider in 2019 for the hunting magazine Project Upland. “Give crow hunting a shot and see for yourself all that you’ve been missing out on!” Missouri’s Department of Conservation claims that “many seasoned crow hunters describe it as addictive.”12
As for the crows, they’re doing just fine. Few birds have proven more adaptable to life in an increasingly human-dominated world. Neither dynamite nor hunting has slowed their population from growing.
Le Compte, C. O. “The Farmer’s Chief Enemy.” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918; “The National Crow Shoot.” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918.
LaDue, Harry. “The Sportsman’s Summer Duty.” Fins, Feathers and Fur. United States: Minnesota Department of Conservation, Division of Game and Fish, 1920; Wilson, Ralph. “Controlling the Crow.” Pennsylvania Game Commission. Pennsylvania Game News 1937-02: Vol 7 Iss 11; Le Compte, C. O. “Caw! Caw! Caw!” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918.
Le Compte, C. O. “The Crow, a Chicken Thief.” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918.
Le Compte, C. O. “The Farmer’s Chief Enemy.” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918.
“The National Crow Shoot.” Du Pont Magazine. United States: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1918.
“A Nation-Wide Effort to Destroy Crows.” Bird-lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1919.
“Holds Annual Crow Shoot.” Shooting and Fishing. United States: National Rifle Association of America., 1918; LaDue, Harry. “The Sportsman’s Summer Duty.” Fins, Feathers and Fur. United States: Minnesota Department of Conservation, Division of Game and Fish, 1920.
Kalmbach, Edwin Richard. The Crow and Its Relation to Man. United States: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1918.
“A Nation-Wide Effort to Destroy Crows.” Bird-lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1919.
LaDue, Harry. “The Sportsman’s Summer Duty.” Fins, Feathers and Fur. United States: Minnesota Department of Conservation, Division of Game and Fish, 1920.
Gade, Daniel W. "Shifting synanthropy of the crow in eastern North America." Geographical Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 152-175.
Crider, Andrea. “Is Crow Hunting Worth My Time?” Project Upland Magazine, April 10, 2019. https://projectupland.com/migratory-bird-species/crow-hunting/is-crow-hunting-worth-my-time/; “Getting Started Crow Hunting.” Missouri Department of Conservation, accessed March 10, 2025. https://mdc.mo.gov/hunting-trapping/species/crow/getting-started-crow-hunting
This was a great read, very interesting and engaging. Long live the crow!✌️
I really enjoy your writing!