Our Birdy Presidents
For most of its history, America was led by presidents who watched birds, hunted birds, or kept birds as pets.
Two years ago, my dear friend Molly asked me what topic I’d choose to write about if I were to write a book. “I don’t know, probably something about presidents and birds,” I said. I had been on a big presidential biographies kick and was also several years into a fixation on birds that was taking up more and more of my life. “You should write that book!” Molly told me, “I would love to read it.” With that gentle push, I started googling around to see what had been written on the subject (as it turns out, not a whole lot). I soon found myself widening my net and reading about how the relationship between birds and Americans — president or otherwise — had changed over the course of the country’s history. And that, in brief, is how this whole Bird History project got started.
I don’t know whether there’s enough material about birds and presidents to fill a book, but there’s certainly enough content to fill a blog post. While I’d only classify five of our forty-five presidents as bird lovers, there were at least twenty-three who hunted birds and sixteen who kept them as pets. I may be a little biased, but I think the perfect way to celebrate Presidents Day is to take a look at America’s birdy presidents — the bird hunters, the bird owners, and the bird lovers.
Bird Hunters
In 1923 the outdoors magazine Forest and Stream tallied all of the American presidents to that date, and counted the number who were hunters: “Practically all of our Presidents have been fond of outdoor recreation,” the author found, “and all but six were devotees of the rod and gun.”1 The fact that so many of the early presidents hunted says perhaps less about presidents and more about wealthy white men, particularly those that grew up in the south. Men from the plantation-owning class weren’t hunting birds to feed their families — they were hunting for sport (a different kind of blood sport, cockfighting, was enjoyed by Andrew Jackson, who even held a few fights at the White House).
While Teddy Roosevelt was most famous for pursuing big game (more on him later), Grover Cleveland was probably the most dedicated sportsman-president, even writing a book called Fishing and Shooting Sketches about his experiences duck hunting. His strong sense of the sportsman’s ethic led him to warn others against “[disgracing] themselves by killing the handsome little sand-pipers or peeps too small to eat.” He praised the game laws that were being passed across the country at the turn of the century and called for hunters to exercise greater restraint. Cleveland’s primary concern for conservation, however, grew from his “considerable resentment against those who in their shooting days were thoughtless enough to forget that I was to come after them.”2
In more recent years, presidential candidates have picked up shotguns, camo, and orange vests for the cameras. Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and a host of less successful presidential contenders went pheasant or duck hunting on the campaign trail (candidate Barack Obama opted instead for skeet shooting) to demonstrate their earthiness, masculinity, or commitment to the second amendment. But sometimes these attempts instead revealed the candidate’s inexperience. While running for governor in 1994, George W. Bush held a campaign event on the first day of the dove hunting season. Using a borrowed shotgun, he blasted a bird out of the sky that turned out to be a federally-protected killdeer. For this infraction, Bush was fined $130 and lambasted by his opponents, who said that not knowing a killdeer from a dove in Texas was like “not knowing what a bagel is in the city of New York.” His wife, at least, would have known the difference — Laura Bush has been a bird-lover since childhood and advocates for bird conservation in Texas.
Bird Owners
In George Washington’s day, sailors coming from South America or the West Indies brought parrots to sell to wealthy Americans as pets. Many presidents, or their wives, owned some of these chatty, colorful birds. Martha Washington kept several, none of whom George was very fond of. James Madison’s wife Dolly also owned a pet parrot, as did Andrew Jackson. Other presidents had similarly exotic pets. Franklin Pierce received two birds from Japan after its trading ports were forcibly opened to the US in 1854. His successor, James Buchanan, was gifted a pair of bald eagles two years later. Canaries were a more popular and affordable pet bird, and President John Tyler had one that he named John Ty, after himself.
By the beginning of the 20th century, birds were the most common and widespread kind of pet. Their ownership crossed class lines, and foreign birds like canaries and parakeets as well as native mockingbirds and goldfinches could be found in every pet shop. Warren G. Harding had a canary named Petey, and Calvin Coolidge had a small flock (Nip, Tuck, Snowflake, and Peter Piper among them). Eisenhower had a parakeet named Gabby, who was buried on the White House grounds. The White House was also the final resting place of a canary named Robin, the pet of John F. Kennedy’s children. Lyndon Johnson’s lovebirds were the last pet birds to reside in the White House, as dogs and cats eclipsed birds in popularity and respectability.
Bird Lovers
To most presidents, birds were something to be used for entertainment, prestige, or companionship. It was much more rare for presidents to take an interest in birds themselves, as beings of curiosity or wonder, or as a means of connecting with the natural world. I’ve got a soft spot for our five bird-lover presidents, who I like to imagine as big, powerful men fawning over tiny, beautiful songbirds.
Thomas Jefferson
In the 1700s, the few people who studied the natural world were men who had the wealth and freedom to pursue knowledge without distraction from worldly concerns. Thomas Jefferson was one of these gentleman-scientists. In what was both a philosophical treatise and survey of America’s natural bounty, Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785 to counter the French naturalists who claimed that the animals, plants, and humans of the New World were degenerate and inferior to those of the Old. To support his case, Jefferson compiled a list of 125 birds found in Virginia, which some have described as the first checklist of American birds. He maintained this interest in birds throughout his life, later exchanging letters with Alexander Wilson (often referred to as the father of American ornithology) about the identity of new and tricky birds they had each seen. Jefferson was probably most famous, however, for his pet mockingbirds. His favorite among them was named Dick, whom he “cherished with peculiar fondness, not only for its melodious powers, but for its uncommon intelligence and affectionate disposition.”3
Rutherford B. Hayes
So far as I can tell, Rutherford B. Hayes’s interest in birds has been ignored by historians (which, to be fair, is consistent with general attitudes to his entire presidency). Hayes was president from 1877 to 1881, a decade or two before movements to protect birds really took off. But I found a handful of indications that he was an early appreciator of birds. In 1885, an issue of Harper’s Weekly carried the stray remark that “Ex-President Hayes says that there are fifty-two varieties of birds on his grounds, and that his son has collected fifty different kinds of birds’ nests.”4 Only a dedicated birder would bother making a yard list of birds, much less be able to identify fifty-two species. Hayes also subscribed to Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio5 and left an endorsement for Jacob Studer’s book, The Birds of North America, writing that “it is a valuable work. I have subscribed for two copies.”6
Hayes wasn’t just interested in wild birds. In 1881, he recorded in his diary the death of his pet mockingbird, who accompanied him for his entire four-year term in the White House. And after he left the presidency, he “retired from the first office of the country to devote his time to poultry breeding.”7 Hayes evidently passed his interest in birds on to his children, one of whom became the president of St. Petersburg, Florida Audubon Society,8 while another son continued the poultry farming business.
Theodore Roosevelt
From when he was a child, Theodore Roosevelt would obsessively record the descriptions and names of birds he saw, a much more difficult task in the days before modern field guides. He would also collect “samples” of birds with his shotgun, and taxidermied the birds himself. One friend remembered that he “reeked of arsenic,” and his Harvard dorm was cluttered with bird skins and mounted birds.9 Roosevelt carried this love of birds with him to the presidency, where he accumulated a list of 93 bird species that he’d seen about Washington. These included the red-headed woodpeckers, northern flickers, orchard orioles, wood thrushes, and a screech owl that he found nesting on the White House grounds. He also famously kept a menagerie of animals at White House, which in addition to dogs, horses, lizards, snakes, a bear, a badger, and a hyena, included chickens, a barn owl, and a hyacinth macaw.
Roosevelt had close relationships with the leading ornithologists of his day, and kept up a lively correspondence with them about both the intricacies of songbird classification and the best approaches for protecting the country’s dwindling bird populations. In 1903, Roosevelt designated Florida’s Pelican Island as the country’s first federal bird reservation, aimed at protecting birds from destruction by feather-hunters. He went on to create fifty more bird reservations during his presidency. After he left the White House, Roosevelt continued advocating for birds and again became president — this time, of the Long Island Bird Club.
Franklin Roosevelt
Just like his distant cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt had an intense interest in birds from his childhood. FDR was given a pellet gun on his eleventh birthday, and he immediately went to work harvesting birds on his family’s estate, eventually amassing a collection of dead birds from over two hundred species. Some he taxidermied himself, some he sent off to professionals, and some were accepted into the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Dedicating time to birding became more difficult for Roosevelt as polio robbed him of his mobility and politics stripped him of his time. But even as president, FDR occasionally stole away to find peace with the birds in the midst of the crises that defined his presidency. On the morning that the Battle of Midway raged in the Pacific, Roosevelt awoke at 2:00 a.m. to go birding, finding an impressive 108 species.10
Today, the legacy of FDR’s love for birds can be seen in the dozens of national parks and game reserves he established over his twelve-year presidency. It can also be seen in the Duck Stamp system, which resulted in a doubling of waterfowl numbers between 1934 and 1941 and has channeled more than $500 million into wetlands conservation in the years since. Finally, FDR’s love of birds can be seen at his historic Hyde Park Estate. As visitors pass through the entrance hall of what is now the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, they’re greeted with a cabinet filled with stuffed birds, shot and mounted by FDR himself.
Jimmy Carter
Before he became president, Jimmy Carter hunted quail near his home in Plains, Georgia (Eisenhower also hunted quail in the area). It wasn’t until after he left the White House that Carter discovered a love for birdwatching. During a family trip to Tanzania in 1988, Jimmy and his wife Rosalynn started keeping track of the birds they were seeing with the help of a nature guide, and by the end of the trip their list included 130 birds. In his post-presidential life, Carter busily traveled the world as part of his peacebuilding efforts, often taking advantage of his trips to go birding abroad. In 2007 and 2013, Carter was in Nepal to help monitor elections, and in both trips Carter met up with a local nature guide who helped him add birds like the Rufous Woodpecker and Mountain Bulbul to his life list. As of 2004, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had logged more than 1,100 species.
Stoddart, Alexander. “Fishing and Hunting Presidents.” Forest and Stream, vol. 93, no. 1. January 1923.
Cleveland, Grover. Fishing and Shooting Sketches. United States: Outing Publishing Company, 1907.
Smith, Margaret (Bayard) 1778-1844, and Gaillard Hunt. The First Forty Years of Washington Society: Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard) From the Collection of Her Grandson, J. Henley Smith. New York: Scribner, 1906.
Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1885. Vol 29, pg. 355.
Diamond, Allaire. “Review: America’s Other Audubon.” Northern Woodlands, Winter 2012.
“Advertisements.” Education. United States: New England Publishing Company, 1892.
Cory, Campbell. “Pabst Strain of S. C. White Leghorns Developed Under Ideal Conditions, Making Great Trap-Nest Records.” Poultry Success. United States: A. D. Hosterman Company, 1915.
“Reports of State Societies and Bird Clubs: St. Petersburg (Fla.) Audubon Society.” Bird Lore, vol. 23-24. United States: Macmillan Company, 1921.
Gurney, Scott. “Biographical Portrait: Theodore Roosevelt.” Forest History Today, Fall 2008.
Brinkley, Douglas. “How Birding Inspired FDR’s Environmentalism.” Daily Beast, April 13, 2017. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-birding-inspired-fdrs-environmentalism