CHAPTER SIX

Protecting Birds, Protecting Ornithologists

REVIVING THE MOVEMENT

On a chilly New England morning early in 1896, Harriet Lawrence Hemenway experienced an epiphany. While sitting in her home in one of Boston’s most affluent neighborhoods, Hemenway stumbled upon a particularly vivid account of the destruction of herons by millinery hunters. Until that moment she had given little thought to the source of the beautiful feathers that adorned her hats and so many others at the turn of the century. Moved by the graphic descriptions of birds horribly mutilated in the name of fashion, she decided to take action to stop the cruelty.

With the aid of her cousin, Minna B. Hall, on 10 February 1896 Hemenway invited several of Boston’s leading citizens to found the Massachusetts Audubon Society.1 The purpose of the organization was “to discourage the buying and wearing, for ornamental purposes, of feathers of wild birds, and to otherwise further the protection of native birds.”² The new society quickly elected William Brewster as president and began issuing a steady stream of pamphlets to bring its protectionist agenda before the public.³ Soon anxious reformers in dozens of other states followed Hemenway’s lead and founded similar societies.

There were other signs that after several years of slumber the Audubon movement might finally be stirring again. The most important of these occurred at the annual AOU meeting in November 1895, when AOU Treasurer William Dutcher gained appointment as chair of the bird protection committee. Fired with enthusiasm for the protectionist cause, Dutcher remobilized the lethargic committee and worked tirelessly to help establish state Audubon societies. In a highly successful educational, legislative, and enforcement campaign, the AOU’s bird protection committee joined forces with a second, more enduring Audubon movement that continues to this day. This fruitful collaboration resulted in not only an American public alerted to the problem of bird destruction, but also an impressive series of state and federal legislative victories.

There were many reasons why the second bird protection movement succeeded where the previous one had faltered. First, it began with the creation of smaller, more manageable state societies, not a large national society, which had proven costly and unwieldy to administer during the short-lived Audubon crusade nearly a decade before.⁴ Second, the new movement emerged in a cultural climate that not only was more conducive to reform, but also viewed regular contact with nature as an important means to ameliorate many of the problems plaguing modern America. Progressive-era activists regularly touted the benefits of getting “back to nature,” and the bird protection cause both benefited from and promoted this new sensibility.⁵ Third, the movement profited from close cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of the Biological Survey, which provided crucial personnel and scientific data for the protectionists’ armamentarium. But perhaps most important was the leadership of William Dutcher, the linchpin of both the AOU bird protection committee and the National Association of Audubon Societies. More than any other single individual, Dutcher was the engine that powered the bird protection movement through its crucial early years.

The educational and legislative successes of the bird protection movement also had important secondary consequences. Among these was a heightened tension between AOU scientists and other groups with whom they had once been closely affiliated: amateur bird and egg collectors, taxidermists, and natural history dealers. Tensions that had flared up briefly during the more ephemeral bird protection movement of the 1880s were now impossible to ignore or gloss over. As state officials began to restrict even scientific collecting of birds and eggs, many disgruntled ornithologists blamed the new Audubon societies for their woes. At the same time, restrictive permit policies forced ornithologists to attempt to narrow the definition of scientific practice to preserve the collecting privilege for themselves. In this process, scientists continued to distance themselves from entire groups—including natural history dealers, youthful collectors, and others—that had traditionally been associated with scientific ornithology.

But even this more restrictive definition failed to stem the continuing erosion of the collecting privilege. Consequently, when Dutcher engineered the creation of the National Association of Audubon Societies in 1905, the AOU repudiated its commitment to bird protection. In its stead the organization initiated a vigorous defense of scientific ornithology and its collecting practices. Not until nearly twenty-five years later, during a series of upheavals that rocked the conservation establishment—including an attack on scientific ornithologists from an AOU insider—did the union revive its protection activities.

Both contemporary participants and later historians have emphasized the remarkable successes of the second bird protection movement.⁶ In this chapter I focus on the critical role that scientific ornithologists, and especially the AOU, played in initiating and sustaining this important movement. The AOU’s entry into, withdrawal from, and subsequent reengagement with the issue of wildlife conservation provides an early and fascinating case study of a scientific community’s attempt to define a social and political role for itself beyond the confines of the more traditional museum, laboratory, and classroom settings. The episode also demonstrates that entry into the political domain often exacts a cost. The bird protection movement became one of several factors that divided scientists and the larger ornithological community in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the beginning years of the twentieth.

DUTCHER’S PUSH FOR PROTECTION

During the thirteenth annual meeting of the AOU, held in November 1895, a representative from the Committee on the Protection of North American Birds rose to present his report. His message that evening was familiar to the small group assembled at C. Hart Merriam’s home for the business session of the union. As had been the case for some time now, the bird protection committee had accomplished nothing during the preceding year.7 In fact, the lethargic committee had been inactive since lobbying for passage of the AOU model law in Pennsylvania six years previously. Like many of the birds it ostensibly sought to protect, the committee was in serious danger of becoming extinct. That night, Elliott Coues moved to have the latest committee discharged, and newly elected AOU President William Brewster appointed a new bird protection committee. With the appointment of William Dutcher (fig. 21) as chair, prospects for the committee, and the birds, immediately began to brighten.

Figure 21. William and Basil Dutcher skinning a loon, ca. late 1870s.

As had been the case with many of his fellow ornithologists, Dutcher’s original interest in birds began as a sportsman.8 In May 1879 he shot a bird that was new to him, in Shinnecock Bay, Long Island. He had the novel specimen identified and mounted by the well-known New York taxidermist John G. Bell. The bird, a female Wilson’s plover, turned out to be a new record for the area, a fact that Dutcher eagerly recorded in the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club.⁹ The event marked a turning point in the life of the successful Manhattan insurance broker. The plover became specimen no. 1 of what soon grew to be an extensive collection of Long Island birds, and his published record became the first in a series of publications based on his collection. Dutcher’s ornithological activities came to the attention of the AOU officials, who elected him an associate member in 1883 and treasurer three years later.

Within months after Dutcher’s appointment as chair of the AOU bird protection committee, Harriet Hemenway organized the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Dutcher recognized that this kind of organization represented an invaluable ally in the fight to protect birds and began urging individuals in other states to establish similar societies.¹⁰ By the end of 1896 two states—West Virginia and Pennsylvania—had followed Massachusetts’s lead. With Dutcher’s encouragement and support, during the next year scientists and reformers organized Audubon societies in Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.¹¹ The pace continued for the next six years, as interested individuals in twenty-six states joined to create additional Audubon societies.¹²

In its early years the second Audubon movement stressed education over legislation and enforcement activities. In an attempt to persuade women to relinquish their bird-wearing habits, protectionists distributed countless pamphlets, posters, and circulars containing graphic descriptions of the cruel methods used to obtain feathers.¹³ Other accounts stressed the economic value of birds in checking the growth of noxious insect populations. Newspapers and lectures provided additional means to bring the protectionists’ message before the public. In 1897 Frank M. Chapman, an assistant curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History who was in particular demand on the lecture circuit, reported to William Brewster: “Protection and popular bird work are booming. I go to Washington the last of the month to address the teachers of the city in the afternoon and the Audubon Society in the evening and I have engagements also in Hartford, Bridgeport, Brooklyn, and Plainfield.”¹⁴

Protectionists especially sought to reach impressionable young children (fig. 22). As Dutcher explained, “while legislation may be of vast benefit in protecting all bird life, yet we firmly believe that the true solution to the problem will be the education of children of our schools, both public and private. They should be taught in every grade, from kindergarten to the college, not only the aesthetic but the economical value of birds. . . . When we have educated our children, laws will be unnecessary.”¹⁵ Toward that end, Dutcher repeatedly urged AOU and state Audubon society members to push for the introduction of Bird Day, an idea first suggested in 1894 by C. A. Babcock, superintendent of schools in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Modeled on the successful Arbor Day celebrations introduced nearly twenty-five years earlier, Bird Day was devoted to “instructing the children in the value of our native birds and the best means of protecting them.”¹⁶ Ideally, the day—during which children would read original compositions, perform skits, listen to lectures, and recite poetry and prose about birds—would be the culmination of a year-long program of bird study.

Bird protection committee member Florence Merriam was sanguine that attempts to introduce bird study into schools would be aided by the recently initiated nature study movement, a turn-of-the-century educational reform initiative that sought to incorporate hands-on contact with nature into elementary and secondary school classrooms.¹⁷ Several state Audubon societies offered training sessions to show teachers how to make bird study a regular part of their curriculum.¹⁸Although some protectionists worried that the success of nature study would lead to more carnage as teachers and students gathered birds and eggs to undertake their studies, most were heartened by the new opportunity.¹⁹

Figure 22. Junior Audubon Society of Sutton, West Virginia, 1915. To reach children with their conservation message, Audubon Society leaders freely distributed bird-related literature, promoted nature study in schools, and (beginning in 1910) organized Junior Audubon Societies.

Under Dutcher’s aggressive leadership, the AOU bird protection committee soon became, in all but name, a national Audubon society.20 In addition to lobbying for the creation of new protective societies and the introduction of Bird Day, the committee served as a clearinghouse for individuals seeking information on the bird protection movement. To better meet the increasing workload and assure greater geographic representation of the committee, Dutcher expanded its membership to thirteen, including four women, who as a rule had previously been absent from the AOU.²¹ The committee’s lengthy annual reports detailed the activities of the Audubon movement and began to occupy more and more space in the Auk. Dutcher also arranged to have these reports separately printed for wider distribution.

By 1897 bird protection work was beginning to represent an increasing financial hardship for Dutcher. He wrote to Brewster that he “loved the work” and firmly believed that it was the “duty of every earnest man to do some good in the world,” but he felt that his bird protection activities, to which he had devoted “fully one half’ of his time, were threatening his ability to make a living in the insurance business.²² By the end of 1897 a frustrated and overworked Dutcher resigned his chair, but he remained an active member of the bird protection committee.²³

Dutcher’s temporary replacement, Witmer Stone, proved to be just as committed to conservation as his predecessor. Stone was one of the few ornithologists in the nineteenth century lucky enough to parlay his boyhood interest in collecting natural history specimens into a professional position. In 1888, after graduating with an A.B. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Stone became a Jesup Fund Student at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where he remained for the next fifty years.²⁴ The ornithological collection at the academy had once ranked among the finest in the world. But at the time of Stone’s arrival, it had suffered from nearly two decades of neglect. Besides reinvigorating the academy’s bird collection, Stone helped to create two other ornithological institutions in the Philadelphia area. In 1890 he was a founder of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, one of the more vigorous of the numerous local ornithological societies created at the end of the nineteenth century. He was also an organizer and the first president of the Pennsylvania Audubon Society, created in 1897, a year before he was tapped to chair the AOU bird protection committee.

As committee chair, Stone continued the aggressive conservation policies initiated by Dutcher. Despite increasing calls for effective legislation, in his 1898 report Stone indicated that the committee had continued to stress education. Toward that end, the sixteen thousand members of fourteen state Audubon societies had issued over ninety thousand leaflets during the previous year.²⁵ Stone also called for a “cheap monthly magazine devoted to popular ornithology, to serve as an organ for the various Audubon societies.” He hoped, as George B. Grinnell had over a decade previously, that a suitable periodical would relieve the committee of part of its growing workload.

For over a year Frank Chapman had also contemplated just such a magazine.²⁶ Although he had been an ornithologist at the American Museum for nearly a decade, he continued to make only a nominal salary. To supplement his meager income, Chapman had done what many entrepreneurial naturalists during his day were to do: he found a way to profit from the increasing popular interest in natural history, in his case through well-attended lectures and a series of best-selling field guides. With his marriage in March 1898, Chapman felt the need “to adopt some means of adding” further to his earnings.²⁷

That means was Bird-Lore, a bimonthly magazine of popular ornithology that was also the official publication of the newly emerging Audubon societies. Before launching the first issue of the magazine in February 1899, Chapman had received the blessings of Stone and numerous state Audubon societies.²⁸ He also secured the services of Mabel Osgood Wright, a prominent nature writer and president of the Connecticut Audubon Society, to edit the Audubon department of the new periodical. Bird-Lore proved a successful venture from the outset. One year after Chapman began publishing the magazine, a relieved Witmer Stone reported that Bird-Lore had greatly reduced the bird protection committee’s correspondence burden.²⁹

Around 1900 the committee began to supplement its previous focus on education with increased legislative and enforcement activity. Several factors account for this reorientation. One of the most important was the passage of the Lacey Act, named after its principal sponsor, Rep. John F. Lacey of Iowa, who was the author of a number of turn-of-the-century congressional conservation initiatives.³⁰ Signed into law on 25 May 1900, the Lacey Act authorized federal funds for the restoration of wild bird populations, established federal control on the importation of foreign birds and animals, and, most importantly for the bird protection movement, outlawed the interstate shipment of “wild animals and birds” taken in defiance of existing state laws.³¹ The final form of the bill, which emerged after four years of congressional consideration, was written in close collaboration with T. S. Palmer, bird protection committee member and chief assistant of the USDA’s Biological Survey. The Audubon coalition of scientists, humanitarians, and nature lovers fought vigorously for passage of the Lacey Act.³² The most effective support, however, came from recreational hunters, especially G. O. Shields and his newly created League of American Sportsmen, who hoped the bill would further their campaign to eliminate the sale of game.³³ By providing individual state laws with the teeth of federal enforcement, the Lacey Act proved a powerful weapon in the protectionists’ arsenal.

At about the time the passage of the Lacey Act seemed certain, the AOU bird protection committee, and more specifically William Dutcher, became increasingly active in enforcement work. As early as 1894, committee members had reported on the activities of individuals hired to protect the breeding colonies of seabirds on a limited number of East Coast islands.³⁴ But it was not until 1900, when the artist-naturalist and AOU member Abbott Thayer offered to raise the required funds, that enforcement became an integral part of the committee’s work.³⁵ With the $1,400 collected the first year, Dutcher hired wardens to monitor breeding colonies along the northeastern coast, from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to Maine.³⁶

Encouraged by the apparent success of recent enforcement activities and the passage of the Lacey Act, in 1901 Dutcher mounted an aggressive campaign to secure passage of the AOU model law. Prior to that year, only five states had enacted laws the committee considered “at all satisfactory” for the protection of nongame birds.³⁷ Working closely with other committee members, state Audubon societies, and sport hunting organizations, Dutcher and Palmer lobbied state legislatures up and down the eastern part of the country. As a direct result of this campaign, eleven states passed “a complete new law, or much needed amendments to existing laws” during the year.³⁸ Dutcher and Palmer continued to keep the pressure on, and by 1903 twenty-nine states had passed some version of the AOU model law.³⁹

Dutcher and Palmer also played a key role in the creation of the first and many subsequent federal wildlife refuges. On 14 March 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt signed an unusual executive order establishing Pelican Island, a fouracre site on Florida’s Indian River and home to a large nesting colony of brown pelicans, as a “preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”⁴⁰ The action came after Chapman had visited the island in 1898 and 1900 and began urging the protection of its threatened inhabitants. In response to Chapman’s plea, in 1902 Dutcher hired a warden to monitor the island during breeding season and filed paperwork to purchase it from the federal government on behalf of the AOU bird protection committee.⁴¹ When the transaction became bogged down, a General Land Office employee suggested setting Pelican Island aside as a federal bird reservation.⁴² The idea delighted Roosevelt, who was a strong supporter of conservation initiatives. It also thrilled Dutcher and Palmer, who with Frank Bond, an Audubon official and General Land Office agent, began pressing Roosevelt for the establishment of additional reservations.⁴³ The president seemed quite willing to accommodate their demands, and before leaving office in 1909 he used his executive authority to establish more than fifty additional reservations.⁴⁴

Along with heightened legislative activity and the promotion of wildlife refuges came attempts to better organize the Audubon movement on a national level. Again, the major protagonist in the effort was Dutcher, who called the first meeting of state Audubon society representatives to coincide with the annual meeting of the AOU held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1900. The purpose of the proposed meeting was to establish “a closer relationship between the Societies and the Union, and to consider ways for the more systematic prosecution of the work of the Societies.”⁴⁵ Nine representatives attended and created a committee to “formulate plans for the federation of the Audubon Societies.”⁴⁶ They also planned a meeting to coincide with the next annual AOU conference to be held in New York in 1901.

During the next two years the work of the Audubon societies and the AOU bird protection committee were increasingly merged in the person of William Dutcher. At their 1901 meeting representatives from the state Audubon societies again rejected the idea of consolidation but did vote to create a loose confederation, the National Committee of the Audubon Societies of America, “to represent the societies whenever concerted action be deemed . . . expedient.”⁴⁷ Dutcher was elected chair of this new national committee and chosen to replace Stone as the head of the AOU bird protection committee. The next year he issued a single lengthy report for both committees, which occupied fifty-eight pages in the Auk.⁴⁸

In 1905 Dutcher orchestrated the creation of the National Association of Audubon Societies, a coalition of most of the state Audubon societies and forerunner to the National Audubon Society, which is still active today. That same year he also resigned from the AOU bird protection committee following complaints from members of the AOU Council about increasing restrictions on scientific bird collecting.⁴⁹ Although individual members of the AOU continued to play important roles in the bird protection movement, for the next twenty-five years after Dutcher’s resignation the AOU relinquished its preeminent position in American wildlife conservation.

REDEFINING ORNITHOLOGY

The second bird protection movement brought to the surface again a central dilemma for a scientific ornithology that continued to depend heavily on collecting to provide it with the raw material for research. The problem was how to eliminate large-scale commercial hunting for plumes and meat, while maintaining the ability to collect birds for “scientific” purposes. Most scientific ornithologists supported the permit provision in the AOU model law as a way to resolve their difficulty. As mentioned earlier, that provision authorized granting a permit to collect birds to anyone who submitted the proper fee, an executed bond, and an affidavit from two recognized ornithologists.50

Although the permit system was serviceable in theory, several problems arose as it was put into wider practice in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. First, many in the broader community of collectors resented what they perceived as a high-handed attempt by scientists to limit their activities. A second, closely related difficulty was defining precisely what kind of collecting was “strictly scientific” and therefore allowable. In the culture of collecting that reigned throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the boundaries between scientific ornithologists, amateur and professional collectors, taxidermists, and commercial dealers were fluid. Moreover, some individuals did what nearly everyone considered legitimate scientific collecting in conjunction with commercial collecting for the natural history trade or even more problematic millinery hunting. And if these difficulties were not enough, the decision concerning who would and would not be granted a permit was gradually removed from the hands of scientists and entrusted to state game commissions, which were increasingly suspicious of ornithologists’ claims for the continued need for large-scale collecting. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the bird protection movement in general, and the permit system in particular, again became a wedge between scientific ornithologists and the closely associated communities of collectors, taxidermists, and dealers.

The success of the second bird protection movement helped legitimize the views of the radical wing of the movement, the so-called ultra-protectionists, who were increasingly impatient with scientific ornithology’s continued collecting demands. For example, the nature-writer Leander Keyser criticized the deplorable “record of bird-killing and nest robbing” contained in ornithological journals. For Keyser, bird collecting “even for scientific purposes” was by definition cruel.⁵¹ If scientists were as interested in protecting birds as they claimed, they would “study birds in all the varied phases of their lives,” not just “shoot them and despoil their nests as soon as found.” Keyser admonished scientific ornithologists to practice what they preached: “If we really wish to spare the birds, I feel that professional ornithologists must set the example of mercy. As long as many of them continue to destroy with so ruthless a hand, our arguments against pothunters and fashion-mongers are robbed of all their moral force.”⁵²

A similar attack on scientific ornithology came from Reginald C. Robbins, a former Harvard philosophy graduate student with a Boston Brahmin background.⁵³ In 1901 Robbins published an obtuse, sixteen-page polemic entitled Bird-Killing as a Method in Ornithology and arranged to have it distributed with the January 1902 edition of the Auk.⁵⁴ Few ornithologists could follow Robbins’s trying circumlocutions, but the central message of the pamphlet was discernible even to the casual reader: scientific ornithologists were responsible for an inordinate amount of unnecessary bird destruction.

Other attacks on scientific ornithology abounded. As the nineteenth century closed, William T. Hornaday, erstwhile employee of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment and vigorous spokesperson for the culture of collecting, increasingly transferred his loyalty to the protectionists’ camp.⁵⁵ For Hornaday the conversion from taxidermist and collector to conservationist and protector had come gradually, following a buffalo-collecting expedition mounted in 1886, while he was head taxidermist for the Smithsonian Institution. Outraged by the wanton and rapid destruction of this noble beast, Hornaday published a lengthy monograph, The Extermination of the Bison (1889), and other more popular articles to call wider attention to the problem.⁵⁶ He also persuaded Smithsonian authorities to establish a National Zoo, which he hoped would be used to preserve North American species, like the buffalo, which had reached critically low levels. Hornaday resigned from the Smithsonian when his design for the proposed zoo was rejected, but by 1896 he was hired as director of the Bronx Zoo, which the New York Zoological Society was then in the process of founding. During his twenty-six years with the organization, Hornaday remained deeply involved in wildlife conservation battles.

In an 1898 report for the New York Zoological Society, Hornaday charged scientific naturalists with ignoring the problem of bird and mammal destruction in North America. He admitted that a “few of the active members of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Audubon Society” had “taken a hand in the enactment of laws for the protection of birds generally,” but he claimed that most had been too “wholly engrossed in their studies” even to notice the “carnage going on around them.”⁵⁷ Hornaday’s charges were exaggerated at best, but they reflected a widely shared perception not only among the more militant protectionists, but also among many in the general public.

Reeling under these and similar attacks and recognizing that much of the largescale collecting done under the cover of science greatly stretched the bounds of legitimacy, the bird protection committee finally began to address the issue of excessive “scientific” collecting. As early as 1897 Committee Chair Dutcher recommended that “all permits issued by the proper authorities for collecting birds and their eggs should be absolutely confined to scientific purposes, and that in no sense shall they be construed to collect for commercial purposes.”⁵⁸ Thorough discussion of the proposal failed to begin until after the publication of Hornaday’s scathing indictment.

In his bird protection committee report for 1898, Witmer Stone proudly pointed to one result of the recent revival of the bird protection movement: the decrease in the number of birds brought to taxidermists’ shops to be mounted. When asked about the state of his business, one disgruntled taxidermist is reported to have said: “It is simply dead. If it warn’t [sic] for rugs and deer heads we couldn’t live. Those —, —, — Audubon Societies and bird books and newfangled laws are just crowding us out. The men are afraid to shoot or handle them in any shape. What’s the birds for if they ain’t to be used.”⁵⁹ Though perhaps spurious, the report was nonetheless telling. Gone entirely were earlier claims about taxidermists and natural history dealers being “indispensable allies” to scientific ornithologists. Scientists increasingly sought to distance themselves from all forms of commercial natural history.⁶⁰

In a more extensive discussion in the body of the report, Stone again raised the issue of the “sacrifice of birds to science,” which he felt could no longer be “conscientiously ignored.” He declared that the day had passed when everyone interested in bird study needed an extensive personal collection. Not only were large institutional collections available to serious students, but increasingly “many an ornithologist. . . well deserving of that title” pursued studies without a gun.⁶¹

Stone then singled out two particular groups he felt no longer deserved permits to collect birds for scientific purposes. First were those who received “scientific” permits to collect “for natural history dealers.” “Far worse,” though, in Stone’s view was the “scourge of egg collecting.”⁶² In unambiguous terms, Stone denounced the widespread practice of large-scale egg-collecting as a “fad ... encouraged and fostered by dealers until it became one of the most potent causes of the decrease of our birds.”⁶³

In considering whether to call for greater restrictions on egg collecting, Stone was walking a fine line. On the one hand, he wanted to maintain the credibility of the AOU by taking action against what many believed was an illegitimate extension of the collecting privilege. On the other hand, Stone and his colleagues recognized that egg collecting had often been the first manifestation of what eventually developed into a deeper, long-term, even scientific interest in birds. At the time Stone was writing, virtually every scientific ornithologist in America had first become attracted to bird study while amassing a youthful collection of birds or eggs (fig. 23).

The issue provoked strong feelings on both sides. As one prominent ornithologist was reported to have said: “I would rather see 1,000 birds killed through lack of laws, than have one promising Ornithologist discouraged through hardships imposed by arbitrary legislation.”⁶⁴ Afraid that a call for a complete ban on youthful collecting would dry up the future supply of scientific ornithologists, Stone refused to condemn the activity outright. Instead, he called on “active ornithologists” to give would-be bird and egg collectors a few words of advice about the kinds and numbers of species whose collection might lead to a scientific contribution.⁶⁵

The dilemma was one that the more thoughtful young collector also faced. In 1904 fifteen-year-old Frank T. Antes, one of the youngest associate members of the AOU, wrote to Brewster for advice on a subject that had “long been troubling” him:

It is: ought I to collect birds in an age when so much is being done to protect them? I am now about at an age when I can take out a license and shoot birds for scientific purposes. I should like to do this for self-enlightenment on the plumages and structure, but on the other hand is it perfectly right to do this and also to talk to other people about how they must not kill birds or wear them on their hats? ... If you will be kind enough to advise me on this subject I shall be very obliged to you.⁶⁶

Figure 23. Alexander Wetmore, with Bird-Lore, opera glasses, and bird collection, 1901. Fifteen-year-old Wetmore was the kind of budding young naturalist that ornithologists worried about discouraging through outright prohibitions on collecting. Wetmore later worked for the Biological Survey, headed the United States National Museum, and eventually became secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1899 Stone had tried to answer Antes and all young would-be collectors with a widely distributed pamphlet entitled Hints to Young Bird Students.67 The pamphlet, which was signed by most professional ornithologists in America at the time, amplified the comments found in the earlier bird protection committee report, including the attack on natural history dealers:

Do you know what scientific ornithology—real ornithology—is? Are you not influenced, to some extent at least, by “oological” magazines and dealers’ price-lists of eggs, from which you learn that it is important to secure series of sets,—which means hundreds and thousands of eggs,—and wherein you also learn the market price of this or that egg, and value your specimens accordingly,—just as you do your postage stamps? This is not science, and the men who advocate this sort of collecting, and who have the largest collections of eggs, rarely contribute anything to our knowledge of birds, and are not advancing the science of ornithology. . . . There is nothing to be gained by the collecting of series, except the extermination of the birds, which is surely not your object.⁶⁸

Stone still refused to condemn all youthful collecting, but he argued that would-be ornithologists would “learn more of value by a study of the living bird than by collecting skins.”⁶⁹

At the time Stone was writing, the business of natural history was already beginning to change. The reemergence of the vigorous bird protection movement in the mid-1890s had come on the heels of the panic of 1893. Many dealers were forced to sell out or abandon their businesses. Some, like Walter F. Webb and his one-time partner Frank Lattin, one of the largest egg and skin dealers in the country, moved into other, less contentious areas of natural history, like shells or books. Others, like Ward’s Natural Science Establishment and Frank B. Webster’s Naturalists’ Supply Depot, began targeting less-problematic and higher-volume educational institutions rather than private collectors. Because of these changes, Stone’s indictment seems to have generated little or no public reply from natural history dealers. But the army of egg collectors was another story.

For example, Stone’s pamphlet provoked an angry reply from a prominent egg collector, J. Parker Norris, Jr., of Philadelphia, whose collection of over twenty thousand eggs ranked among the largest in the nation.⁷⁰ Norris began by admitting that he was responsible for the particular example of excessive egg collecting first raised by Hornaday and repeated by Stone (210 sets and 910 eggs of the Kentucky warbler). The eggs, he claimed, were scientifically legitimate; they had been gathered over a period of twelve years as preparation for an “elaborate monograph” on the warblers of North America.⁷¹ Norris then went on the offensive, alleging that Stone was “neither sincere nor consistent” in his charges against egg collectors. He claimed to have found conclusive evidence that a recent collection Stone acquired for the Academy of Natural Sciences contained a “drawerful of skins of the Worm[-]eating Warbler, taken in Chester County in two seasons by Mr. H. Garrett (professional taxidermist). Before this was done the Worm-eating Warbler was a common summer resident in Chester County; now it is rare.”⁷² This accusation was particularly embarrassing for the current chair of the bird protection committee.

Norris continued by arguing that not just in this but in every instance skin collecting was more damaging to bird populations: “When you take a set of eggs the ♀ always lays another, but kill the parents and you destroy not only them but all the progeny they would have had and so on ad infinitum.”⁷³ And finally he defended oologists’ contributions to science by pointing proudly to the accomplishments of the patron saint of oology, Charles E. Bendire, an honorary curator at the U.S. National Museum, whose extensive egg collection provided the basis for the widely heralded two-volume Life Histories of North American Birds. Norris also included a disparaging reference to the unceasing nomenclatural controversies that characterized the professional museum ornithologist:

Figure 24. George W. Morse of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his prized egg collection, 1929. Many ornithologists gained their first introduction to bird study by collecting eggs. With the growth of the Audubon movement and the increasing legal restrictions on collecting, interest in the activity greatly diminished.

Quite as much interest and value had been contributed to the twin science of ornithology and oology by oologists as by ornithologists, particularly the closest [i.e., closet] type of ornithologists, who spend their time making and unmaking minute subspecific differences. You will not find any oologist who knows nothing about ornithology, but it is most common to find ornithologists who know nothing about oology.74

As a defender of the rights of amateur and youthful collectors, Norris also participated in a protracted series of exchanges on the issue of large-scale collecting, especially of eggs, which appeared in the Osprey and other periodicals aimed at collectors.⁷⁵ The issue was one that divided scientists from the larger community of amateurs, who vigorously defended what they believed to be their own legitimate collecting needs (fig. 24). It also threatened to divide the scientists themselves. While most scientific ornithologists supported Stone’s campaign to suppress large-scale collecting by amateurs, commercial dealers, and others, several also continued to assert the rights of all collectors. As Coues maintained: “We are the friend and helper of every boy who wishes to make a cabinet of eggs or skins; we stand by every collector who takes birds or their eggs for proper purposes of ownership, study, exchange, or sale.”⁷⁶

CONSERVE THE COLLECTOR

In 1902 Charles B. Cory, president-elect of the AOU, replied with apparent irritation to an invitation to attend a meeting of the District of Columbia Audubon Society: “I do not protect birds. I kill them.”⁷⁷ Though at least partially tongue-in-cheek, Cory’s answer nonetheless hinted at what many scientists viewed as an increasingly problematic relationship between the AOU and the broader bird protection movement.

The reasons for the scientists’ apprehensions were many. First, the AOU bird protection committee’s earlier attempts to head off criticism had failed. Although the committee had gone on record against large-scale collecting by dealers, taxidermists, and youth, scientists continued to be accused of condoning and even participating in excessive collecting. In a particularly striking example of this disturbing trend, in 1902 Garrett Newkirk of Pasadena, California, wrote to Condor to protest the “cruel indifference to and lack of genuine sympathy with bird life, on the part of some of the scientific ornithologists.” Newkirk admitted that “certain students ... of nomenclature and classification” might be entitled to “collections ... of dead and stuffed birdskins.” “But,” he continued, “the unflinching, destructive disposition of some, even of the better class of collectors, seems to me without excuse and abhorrent to the lover of life and Nature.”⁷⁸

Newkirk continued with a remarkable statement that betrayed the increasing radicalization of the bird protection movement. Where earlier bird protectionists tended to speak of the obligation to prevent needless suffering in animals (especially for millinery purposes), Newkirk asserted that birds had positive rights that were on a par with those of humans:

They [scientists] would not think of killing, even in the Philippines, varying specimens of the genus Homo, merely for the purposes of anatomical study, to embellish some museum or to settle a disputed point of faunal geography. And yet they have no hesitation in taking the lives of other animals, who are in some respects superior to themselves, for just such purposes of curiosity, or, what is worse, for merely selfish ambition. Beings who love and mate, who build homes with infinite labor and pains, with marvelous wisdom and skill, these are hunted, robbed and killed, without any consideration of their rights.⁷⁹

Exacerbating this and similar attacks from the radical wing of the bird protection movement was the perception that Dutcher was moving toward a stance of absolute protection.⁸⁰ One source of this belief was a letter published in 1903 in which Dutcher castigated P. M. Silloway, “an ornithologist of recognized ability,” for collecting every egg he could locate in a colony of Holboell’s grebes in Montana:

Twenty-eight eggs taken, some of them almost to the point of hatching, and for what,—that they might be measured to see if there was a fraction of an inch difference in the length or breadth of the empty shell, or to note if there was a slight variation in the shade of the ground color. Could this not have been done without the sacrifice of twenty-eight young birds, and the consequent distress of the parents?⁸¹

Dutcher claimed that no one had a “higher appreciation of real scientific work” than he, but that “the taking of every egg, of a rare breeder, in a small colony, is in no sense scientific, but on the other hand, it is wasteful and reprehensible.”⁸² Even this apparently reasonable critique was disturbing to the many scientists who rejected any external limitation on their collecting activities. As A. K. Fisher wrote in reply, “a naturalist is better qualified to know his own needs than anyone else, and ... it is unwise to condemn his methods of collecting even though they may seem extravagant from our point of view.”⁸³

Dutcher’s rhetoric also began to reflect the increasingly religious tone of the more radical wing of the bird protection movement.⁸⁴ His annual report for 1903 often sounded more as though it had been penned by an evangelist than a scientist. For example, in the introduction he stressed the “spiritual” side of bird protection.⁸⁵ Dutcher then quoted a passage from Coleridge in which the romantic poet had admonished man to love the beasts just as God loved man.⁸⁶ And near the end of his report he called for the total elimination of all Sunday shooting in the states that still allowed it, to provide “absolute rest to bird life for the one day per week.”⁸⁷

Even more disquieting to the scientists were the increasing restrictions on collecting. The series of state laws that the bird protection committee had recently secured with the close cooperation of state Audubon and humane societies often limited what scientists considered entirely legitimate collecting. In some states the problem began when the authority to issue permits had been removed from scientific organizations and entrusted to state game commissions or wardens. Game officials tended to be more closely allied to the sporting community and less sympathetic to the collecting demands of scientists.

New York was a case in point. Under the terms of the original AOU model law passed in 1886, the state authorized the American Museum of Natural History to issue permits for scientific bird collecting. For nearly two decades J. A. Allen reviewed the applications and issued collecting licenses on behalf of the museum.⁸⁸ But in 1904 the state legislature amended the law to make the New York Forest, Fish, and Game Commission the sole permit-granting authority in the state. As State Game Protector J. Warren Pond soon reported, “much care has been taken to determine just who every applicant is and what his business is.” In the face of this intense scrutiny, only five permits had been granted during the first five months in which the new law was in effect.⁸⁹

Other states were even more restrictive. In a 1903 editorial complaining about the bond requirement in the AOU model law, Walter K. Fisher, editor of the Condor, asserted that “almost without exception it is a positive hardship to secure a permit to collect where the A.O.U. bill has been accepted, particularly in the case of non-residents.” In Vermont only three permits to collect were in force at any given time. Even worse, Virginia’s bird protection legislation lacked a provision for scientific collecting.⁹⁰ Fisher asked impatiently, “Where is Ornithology to come in?”⁹¹

At the same time, Walter’s father, A. K. Fisher, orchestrated a successful campaign to eliminate the bonding clause from the AOU model law. Just before the annual AOU meeting in the fall of 1903, the elder Fisher wrote several prominent ornithologists to complain about the difficulty of obtaining collecting permits and the objectionable bond feature: “The present wave of hysteria rolling along & pervading bird protection is threatening to prevent collecting by ornithologists. I do not believe that the AOU should sanction unnecessary restrictions to legitimate collecting and consequently feel that the bonding feature in the AOU law should be cut out.”⁹² After securing support from several key AOU members, Fisher brought his reform proposal before the full council of the union, which decided to place the issue before the general membership at its business session. Despite strong opposition from Dutcher, AOU members voted to strike the offending clause from the AOU model law.⁹³

Two years later, at the AOU annual meeting immediately following the creation of the National Association of Audubon Societies, Dutcher reported that his committee had been “inactive” the past year because “most of its members were connected with another society.” Expanding upon his earlier theme, A. K. Fisher strongly urged that the bird protection committee be continued, but he argued that its mission should be reoriented to better represent “the interests of scientific ornithologists, the tendency being to prohibit all collecting.” Chapman suggested that one way to begin this process of redefinition would be to have the committee composed only of scientists who were not active members of the National Association of Audubon Societies. An angry Dutcher replied that he felt the scientists had “misunderstood” the feeling of the Audubon societies toward scientific collecting and asked that his committee be discharged. AOU President Charles Batchelder then appointed Fisher to chair the new bird protection committee.⁹⁴

Like his immediate predecessor, A. K. Fisher was a consummate AOU insider.⁹⁵ He had been a founding member of the union, a longtime member of its governing council, and an original district superindendent for the AOU migration committee. In the latter capacity he worked closely with the C. Hart Merriam, his friend and former classmate at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. When Merriam became head of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (later the Bureau of the Biological Survey), he persuaded Fisher to abandon his medical practice and accompany him to Washington as an assistant. Fisher remained an important force within the agency for the next forty-six years. His most significant publication, a study of the diets of hawks and owls published in 1893, was typical of the reports regularly issued by the Biological Survey in its early years and long remained a standard in its field.⁹⁶

As his comments of the last few years had suggested, Fisher’s appointment marked a fundamental shift in the conservation policy of the AOU. Fearful of further erosion of the collecting privilege, the union entirely abandoned its leadership position in the nearly decade-long bird protection movement. Individual members, like Chapman, Allen, Dutcher, and others, continued to serve in key administrative positions within Audubon societies at both the state and national levels, but the AOU as an institution repudiated its earlier commitment to bird protection. Gone were the frequent appeals on behalf of the birds. Gone were the regular appearances before state and federal legislatures as representatives of the union. And gone too were the lengthy reports detailing the successes of the movement. For over twenty-five years the bird protection committee held no formal meetings and issued no printed reports. The issue of bird protection all but disappeared from the pages of the Auk.

Behind the scenes the situation was hardly better. Each year when called to give his annual report, Fisher responded that his committee had held no meetings and had no formal report to offer.⁹⁷ This was often followed by a brief account of his attempts to secure more liberal permit regulations in states that had restricted collecting. In 1908 Fisher even asserted that he did “not feel that the song-birds require the protection accorded them. Storms kill more than ornithologists. . . . We should oppose laws that do not give ornithologists a right to collect.”⁹⁸

A remarkable exchange during a 1909 council meeting revealed an older generation’s frustration with the increasing restrictions on collecting and its failure to appreciate recent changes in the direction of ornithological research. The exchange began when Fisher indicated, as usual, that he had no formal report to offer on behalf of the bird protection committee but felt it was “more and more evident that the trouble in obtaining permits was affecting the study of ornithology.” The state of Washington granted permits only to residents, thereby preventing even federal ornithologists from doing needed research there. In Texas “it was almost impossible to collect.” And it continued to be difficult to get permits in New York. Fisher argued that even “boys should be allowed to collect if they can make bird skins,” and that the AOU should “take steps to help young men fit themselves as ornithologists ... so that ornithologists would not be annihilated.”⁹⁹

Several council members echoed Fisher’s apprehensions. Calling the “moral effect” of the restrictions “tremendous,” William Brewster argued that they would ultimately lead to “the extermination of practical ornithologists.” Already it was “almost impossible” to get good records from the “opera glass observers,” even though the latter published with complete confidence. Charles Batchelder argued that it was “time ornithologists should have protection,” and that the committee should “formulate plans to bring about needed modifications of the methods of issuing permits for bird collecting.” Merriam, D. G. Elliot, Stone, and Chapman each expressed sympathy with what had been said. The latter also admitted that “he had collected in his native state, New Jersey, without a permit” and recommended a bulletin to clarify how the union felt about collecting birds for scientific purposes.¹⁰⁰

No bulletin emerged from the council’s discussion, but three years later the bird protection committee’s change in mission was publicly recognized by Witmer Stone, who had recently been appointed as editor of the Auk:

It is certainly true that there are to-day, very few young men engaged in forming a collection of bird-skins, formerly regarded as a sine qua non to the development of an ornithologist. So serious has this matter appeared to some that it has been suggested that the A.O.U. Committee for the Protection of North American Birds might well be changed to a Committee for the prevention of the extermination of North American ornithologists.¹⁰¹

Stone denied that Audubon societies had pressured states to restrict or eliminate permits for scientific collecting. Rather, he placed the blame for the recent difficulty in securing permits squarely on those few insensitive collectors who “displayed little or no sympathy with citizens who prefer live birds to dead ones, and armed with their permits have carried on collecting close to houses and grounds in a manner that has made them very obnoxious. These men are naturally regarded as examples of ‘scientific ornithologists’ and it is no wonder that they arouse opposition to the granting of any collecting licenses.”¹⁰²

Stone went on to argue that stringent laws were perhaps not even the main reason for the obvious decrease in the number of collectors. Long-term changes in the direction of ornithological research were as much or more to blame. Many former collectors had moved on to other organisms as the possibility of discovering new North American bird species or subspecies had reached a point of diminishing returns. Those who had remained in ornithology often rejected traditional taxonomic research for studies in “Anatomy, Animal Behavior, Development and Meaning of Coloration, and other broad problems of evolution” that did not necessarily involve skin collecting. Stone tried to reassure his anxious colleagues that despite the obvious decrease in the number of collectors, there was no “danger of ornithologists becoming extinct.”¹⁰³

Stone’s decidedly upbeat assessment of the decrease in collectors was in sharp contrast to that published three years later by Joseph Grinnell (no relation to George Bird Grinnell), founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at Berkeley, longtime editor of the Condor, and mentor for a generation of zoologists.¹⁰⁴ From the earliest days of the MVZ, he relied on a network of amateur and professional collectors to stock what he hoped would eventually become a world-class research institution. Continued frustration at his inability to locate and keep good collectors, as well as apprehension about the direction of an increasingly observation-based ornithology, prompted Grinnell to respond publicly.

Grinnell’s polemical essay, “Conserve the Collector,” marked the culmination of concern over the decline of collecting.¹⁰⁵ Deftly summarizing the attitudes of an earlier generation of scientific ornithologists, Grinnell mounted a full-scale defense of the collector. He began by asserting that “matters of precision and accuracy” in scientific ornithology were suffering as a direct result of the recent tendency to forsake the “shot-gun” method. The teeming hoards of field observers, or “opera-glass students” as they were often disparagingly referred to by their critics, were not dependable for “accuracy in identification of species and especially subspecies.” Only the old-fashioned collector provided scientists with the actual specimens upon which an authoritative record of a region’s avifauna and from which sound classificatory structures might be based. The rise of the opera-glass student and the concurrent demise of the collector meant that hardwon attempts to forge ornithology into a more rigorous scientific discipline might quickly erode: “Ornithology as a science is threatened, and it should not be allowed to lapse wholly into the status of a recreation or a hobby, to be indulged in only in a superficial way by amateurs or dilettantes.”¹⁰⁶

Collecting was also crucial to the proper training of ornithologists. Grinnell echoed a frequently expressed worry that “authoritative and expert systematic and field ornithologists” could not be developed except by personally collecting “adequate numbers of specimens in the field.” During the process of stalking, capturing, and preparing birds, the collector gained a deep knowledge of the living and dead organism, knowledge that could be “secured in no other way.”¹⁰⁷

Grinnell argued that even if collecting permits were issued “freely to applicants upon avowed sincerity of purpose,” it would pose no real threat to bird populations. He did not reject the idea of restricting the collection of “rare or disappearing species,” like the Carolina parakeet or the ivory-billed woodpecker, but argued that daily overall “bag-limits” on collectors were unnecessary and undesirable. Because of the tremendous labor involved in preparing bird skins, even the most ambitious collectors rarely took more than twenty birds per day anyhow. Moreover, the total number of collectors was infinitesimally small compared to the large hunting community. In California, only a hundred permits to collect nongame birds were issued per year, as compared with some thirteen thousand game licenses.¹⁰⁸ He admitted that some collectors had “behaved indifferently toward people who were sensitive to bird killing,” but he felt this could be prevented by establishing zones around more populated areas where collecting would be forbidden.¹⁰⁹ Finally, Grinnell argued that “all collecting adds sooner or later to scientific knowledge, either directly through printed contributions from the collectors themselves, or through the subsequent study of the material by others, often after it has been acquired by some public institution.”¹¹⁰ “Conserve the Collector” was an impassioned plea on behalf of a vanishing breed of ornithologist, the collector, from one of its most eloquent spokespersons.

In 1923, nearly two decades after Fisher began serving as chair, the AOU finally decided to appoint an entirely new bird protection committee. But the new committee, and its immediate successors during the next few years, continued to remain inactive and issued no printed reports.¹¹¹ Not until 1930, in the midst of a series of upheavals in conservation circles—including accusations of neglect leveled specifically at the AOU—was the committee finally roused back into action.

A CRISIS IN CONSERVATION

It was the problem of extinction—the same issue that had first troubled J. A. Allen over a half-century previously—that finally roused the AOU bird protection committee from its twenty-five-year slumber. Beginning in the 1920s the issue had gained increasing saliency, with the gradual introduction of a more ecological perspective into conservation discourse. Where earlier concern surrounding animal extinction had been primarily rooted in moral, aesthetic, and utilitarian frameworks, the new perspective—informed by the emerging science of ecology—aimed to preserve the integrity of entire biological communities, whether for their own sake, or more often, for human appreciation and study.112

As environmental historian Thomas Dunlap has emphasized, it was the change in attitude toward predators—wolves, coyotes, hawks, owls, and eagles—that served as a bellwether for this revolutionary shift in perspectives.¹¹³ Once almost universally portrayed as “vermin,” fit only for systematic destruction, ecologically minded conservationists saw predators as crucial components in the reticulated nexus of relationships that knitted together all living organisms. According to this new perspective, predators contributed to the integrity and long-term stability of biological relationships that had been the products of millions of years of evolution.¹¹⁴

In the case of birds, hints of this newfound respect for predators had already begun to appear by 1920. That year several naturalists on the staff at the American Museum of Natural History sent a strongly worded letter to the AOU bird protection committee protesting a bounty law for bald eagles introduced in Alaska three years previously.¹¹⁵ By 1919 territory officials had paid bounties on an alarming fifty-six hundred birds. If this deplorable destruction continued, the scientists feared that the bald eagle, “one of the largest and most magnificent birds, and the emblem of our nation,” would soon be in “serious danger of extinction.” The New York naturalists argued that the AOU, “the leading ornithological society of America,” “should be taking the initiative on this,” but to date the organization had remained “silent and indifferent.”

A. K. Fisher’s reply reflected the still-dominant utilitarian conservation perspective. Fisher, who was also in charge of the predator-control program for the Bureau of the Biological Survey, claimed that Alaskan bald eagles were highly destructive to young blue foxes (whose adult skins fetched anywhere from $100 to $400 each) and to salmon as they ascended streams to spawn. Hence, in purely economic terms the bounty was justified. In any case, Fisher continued, concerns about the danger of extinction were entirely unfounded, for most Alaskan territory remained uninhabited, and therefore safe habitat for the eagles.¹¹⁶ Individually and collectively, the New York scientists continued to raise the issue throughout the year, but their concerns fell on deaf ears.¹¹⁷

The predator problem reemerged in 1926 when Henry R. Carey, a writer, associate member of the AOU, and active member of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, wrote to complain of a relative absence of hawks in recent United States bird census reports: “Judging from this record there can be no question but that many of our Hawks are doomed very soon to join the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet.”¹¹⁸ According to Carey, trappers and “sportsmen” were playing havoc with the hawks, which became easy marks during seasonal migrations, when they tended to concentrate in several well-known flyways. Not only would complete extermination of hawks lead to troublesome mouse and insect irruptions, it would forever impoverish the American landscape. Carey urged those concerned about hawk extinction to act before it was too late: “It is time that Nature Lovers claimed their share of rights from the Nature Wasters. It is time for us to protect for our children their rightful heritage.”¹¹⁹ Carey’s letter generated a lengthy series of published replies during the next few years, but it too failed to stir the lethargic bird protection committee from its chronic state of inactivity.¹²⁰

At the same time, the issue of predators was beginning to divide the AOU’s sister scientific society, the American Society of Mammalogists. The society had been organized in 1919 by a group of Biological Survey scientists, but almost from the start the new organization became a battleground over the agency’s recently instituted predator-control program. Beginning as early as 1915, survey scientists hired hunters, offered bounties, and (increasingly) broadcast poison bait to reduce populations of wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, and other animals assumed to be destructive to livestock and game.¹²¹ In the following decades western ranchers put increasing pressure on Congress to expand the limited program, and Congress, in turn, sought to appease its wealthy and influential constituents by allocating larger shares of the expanding survey budget to predator control. By the late 1920s the well-funded program came under mounting attack from naturalists who felt that the Biological Survey had moved from predator control to complete extermination as its primary goal. For example, in 1929 a committee of the American Society of Mammalogists issued the first of several critical reports that called the program “scientifically unjustified” and urged reform.¹²²

It was against this backdrop that an explosive indictment of bird protection policy and practice appeared in June 1929. A Crisis in Conservation: Serious Danger of Extinction of Many North American Birds was the handiwork of W. DeWitt Miller, Willard G. Van Name, and Davis Quinn.¹²³ The pamphlet gained considerable attention within ornithological circles, in part because at least two of the three authors—Miller and Van Name—were already well-known to the scientists.

At the time A Crisis in Conservation appeared, Miller was an associate curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History and an AOU insider. Hired as an assistant at the AMNH in 1903, the twenty-four-year-old insurance agent took full advantage of the museum environment to broaden his ornithological horizons.¹²⁴ Through extensive reading in the museum’s well-stocked library, constant interaction with Chapman, Allen, J. D. Dwight, and other staff members, and careful examination of the burgeoning ornithological collection, Miller soon became an accomplished systematist. Formal recognition of Miller’s progress followed in regular succession, with election to membership (1906) and fellowship (1914) in the AOU and promotion to assistant (1911) and associate curator (1917) at the AMNH. He was respected enough as a systematist that his colleagues appointed him to help Alexander Wetmore, of the U.S. National Museum, revise the classification of birds for the new edition of the AOU Checklist.¹²⁵

Miller was also a fervent conservationist. Unlike most scientific ornithologists of the previous generation, Miller had never been much of a bird collector. He was, in the words of his eulogist and close friend James Chapin, “always respectful” of birds’ “rights.” Miller’s respect for bird life extended to active involvement in the New Jersey Audubon Society, where he was a founding member and longtime vice president. Before helping author A Crisis in Conservation, he had been involved in several conservation crusades. For example, in 1923 he wrote to the New York Times to protest the destruction of mammals for purely ornamental summer furs, and a year later he exchanged several letters with the Du Pont Company over its sponsorship of a national crow-shooting contest.¹²⁶ In 1928 Miller made an extended survey of western forests with Willard G. Van Name, a colleague at the museum who was an associate curator of invertebrates. No doubt it was during this lengthy trip that the two scientists planned their attack.

Although he was an accomplished invertebrate zoologist with a Ph.D. degree from Yale (1898), Van Name was probably better known to ornithologists for his conservation activities. In 1915 his was the lone voice that tried to refute Grinnell’s ardent plea to “conserve the collector.”¹²⁷ Van Name was also a moving force behind the series of letters from American Museum naturalists protesting the Alaskan eagle bounty in 1920. Throughout the twenties he was increasingly involved with efforts to prevent commercial encroachment into, and to extend the boundaries of, national parks.¹²⁸ Now he had again turned his sights to the problem of wildlife destruction.

The primary target of A Crisis in Conservation was the National Association of Audubon Societies, which had been run by T. Gilbert Pearson since 1910, when Dutcher had suffered a debilitating stroke. On the surface the organization had flourished under Pearson’s reign: it had steadily increased its membership, visibility, and endowment. But according to the critics, behind the rosy facade was an organization that had veered measurably from its original course. Under the domination of Pearson and other “professional conservationists ... in the game for what there was in it for themselves,” the NAAS had become complacent and too cozy with the government agencies, private organizations, and others it should have been policing.¹²⁹ While the NAAS stood by idly, innumerable bird species were rushing headlong toward extinction, with scarcely a voice raised in protest. The great auk, Labrador duck, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, “also probably” the Eskimo curlew and heath hen, were already lost. A troubling number of additional species—the whooping crane, trumpeter swan, ivory-billed woodpecker, California condor, flamingo, golden plover, Hudsonian godwit, buff-breasted sandpiper, and upland plover—were now “beyond saving.” And as many as twenty-six additional species were immediately threatened with a similar fate.¹³⁰

Amid the series of scathing accusations, neglected opportunities, and alarmist predictions detailed in A Crisis in Conservation, one charge more than any other stung the scientists: the claim that they had remained entirely unmoved by the fate of birds faced with extinction:

The subject of extinction of our birds has been all along and is in most cases still one that these people [professional ornithologists and writers] ignore, or if they allude to it at all it is commonly done in such a half-hearted, timid, apologetic and inconsequential way as to counteract any good effect that the allusion might possibly produce. How can the general public be expected to realize the danger of extinction that threatens many of our birds while the distinguished ornithologists and authors of widely read books on birds to whom the public looks for guidance and warning of impending danger to our native species remain silent, indifferent or complaisantly satisfied with the situation and with the inefficiency of bird protection organizations of which they are in many cases officials?¹³¹

History was likely to stand in harsh judgment of the scientists who had abdicated their responsibility to inform the public that many species were in danger of being "wiped off the face of the earth.”¹³²

The product of two well-respected naturalists on the research staff of the AMNH, the serious accusations in A Crisis in Conservation provoked a series of replies. Unfortunately, Miller died less than two months after the pamphlet appeared, when his motorcycle ran head-on into a bus during one of his frequent New Jersey birding excursions. Following his death, Chapman, who was not only Miller’s boss, but also editor of Bird-Lore and chair of the board of trustees of NAAS, tried to suppress the embarrassing pamphlet.¹³³ George H. Sherwood, director of the AMNH, declared that the entire staff of his museum was unanimous in condemning the claims in A Crisis in Conservation and ordered Van Name to refrain from publishing further except with prior approval of the museum.¹³⁴

Rosalie Edge, a feisty conservation-minded New Yorker of independent means and mind, tried to raise the charges lodged against the NAAS at the society’s annual meeting in 1929 but was rebuffed.¹³⁵ In private, the board of trustees of the organization, many of whom were also associated with the AMNH, decided that the best course of action was to ignore the troublesome pamphlet and hope the furor would blow over.¹³⁶ Never one to back down from a fight, Edge then contacted Van Name and Quinn, and together with Irving Brant, Roger Baldwin, Henry Carey, and others launched the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), a radical organization that served as a gadfly in conservation circles for the next two decades.¹³⁷ The ECC immediately began issuing a series of critical pamphlets aimed at the NAAS, the Bureau of the Biological Survey, and numerous other state, federal, and private wildlife organizations.¹³⁸ Within a few years, Edge and the ECC had forced the resignation of Pearson and the transfer of Bird-Lore from Chapman to the NAAS.

RENEWING THE CONSERVATION COMMITMENT

The AOU was not immune to the train of events set in motion by the publication of A Crisis in Conservation. The polemical pamphlet also pushed the bird protection committee back into action.139 When the most recent chair of the committee offered no formal report at the annual meeting in 1929, the new president of the union, Joseph Grinnell, who was increasingly sympathetic to the conservationists’ pleas, appointed a new committee.¹⁴⁰ In February 1930 he named one of his former graduate students, Henry Child Bryant, to head that committee.¹⁴¹

It became immediately clear that for the first time in twenty-five years things were going to be different for the bird protection committee. Soon after his appointment, Bryant wrote his fellow committee members urging them to support a recent congressional proposal to protect the bald eagle.¹⁴² By May he had arranged for the new committee to meet. The ideas discussed during that initial meeting indicated that this committee’s approach to scientific collecting was fundamentally different from that of its immediate predecessors. One member suggested that those who were issued permits for scientific collecting should be forced to publish within three years or face revocation of their license to collect, a proposal that would have been an anathema during Fisher’s reign. Even more revolutionary was the proposal to create a “white list” of “rare and dangerous birds” that could not be collected even with a scientific permit.¹⁴³ By September Bryant was circulating drafts of a formal committee report.¹⁴⁴ The final version approved by the union included a platform that called for continued educational efforts in bird protection; special protection for birds of prey; opposition to the introduction of exotic birds into North America; reduction of dangers presented to birds by lighthouses, poison campaigns, discharge of oil in waters, and other “modern man-made developments”; and support for legislation and treaties that favored “real bird protection” while not hampering “sound scientific research.”¹⁴⁵

The new committee’s unusual level of activity created something of a sensation at the 1930 AOU meeting in October. Grinnell called the committee’s report “the event of the season,” and Chapman voiced pleasure that the committee “had again come to life.”¹⁴⁶ According to Bryant, “some of the old-timers were astounded that any report was to be submitted.”¹⁴⁷ In the end, though, the committee was forced to compromise on its platform plank that, in the preliminary versions, had called for a “white list” of threatened birds to be immune from collection even by those possessing scientific permits. The final version called for increased protection for native birds that were “fast nearing extinction,” but left it to the judgment of the individual ornithologist to determine which species required “better protection” and what the precise nature of that protection might be.¹⁴⁸

Under Bryant’s aggressive leadership, the AOU bird protection committee remained active for several years. Besides the recurrent problem of scientific collecting, the committee immediately had to deal with another potentially divisive issue: the Biological Survey’s predator-control program. An April 1931 report on the ornithological work of the Biological Survey published in the Auk prompted several letters of protest when it failed to mention the agency’s control program.¹⁴⁹ In response, the Auk published a highly critical editorial that placed the AOU firmly on the record with the American Society of Mammalogists in condemning the “nefarious work” of predator control, which threatened to bring the Biological Survey into “disrepute.”¹⁵⁰

A year later, the bird protection committee authored a resolution condemning systematic campaigns aimed at destroying birds “without regard to the status of the species and their ability to endure such destruction.” The rationale given for the resolution revealed the extent to which ecological notions were beginning to enter conservation discourse. According to the resolution, which was passed by the entire membership of the union, the AOU “desires the preservation and maintenance of the avifauna of this continent, and of all continents, in the largest measure of integrity, and offers the spirit of that pronouncement as the proper one in which to approach all questions of law and practice which concern bird life.”¹⁵¹

In spite of this more ecological perspective, which if pursued to its logical conclusion might have led to a formal call for reasonable restrictions on scientific collecting of endangered birds, the problem remained a thorn in the side of the AOU. At the annual meeting in 1935, S. Prentiss Baldwin, a retired businessman who had established an ornithological research station at his summer estate in Gates Mill, Ohio, presented a resolution calling on its members to refrain from “the collecting of skins and eggs of rare and apparently vanishing birds” and to “prevent traffic in fresh specimens for commercial purposes.”¹⁵² Through dubious behind-the-scenes machinations, a few well-placed opponents of the resolution managed to squelch it.¹⁵³ During a discussion of the proposed resolution in the AOU Council, Alexander Wetmore suggested a watered-down version based on the recommendations of the American Committee for International Wild Life Protection, which called on scientists to take specimens of “rare or disappearing species” only “with discretion.”¹⁵⁴

In separate responses to the resolution debacle, the ECC and the NAAS each put together their own recommendations on scientific collecting. Not surprisingly, the ECC’s was the most far-reaching of the two proposals. It began with the claim that for a number of years the birds collected by “amateurs and private collectors” had not added to the knowledge of North American avifauna. Rather, such “superfluous” collecting presented “a very serious menace to the future of ornithology by hastening the extermination of many species.” In no uncertain terms, the ECC recommended that “no more permits for general and unlimited bird collecting be issued by either the federal or state governments" and that “no permits whatever should be issued on any pretext for collecting certain species that are in great danger of extinction.” According to the ECC, some twenty-five birds deserved complete and absolute protection.¹⁵⁵

Even the NAAS, which was beginning to exhibit a measure of independence from scientific ornithologists, was unusually straightforward in condemning the collecting of endangered species. At a board of directors meeting in June 1936, the NAAS passed a resolution stating that in the United States the collecting of wild birds and eggs was “subject to abuses, opposed to sound conservation and EVEN THREATENING THE LOCAL OR GENERAL SURVIVAL OF VARIOUS SPECIES.”¹⁵⁶ According to the NAAS, collecting specimens of wildlife was not an “inherent right” of the scientist; rather, it was a “privilege” to be granted only when carefully specified conditions had been met. Individual states and the federal government should carefully review the objects of proposed collecting to make sure they were worthy, and any permits granted should “COMPLETELY EXCLUDE CERTAIN THREATENED SPECIES FROM THE LIST OF THOSE WHICH MAY BE COLLECTED.” The burden of proof concerning “need and desirability” of all proposed collecting should fall squarely with the applicant, and those approved to collect should be required to submit an annual report listing all species taken. Although falling short of the blanket condemnation of collecting contained in the ECC proposal, the NAAS resolution went far beyond a point with which most AOU scientists were comfortable.

The bird protection committee thus found itself under increasing pressure to draft its own collecting resolution. The initial attempt—which defended the continued need for specimens to conduct scientific research—also explicitly opposed the collecting of birds “as objects of curiosity or personal or household adornment,” for commercial purposes, or taking “rare and vanishing birds where such collecting might affect adversely the status of the species.”¹⁵⁷

But even these apparently reasonable restrictions were problematic enough for a few influential council members to table the resolution during the AOU meeting in 1936.¹⁵⁸ Following this setback, NAAS President John Baker urged the bird protection committee to “publicize” both its proposed resolution and the fact that the AOU Council had ignored it.¹⁵⁹ A clearly frustrated Bryant wrote to AOU President A. C. Bent indicating that his committee was suffering from low morale following the council’s action, which had been taken without any formal explanation.¹⁶⁰ Bent replied that he personally favored the proposed resolution and would see to it that it was presented at an open meeting of the union the next year.¹⁶¹ During the 1937 annual meeting, AOU members passed a resolution that was almost identical to the one squashed by the council a year earlier. The major difference was that it specified in more detail the kinds of activities discouraged with threatened species: “The Union opposes . . . any scientific or other collecting or investigational activities which may in any way endanger of adversely affect the status of seriously depleted species by molestation, invasion of territory or otherwise.”¹⁶² Finally, over fifty years after the creation of its first bird protection committee, the AOU had come to realize that even scientific collecting had legitimate limits.

Why did the AOU finally cave in on the issue of collecting threatened species? For one thing, scientific ornithology looked very different from the days when Frank Chapman slogged through Florida swamps in search of the last Carolina parakeets. As ornithological research gradually broadened into new areas—like life histories, behavior, ecology, and physiology—the need to collect rare species no longer seemed so pressing. At the same time, the rise of birdwatching—a central aspect of the Audubon movement and the subject of the next chapter—resulted in a politically powerful interest group that was generally more aware of the threats facing native birds and often unsympathetic to the collecting demands of scientists. When Rosalie Edge and John Baker pressured the AOU to change its collecting policy, they spoke on behalf of a vast constituency that was difficult to ignore.