When Birds Meant Food

Every bird, big or small, was fit for the table. A unique book from 1867 catalogued 120 different kinds that people used to eat.

Looking back at the pieces I’ve written since I started this newsletter last September, I realize that an uncomfortably large number of posts deal with killing birds, often for their meat, sometimes out of necessity, and many times just for fun. These stories are not very comfortable or pleasant to think about. But it’s important to remember that until around 1900, most people saw birds as resources that lived and died solely for our benefit. Their bodies existed to serve as our food, their feathers existed to adorn our clothes or stuff our mattresses. Birds sang to brighten our days, and we kept them in cages to capture those songs. Our relationship with birds was defined by consumption.

And no one did a better job of cataloging the many ways that we consumed birds than a man by the name of Thomas Farrington DeVoe. 

DeVoe the Butcher.

By trade, DeVoe was a butcher in New York City’s Jefferson Market. But he harbored more cerebral aspirations. DeVoe was an amateur historian (relatable!) and while not at work carving up pigs and cows, he wrote a history of New York City’s public markets. Between his day job and his passion projects, he spent a lot of time trawling the markets up and down the Atlantic coast. This led him to write a second volume in 1867, a comprehensive catalog of every item of food that he’d seen offered for sale in America’s great cities. To this book, he gave the exhaustive title The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn; Including the Various Domestic and Wild Animals, Poultry, Game, Fish, Vegetables, Fruits &c., &c. With Many Curious Incidents and Anecdotes. 

Over the course of 454 pages, DeVoe described each different cut of beef, offered tips for picking out a quality pork shank, and detailed a list of every fruit, fish, grain, and vegetable that had ever appeared in an American market. Raisins and raspberries, head-cheese and bologna, prong-horn antelope, guinea pigs, black bears, artichokes, dolphins, rays, skates, garlic, parsley, sea turtles, and countless other items of food both common and obscure were all evaluated on their availability and quality as food. 

On top of all that, he spent 33 pages leaving a record of every kind of bird he’d ever seen for sale.

First came the birds with the most meat on their bones. Whistling swans, with “wings measuring eight feet extended, and weighing twenty-five pounds” were scarce, but trumpeter swans were more common. Canada geese were standard fare during the winter. Buyers could find every variety of American duck: red-heads, mallards, black ducks, wood ducks, widgeon, scaup, ring-necked ducks, blue-winged teal, green-winged teal, pintail, gadwall, shovelers, harlequin ducks, golden-eyes, ruddy ducks, and buffleheads.

Then there was the canvasback duck, which “no doubt, is the finest and choicest wild-duck known for the table.” Many of these birds were “sent by our swift steamers to Europe,” where they were sold for eye-watering sums. Other European fowl made the reverse journey, like the pheasants, partridges, and grouse sometimes imported from England. If you had the money you could even buy peacocks. 

Like John James Audubon had done forty years earlier, DeVoe shared his opinions on the quality of each bird’s meat. The woodcock was “the most delicate eating of all the birds known,” and also commanded the highest price. Meat from meadowlarks was “almost as good as the quail, but not so plump or large.” The spotted sandpiper was a “delicate morsel,” and blackbirds, of which he names four kinds, were “small, but sweet-fleshed.” 

By the time DeVoe wrote his book, domesticated turkeys were farmed by the thousands, but their wild counterparts had almost entirely disappeared from the east. If you happened to find one for sale, it probably arrived from the western states by train, frozen solid, still covered in feathers. Prairie chickens were once so scarce that they cost ten dollars a pair, but rail lines to the midwest now brought the birds in numbers “so large as to create a glut in the winter and early spring months.” To supply New York and Boston with ruffed grouse, sharp-tailed grouse, sage grouse, and bobwhites, hunters in the Great Plains carried out a “great slaughter of Western game.” Some birds came from even farther, like the California quail shipped from the Pacific coast. 

Passenger pigeons could be found “both alive and dead, very plenty, and generally cheap.” As food, adult pigeons made for mediocre eating, but their young, called squabs, were “tender, delicate, and light”. Seventy five thousand could be sold in New York City in a single day.

Birds didn’t have to be big and meaty to earn their place at the market. People ate small songbirds too. Blue jays and robins and catbirds and cuckoos were strung up in rows, next to the even smaller finches, sparrows, and thrushes, which were tied in bunches like radishes.

Not all the birds at the market were sold to be eaten. Loons were “sometimes found in our markets, and generally find purchasers among amateurs for their collections.” Terns, small gulls, even eagles were also sold  “not so much for the table as for the collectors.” Feathers were sold to make writing quills, and down was sold for stuffing feather beds. Shoppers could buy eggs from domesticated birds as well as wild ones. As DeVoe put it, “there are those who fancy a gull’s egg an exceedingly delicate morsel.”

For page after page, DeVoe lists snow geese and horned grebes, piping plovers, ring plovers, golden plovers, and upland plovers, pectoral sandpipers, buff-breasted sandpipers, Wilson’s sandpipers and Schinz’s sandpipers, green herons and great blue herons; kingfishers and nighthawks, cowbirds and catbirds and coots and cuckoos. By the time he reaches the end of his inventory, DeVoe has cataloged 120 kinds of birds and proclaimed that “the variety, quantity, and quality of wild-fowl and birds … received in the public markets, especially of the city of New York, is not surpassed in any other city in the world.” 

But as much as his book documented America’s insatiable appetite for wild birds, it also demonstrated a dawning realization that plundering the country’s wildlife had its costs. Nowhere else did Thomas DeVoe feel compelled to apologize for mentioning an edible plant or animal, but before listing the birds, he clarified that he did not “wish to encourage the destruction of a single life that would be more useful to the economy of nature than its dead body for the table.” 

According to DeVoe, there were both sentimental and practical reasons for wanting to protect the thousands of small, insect-eating birds that were “wantonly killed merely for the sport, or a few pence.” Using an argument that became widespread with the rise of economic ornithology thirty years later, he credited birds with keeping in check the populations of destructive insects that otherwise would “increase so rapidly as to become almost a plague, by destroying all fruit and vegetation.”

Orioles, DeVoe argued, “should never be purchased except for a collection” since they were “of so much value to the fruit-grower or farmer.” Robins were “more useful to man living than dead.” The fledgling woodpeckers that were sometimes offered for sale provided only “a very small morsel of food, which perhaps a sick person might relish,” but it was “cruelty to take such birds from their nests, without it was to save human life.” He felt so strongly that these birds were not meant to be eaten that he called for the passage of “a United States general law that would especially protect all birds smaller than the quail, except a few shore-birds, or those which are known to be injurious.” 

Here too DeVoe was ahead of his time. It would take another fifty years to pass the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which made it a federal crime to hunt, ship, and sell most birds, or to even own their feathers. After its passage, you could no longer buy robins or geese at the market, and for most Americans, wild birds stopped meaning food. The law would prove vitally important in protecting many of America’s birds, but it would come too late for others. Today, all that we have left from birds that were hunted to extinction are descriptions, and DeVoe left us a couple. Eskimo curlew, last seen in 1963, were well flavored “when in a fat condition,” and passenger pigeons, “when fat and fresh, are very delicate eating.”