Dying Birds and the March of Civilization

Fearing extinction at the turn of the century

Images in this piece are from William Temple Hornaday’s 1913 Our Vanishing Wildlife.

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

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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.

1. Price, Jennifer Jaye. Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature In Modern America. United States: Basic Books, 1999, p. 4.

2. William Leffingwell, Shooting on Upland, Marsh, and Stream. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. 1890, p. 218.

3. H. Clay Merritt. The Shadow of a Gun. Chicago: The F. T. Peterson Company. 1904, p. 11.

4. Clare, Paul. “Fashion’s War Against the Birds.” The Saturday Evening Post. United States: G. Graham, 1899.

5. South Dakota Arbor and Bird Day Annual. South Dakota Department of Public Instruction. 1914; Flagg, Wilson. A Year with the Birds. United States: Educational Publishing Company, 1889.

6. “In A. D. 1950.” Forest and Stream, vol. 25. No. 9. September 17, 1885, p. 142.