5

Angry Ladies

IT WAS THE THIRD WEEK of December, a chilly, overcast Sunday morning just a slow cup of coffee after daybreak. Most of the world was asleep, but Amy and I, a heavy tripod balanced on my shoulder, were splashing through cold puddles, counting birds.

We were a few miles from Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a flat, jigsaw-puzzle landscape of interlocking peninsulas, coves, and tidal creeks, of cordgrass marshes, fields, and soggy pine-oak forests. A few miles up the road was the tourist town of Saint Michael’s, around which lay an imaginary circle fifteen miles wide. This day, as in every December since 1953, good weather or bad, dozens of birders combed that circle, trying to tally every bird of every species within it.

I stepped in a puddle and winced, realizing I’d put off getting new hiking boots a little too long when frigid water flooded through a long split in the seam above one sole. It was worse with the next step—I could see that the entire meadow was flooded a few inches deep from here on to the edge of the bay—but after a minute my foot was numb enough that I didn’t notice. Much.

Amy and I were taking part in a Christmas Bird Count, a venerable tradition whose roots, more than a century old, lie in the great movement for bird protection, which both rose out of and helped give birth to birding as a modern pastime. We were on the Jean Ellen duPont Shehan Audubon Sanctuary, a 950-acre peninsula of forest, field, and wetlands. Amy had been the sanctuary’s first and only manager, but after eight years, this was her final day on the job—the next morning we were packing up the remainder of her things for the move to Pennsylvania, where I lived. So this last Christmas Bird Count on the sanctuary was a bittersweet one for my wife, who loves the tidal creeks and marshlands of the Chesapeake, who had lived her whole life by the water but was giving that up for the mountains.

To our right was a shaggy field of switchgrass and big bluestem, matted down by an early snowstorm, while to our left lay a big woodlot of loblolly pines and southern red oaks, tangles of greenbrier clotting the edge like green concertina wire. Among the brambles, lots of birds were flitting; the air was full of the metallic plink calls of white-throated sparrows and the sharp tsk notes of juncos, like the disapproving sound you make with your tongue. It was a cold, damp morning; no wonder the juncos sounded peeved at our disturbance.

We stopped, glassed the greenbrier, and tried to sort how many of each species was milling around in there. “I’ve got twenty-seven whitethroats and fifteen juncos,” I said, after a minute. “Seventeen juncos,” Amy corrected me, not dropping her binoculars. “And a cardinal somewhere back in the woods.”

“And a brown-headed nuthatch,” I said; two can play at one-upsmanship, and I could hear the little bird’s nasal call from high up in a pine.

“Actually, there are two nuthatches, and a red-bellied woodpecker.” I should have known better; Amy’s ears are sharper than mine. “Anything else?” she asked, scratching the totals in a small notebook, which she jammed in her pocket, hurrying along.

We splashed down the rain-filled ruts of the truck path to the edge of Leadenham Creek, a wide estuary dotted here and there with duck blinds built on pilings, way out in the center channel. Duck season was closed, though, and none of the birds bobbing in the light chop were decoys. I lowered the tripod from my shoulder and aimed the scope across the bay; Amy would sweep the foreground and middle of the creek, and I’d use the heavier magnification to pick out the birds huddled against the far bank, maybe a quarter-mile away. Buffleheads sheltered against a rocky seawall, along with scaup (at that range, I could only guess at which of the two species), mallards, and a few black ducks. I blinked against the wind, trying to clear the tears from my eyes, struggling to resolve the long, white bodies of larger ducks into either male common goldeneyes or male common mergansers, while keeping the totals for each species straight in my head. Three canvasbacks, five more buffleheads, one tundra swan; the list grew as I panned the scope from right to left.

We swung wide, into another field of shorter grass where a mass of Canada geese were feeding, the sentries around the edges snapping to attention and giving a few warning honks as we came into view. Amy said she’d take the flock of sparrows working the edge of the tall grass and brush as I started counting up the increasingly nervous geese, and she finished before me. As I lowered my glasses and said, “One hundred and eighty-one,” the whole flock of Canadas broke into flight, their black wings making a sibilant racket as they clawed for altitude.

“Well, that was good timing,” I said brightly.

“Except that they’re going to fly over to Cherry Tree Cove with all the geese we haven’t counted yet,” Amy said sourly, watching them veer south. “Or else those geese will decide to join these birds, and they’ll all take off.” She clomped off through the sodden grass. Clearly, her own imminent departure was making my sweetheart a little testy.

A Christmas Bird Count is, as the name suggests, all about numbers—and therein lies its surprisingly dark origin. The CBC, as it is universally known, grew out of the bloody holiday tradition of a “side hunt” or “match hunt,” in which teams of marksmen would fan out on Christmas Day, shooting essentially anything that moved. The team that accumulated the largest pile of game was declared the winner, and birds were the commonest victims—not just game birds, but virtually anything unlucky enough to fly into shotgun range.

Even a dedicated hunter like Frank M. Chapman could be moved to revulsion by the sheer waste of a match hunt. A banker who had left a promising career in business to pursue his interest in birds, Chapman was by the turn of the last century a rising star at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the founder and editor of the popular magazine Bird-Lore. Why not challenge the idea of a match hunt, he reasoned, with something that combined competition and conservation? He bruited the idea among friends and colleagues, got an enthusiastic response, and on Christmas Day 1900, twenty-seven people hit the woods, field glasses in hand, in twenty-five locales from New Brunswick to Louisiana to California. (One participant, a Wisconsin boy named Alexander Wetmore, would go on to direct the Smithsonian Institution.) By the end of the day, the teams had tallied more than eighteen thousand birds of ninety species, and the Christmas Bird Census (later Count) was born.

The popularity of the event grew rapidly, but it’s hard to imagine what Chapman would make of his brainchild today, more than 106 years after its founding. He’d be proud, no doubt; while the side hunt is thankfully a thing of the past, the CBC has become the largest, longest-running wildlife census in the world, encompassing the western hemisphere from one end to the other. In 2005–06 there were 2,056 Christmas Bird Counts, each taking place within its own fifteen-mile-wide circle, scattered from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope, across Canada, and down through the lower forty-eight and Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and as far south as Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. Almost fifty-seven thousand participants recorded birds of more than 650 species in North America and another 1,500 or so species in Latin America. The total was a seemingly breathtaking 61.5 million individual birds, but that pales with the record-setting year of 1988, when millions of nomadic blackbirds appeared within some count circles, boosting the numbers to an eye-popping 193 million.

Chapman had been agitating for years on behalf of birds, looking for ways to awaken people to the increasingly desperate situation of the continent’s birdlife. Side hunts were far from the worst of it; a leading cause of destruction was the millinery industry and its slaughter of birds to supply the whims of fashion. While still a banker in the 1880s, Chapman had been inspired by attacks on the plume trade by the newly organized AOU, and by prominent ornithologists like George Bird Grinnell, who had been lobbying tirelessly for greater wildlife protection, on the editorial pages of his influential magazine Forest and Stream.

Largely forgotten today, Grinnell was one of the leading figures in American conservation at the end of the nineteenth century. Forest and Stream was widely read and enormously influential (Teddy Roosevelt was a contributor), and through it, Grinnell advocated for the creation of national parks, wilderness preservation, and an end to market hunting. He was instrumental in founding the AOU, the Society of American Foresters, the Boone and Crockett Club (which was among the strongest advocates for game laws), and the New York Zoological Society, along with more than half a dozen other groups.

Although he was involved in the AOU’s first bird-protection efforts in 1886, Grinnell felt broader measures were needed, and in an editorial in February of that year, he proposed the creation of “an Association for the protection of wild birds and their eggs, which shall be called the Audubon Society.” He outlined a pledge that all members would take, promising to work against the senseless destruction of birds, their eggs and nests, and to refrain from using bird skins or feathers as decoration or on clothing.

While the threats against birds were legion, the greatest enemy was market hunting, especially to supply the millinery industry. Fashion in the 1880s had taken wing—and head, and tail, and plume, all stripped from wild birds and arrayed on increasingly flamboyant hats. The greatest demand were for aigrettes, the long, airy, impossibly delicate breeding plumes grown each spring by herons and egrets. Milliners told naïve buyers that the feathers were plucked harmlessly from live birds, or collected beneath nests, but this was feel-good hogwash; gunners shot the birds in their breeding colonies and stripped them of their skins, leaving their eggs and chicks to die and bringing many species to the brink of extinction. Wrote one eyewitness:

 

There, strewn on the floating water weed, and also on adjacent logs, were at least 50 carcasses of large white and smaller plumed egrets—nearly one-third of the rookery, perhaps more—the birds having been shot off their nests containing young. What a holocaust! Plundered for their plumes. . . . There were 50 birds ruthlessly destroyed, besides their young (about 200) left to die of starvation! This last fact was betokened by at least 70 carcasses of the nestlings, which had become so weak that their legs had refused to support them and they had fallen from the nests into the water below, and had been miserably drowned.

 

A single great egret—the “long white” of the plume hunter—has thirty to fifty aigrettes cascading down its back,^* each feather worth roughly twice its weight in gold in the late 1890s. The carnage beggars belief. In London at the height of the craze, a ton and a half of aigrettes passed through one firm’s salesroom in a single year; given that each feather weighed less than a fourth of an ounce, that meant that almost two hundred thousand birds had been shot to supply them, never mind the multiplying loss in eggs and chicks. Overall, the plume trade was chewing through an estimated 200 million birds a year. No wonder Grinnell and his colleagues foresaw a catastrophe.

Wading species like egrets, and seabirds like terns and gulls, were the primary victims, but almost any bird was at risk, from sparrows to hawks. In 1886, Chapman famously took two afternoon strolls down Fourteenth Street, then Manhattan’s main shopping district. “There, notebook in hand, I recorded, when I could identify them, the names of the birds which, usually entire, were seen on the hats of passing women,” he recalled some years later. “In light of existing conditions the results seem incredible.” Indeed; of the seven hundred hats he saw, 542 sported dead birds or feathers, and Chapman noted some forty species of birds. They ranged from songbirds like Baltimore orioles, blackburnian warblers and scarlet tanagers to a saw-whet owl, sixteen bobwhites, and twenty-one flickers.

The response to Grinnell’s proposal was swift and encouraging—thousands of people signed his pledge, and hundreds of local Audubon societies sprouted across the country. Luminaries like Oliver Wendell Holmes and the celebrated abolitionists John Greenleaf Whittier and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher lent their significant weight to the movement, which found common cause with progressive goals in general.

But while Grinnell was writing to the largely male audience of Forest and Stream, made up of hunters, naturalists, and scientists, his message found its greatest resonance with women. Florence Merriam, then still a student at Smith College, helped organize a chapter at the school and was able to pull strings to get no less an authority than John Burroughs to lead the young ladies on a series of bird walks. The local chapters, in turn, recruited schoolchildren by the score, knowing (as did Grinnell, who wrote many children’s books) how effectively kids could reach adults. By the time Grin nell incorporated the Audubon Society the following year, it had some thirty-nine thousand members of all ages, and its own publication, Audubon Magazine, with its namesake’s portrait on the cover.

 

As a boy, George Bird Grinnell was tutored by Lucy Audubon, and he created the first Audubon Society in 1886 to stem the destruction of wild birds. It soon foundered on its own success, but Grinnell had laid the groundwork for later and far more successful efforts.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

 

And then the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. By the end of 1888, the demands of running the society and publishing a second magazine had grown too great. In retrospect, Grinnell’s plan seems hopelessly idealistic—a national society with no dues structure, no governing body other than a hodgepodge of local chapters, and supported by a shower of free publications supplied by Grinnell and Forest and Stream. Income was supposed to be generated by magazine subscriptions, but these were voluntary and most Audubon members declined to pay the six cents an issue. Grinnell was no business lightweight, but it appears he either did not think through the consequences of his proposal, or perhaps hadn’t counted on the burden of its success, which was shouldered by the overworked Forest and Stream staff.

He was also discouraged by the lack of progress against the fashion industry. Despite its flourishing membership, the Audubon Society made little headway in changing the way Americans used bird skins and feathers. The AOU’s model law was quickly adopted by some states and then just as quickly dropped or gutted of any enforcement power when milliners, taxidermists, and egg collectors fought against it. The slaughter continued unabated; the fashion-conscious continued to snatch up every new feather-bedecked bonnet that appeared in shop windows.

Grinnell, whose faith lay in the power of reason and who had expected to sweep the field once women were informed of the horrors behind their hats, gave up the fight. In December 1888, the second and final issue of Audubon Magazine appeared; a month after, Grinnell announced that he was closing shop. “Fashion decrees feathers, and feathers it is,” he conceded bitterly. “For the great majority, self-restraint can only be secured by the dictates of fashion, which are stronger than penal legislation.” The Audubon Society was dead.

Men had tried to mobilize the country to protect birds, and they had failed. Now it was the women’s turn.

 

USING FEATHERS as adornment is probably as old as humanity, and plumed hats had come in and out of fashion for centuries. But the craze for using feathers and bird skins on hats took off in North America shortly after the Civil War; Harper’s Bazaar featured articles about this European trend as early as 1868, and in the decades thereafter, milliners pushed the boundaries of taste and excess further and further, until eventually whole “families” of stuffed birds perched around ersatz nests, glass-eyed bird heads sprouted out of boas of feathers, and ducks and prairie-chickens lay upside down, feet skyward, as though displayed in a butcher’s window.

Grinnell’s acidic remarks notwithstanding, the fight for bird protection wasn’t entirely dead in the water. In 1894 a Pennsylvania school superintendent named Charles Babcock established Bird Day, modeling it on Arbor Day (with which it was often paired), and the observance quickly spread across the country, aided by official proclamations in dozens of state legislatures. Congress, pushed hard by Grinnell, had finally closed Yellowstone to hunting, and two years earlier, President Harrison had established the first federal wildlife reserve, in Alaska, presaging the national wildlife refuge system that Teddy Roosevelt would create in 1903.

But the pivotal event in bird conservation—and in the growth of birding as a hobby for millions—came in 1896, on a cold winter day in Boston, when Harriet Lawrence Hemenway sat down in the parlor of her fashionable Back Bay home to read.

Thirty-nine years old, Mrs. Hemenway sat at the apex of New England society. Fifteen years earlier, at the age of twenty-four, she had married Augustus Hemenway, uniting two of Boston’s most prominent families. Her family, the Lawrences, traced their impeccable Brahmin status back to Revolutionary War Major Samuel Lawrence, and their tremendous wealth to Harriet’s grandfather, who with his brother had founded one of the most successful business partnerships in New England, laying the groundwork for the region’s enormous textile industry. Augustus Hemenway Jr.’s blood might not have been quite so blue (as such fine distinctions were made in Boston society) but his father, Augustus Sr., had amassed an enormous fortune in South American silver mines, Caribbean sugar plantations, and other ventures, largesse that Augustus Jr. would in later years shower on Harvard and other institutions.

Harriet Lawrence Hemenway was an arresting woman; a portrait by John Singer Sargent shows a direct gaze, sharp chin, and wide-set eyes. Thick brown hair is piled on top of her head, and she is in the act of tucking a white water lily in the bosom of her black gown. Given that the water lily was the symbol of pregnancy—a condition few polite women would discuss publicly in those days, much less declare in a portrait—it was a provocative pose, but Harriet Lawrence Hemenway was unafraid of controversy. Her family had been ardent abolitionists, and she had made a point of opening her home to Booker T. Washington at a time when others refused to take in the black orator.

Every great organization has its founding legend, and thus it is with the modern Audubon Society. As the story is usually told, Mrs. Hemenway was a clueless society matron adorned with bird skins and feathers until that January morning in 1896 when she sat down to read a bloodcurdling account of the killing of herons and egrets in Florida for the millinery trade. With this, she experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion and became a champion of conservation.

While compelling, this version of history overlooks the fact that Harriet and Augustus Hemenway were both longtime bird-watchers and lovers of the outdoors, and it seems unlikely that she was unaware of the controversy surrounding the millinery trade; Harper’s Bazaar and other women’s magazines had been writing about it for years, even as they carried advertisements for the newest fashion offerings.

It’s clear, however, that reading that fateful article finally galvanized the formidable Mrs. Hemenway to the sort of action hardwired into her by her family’s activist past, so she invited her cousin Minna B. Hall over for a cup of tea and a bout of strategizing. Together, they sifted through the Blue Book, the register of Boston society, and identified women of substance and influence who might be open to their message of bird protection. What followed was a series of meetings over tea. “We marked the ladies of fashion who would be likely to wear aigrettes on their hats or in their hair. We sent out circulars asking the women to join a society for the protection of birds, especially the egret. Some women joined and some who preferred to wear feathers would not join,” Miss Hall said.

Among the women they brought into the fold were Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, the first president of Radcliffe College and widow of the famed Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, and Sarah Orne Jewett, a popular novelist who had written a short story about a girl protecting a heron. “Although Harriet Hemenway knew where the strings of power lay, she preferred to work them behind the scenes,” writes Frank Graham Jr. in his superb history of the movement, The Audubon Ark. “She was aware that if a society to protect birds were to be successful, it would need to reach beyond her own circle.” And beyond her own gender; women lacked even the right to vote, and reality dictated that for the movement to have a prayer of success, there would have to be prominent men at its helm. At an organizational meeting that February, Hemenway convened not only her social peers, but an august representation of important male naturalists and civic leaders; at the next meeting, they chose William Brewster, founder of the Nuttall Club, as president of what they called the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

The new society borrowed freely from Grinnell’s model, not only in name but also in approach, such as the pledge not to harm birds, which children were asked to sign in order to become members. The group sold calendars and bird charts to raise money (though much of the initial support came quietly from the Hemenway fortune) and plowed it back into educational materials for schools, broadsides against wearing bird skins, and leaflets on how to attract birds, and the evils of allowing one’s cats to roam outside. A reprint of the essay “Woman’s Heartlessness,” by the well-known poet Celia Leighton Thaxter, was an especially effective tool.

The remade Audubon movement spread rapidly; in less than two years, there were 111 chapters across Massachusetts—and while men were on the masthead of the state organization, all but a handful of the local chapters were headed by women, which made up 80 percent of the society’s membership. Some of the state efforts were likewise run by women like Mabel Osgood Wright, a popular nature writer and colleague of Elliott Coues’s who headed the organization in Connecticut.

Such rapid success cannot be credited only to Harriet Hemenway’s tactical brilliance. Audubon was a product of its time, which was shaped to a great degree by the robust women’s club movement of the late nineteenth century, through which upper- and middle-class women exerted what they saw as their moral imperative to fight evils, from poverty to alcohol. The temperance drive was a tremendous motivating force, giving women for the first time a national political outlet and experience they could apply to other battles, including the fight for universal suffrage. When Hemenway and Hill began to spread their message about birds, it was to a tightly knit network of women activists already dealing with a myriad of topics—ground troops handy to the cause. The white, angelic egrets were “feathered innocents” (in the words of a General Federation of Garden Clubs resolution) and the fact that women themselves were driving the demand for plumes lent the effort special weight, because wearing feathers, it was believed, robbed women of the high moral ground on the many other issues of concern to them.

Bird-watching itself was a growing force. Florence Merriam wrote in 1898 of “this increasingly popular branch of nature study,” and gave examples of how many birds might be in one’s own neighborhood:

 

In a shrubby back yard in Chicago, close to one of the main thoroughfares, Mrs. Sara Hubbard has seen fifty-seven species in a year, her record for ten years being a hundred species. In an orchard in Brattleboro’, Vermont, Mrs. E.B. Davenport has noted seventy-nine species in a year . . . In the larger cities, cemeteries and parks offer rare opportunities for bird study. Dr. W.C. Braslin gives a list of seventy-six species for Prospect Park, Brooklyn, while Mr. H.E. Parkhurst has himself seen ninety-four species in Central Park, and as many as a hundred and forty-two have been recorded altogether.

 

Whatever the impetus, the new Audubon message spread like a grass fire. By 1900 there were associations in twenty states (Frank Chapman had given the inaugural address “Women as a Bird Enemy” to the Washington, DC, chapter, which hosted a feather-free millinery exhibit), and by 1901, thirty-six. In 1905 they came together to form the National Association of Audubon Societies.

Their inspired choice as the association’s first president was William Dutcher, an insurance agent and self-taught ornithologist who had worked with Grinnell to form the first, ill-fated Audubon society, and who was appointed chair of the AOU bird protection committee about the same time Harriet Hemenway founded Massachusetts Audubon. Dutcher was a dervish of activity on the protection front, helping to create new state Audubon chapters, lobbying for Bird Day celebrations, reinvigorating the AOU committee, and pushing that group hard in directions it was not always eager to go.

When the noted artist Abbot Thayer proposed paying for wardens to police the bird-nesting islands along the Atlantic coast, the idea was dismissed by most AOU members. “Where he should have received encouragement, i.e., among ornithologists, he met with discouragement, for he was told it was impossible to raise funds for the work,” Dutcher chided the group in its journal, The Auk. So Thayer put up much of the twelve thousand dollars himself, and Dutcher and the Audubon societies oversaw the work, which stretched from Maine to Florida. Some of the biggest remaining wading bird colonies lay in the watery wilderness of south Florida, a state that had just passed legal protection for the birds. The rookeries would be under the care of a former bird hunter named Guy Bradley, a new father to whom the $35-a-month warden’s salary seemed like a godsend. Instead, it was a death sentence; three years later, Bradley was gunned down by a plume hunter he was trying to arrest, becoming bird protection’s first martyr, and (thanks to the publicity over his murder and that of two more wardens, Columbus McLeod and L.P. Reeves, in 1908) propelling the movement forward.

Remarkable strides had been made. The first national success was the passage of the Lacey Act, in 1900, which made it a federal crime to sell in one state birds or game shot illegally in another—a move that, coupled with wider passage of the AOU model law, finally began to choke off market hunting. The Audubon societies were by no means the only force pressuring state and federal lawmakers on behalf of birds, but they were crucial, especially on the state level, battling hundreds of bills that would have rolled back or watered down newly enacted safeguards. They also held the AOU’s feet to the fire when it seemed ready to compromise with the milliners on only partial protection for birds. At last, in 1913—thanks to hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams from the public—Congress passed bills effectively shutting down the remaining feather industry and granting protection to all migratory birds; when a judge struck down the latter as unconstitutional, the measure was recast as a treaty with Great Britain (on behalf of Canada), then codified in 1918 as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which remains the bedrock federal protection for all native wild birds.

The more Dutcher and others pushed for bird protection, however, the less eager the AOU as a whole seemed about the whole topic. Concerned that legislation would deprive scientists of the right to collect birds and eggs as they saw fit, many in the organization grew decidedly cool to the subject. This sometimes boiled over into the kind of open, sneering hostility that AOU president Charles Cory had revealed in his “I don’t protect birds” comment, and Coues’s carping about overly sentimental “Audubonians.”

Dutcher, though, certainly saw the potential force of the Audubon movement, and Grinnell gave it his blessing, serving as a trustee for the new association. Teddy Roosevelt, then governor of New York, lent his support: “I do not understand how any man or woman who really loves nature can fail to try to exert all influence in support of such objects as those of the Audubon Society,” he wrote to Chapman, who published the letter in his newly founded Bird-Lore, the “Official Organ of the Audubon Societies.” The magazine’s motto was “A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.”

Roosevelt wasn’t the only notable in the pages of Bird-Lore, which eventually became today’s Audubon magazine; the first several issues, beginning in February 1899, featured John Burroughs writing about warbler migration, articles for children by Florence Merriam Bailey, a poem about song sparrows by Ernest Thompson Seton, and an article on caring for cage birds by Olive Thorne Miller that urged readers—if they must keep a bird—to treat it “as if he were a sentient being, instead of a piece of furniture.” (Not everyone was impressed by the new publication. Coues, terminally ill and even crankier than usual, wrote in his competing journal, The Osprey, that with Bird-Lore, Chapman was “toying with ornithology in amateurish fashion, and will have to guard against dilettantism, if he would not degenerate into mere prettiness or virtuosity.”)

The charge of sentimentality carried some validity; a lot of what was being written about birds in the popular press, especially for women’s publications, was hopelessly mawkish. But many of the women writing for Bird-Lore, like Florence Bailey, Mabel Wright, and Cordelia Stanwood—women who were the public face of the Audubon movement—were generally clear-eyed pragmatists about wild birds, although Wright often heavily anthropomorphized her subjects, and she (like Seton) occasionally crossed the line into fiction with what Burroughs and Roosevelt attacked as “nature-faking.”

Cordelia Stanwood’s story is an especially fascinating, if somber, one. Born to an old Maine family, she worked as a schoolteacher and principal until in 1904, at age thirty-nine, she suffered a nervous breakdown and retreated to her family’s farm near Mount Desert Island, where she remained for the rest of her long life. Odd and reclusive, prone to off-putting outbursts, she nevertheless became one of the most respected amateur ornithologists of the early twentieth century, and one of the first to make good use of photography, toting a heavy Eastman glass-plate camera and tripod through the boggy woods to document the nests of thrushes, warblers, and other northern birds. Chapman gave her much encouragement and direction, and in turn she wrote articles for lay readers in Bird-Lore, while her meticulous field observations—relayed through long correspondence with Chapman, Burroughs, Edward Forbush, and other prominent naturalists—were particularly critical to understanding the life histories of many birds. But she struggled for years to make a living for herself, braiding rugs and weaving baskets to help make ends meet. “Too proud to accept help from anyone, even her siblings, she was reduced in her old age to selling greeting cards from door to door,” notes Marcia Bonta in her history of women naturalists.

Other women who were not as directly linked with Audubon, but who propelled nature study to the national forefront, include Anna Botsford Comstock, a writer and leading proponent of nature education, Gene Stratton-Porter, who wrote the Limberlost books, and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, a friend of Florence Bailey’s from Smith College, who wrote a number of bird-study books before shifting her attention to anthropological work in her native Maine.

But easily the most important—and visible—figure in the early Audubon movement was Mabel Osgood Wright, who served as Chapman’s associate editor at Bird-Lore and wrote voluminously on birds and nature, while turning her home in Connecticut, which she named Birdcraft after her best-known book, into a haven for wildlife. Wright, who was among the first women elected to AOU membership, was a potent force on behalf of Audubon, founding the Connecticut state chapter and, after the national association was formed in 1905, serving on the association’s board for the next twenty-three years.

Photos of Mrs. Wright show a no-nonsense woman with a firm jaw and a fashionable (though assuredly bird-free) bonnet. Her husband was an Englishman, James Wright, who dealt in rare books. For so public a woman, relatively little is known about her personal life; even her autobiography is less revealing than one would hope, though it appears her father, an Episcopal priest, encouraged her interest in nature. “How or why Wright learned so much about birds or why she felt compelled to fight for their protection is not known,” shrugs Deborah Strom in her survey of important female bird writers. “It is not even clear whether Wright had children, although it seems unlikely that she did.”

Wright was a confidant of most of the leading ornithologists of her day, but where their focus was scientific, she understood the importance of reaching as wide an audience as possible, especially children. Wright’s 1907 book, Citizen Bird, cowritten with Elliott Coues, features three children: Nat, his sister (nicknamed Dodo, but clearly the brighter of the two), and their country-bumpkin friend Rap. Kindly old Doctor Hunter teaches them about the songbirds surrounding their farm, and the patriotic importance of protecting the Sky Sweepers, Wise Watchers, and Weed Warriors, as he styles some of the groups of birds. It was economic ornithology again, this time for kids. “Every time you children deny yourselves the pleasure of taking an egg from a nest, or think to spread a little food for hungry birds,” he tells them, “you are adding to the food supply of your country . . . So we must learn to love and protect this feathered neighbor of ours, who works for his own living as well as ours, pays his rent and taxes, and gives, besides, free concerts to the public daily. He certainly deserves the name Citizen Bird.”

 

The most visible figure in the early Audubon movement was Mabel Osgood Wright. A protégé of Elliott Coues, the author of bestselling books on birds, and the founder of the Connecticut Audubon chapter, she was among the first women elected to AOU membership.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

 

In much of the bird writing in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there is a marked but understandable overreaching to make almost every species of bird appear valuable to humans. Wright and Coues credit the rose-breasted grosbeak with “earning his living helping farmers clear their fields of potatobugs,” even though the grosbeak is a canopy species rarely seen in crop fields, while the eastern kingbird is “a good friend to horses and cattle, because he kills the terrible gadflies. Eats a little fruit, but chiefly wild varieties, and only now and then a bee.” (At the time, beekeepers tended to shoot kingbirds on sight, believing them a threat to their hives.) T. Gilbert Pearson, who succeeded Dutcher as Audubon’s president after the latter was disabled by a stroke, felt compelled to burnish even the ivory-billed woodpecker’s credentials: “An analysis of the food . . . indicates that this species, were it not for its small numbers, might be of considerable economic value. The insects which form the animal portion of its food are mostly of an injurious nature.”

Not only were birds generally portrayed in the most favorable economic light, they were also held up as moral symbols. This was best exemplified by Gene Stratton-Porter, whose Limberlost novels were wildly popular around World War I. Stratton-Porter centered much of her writing in her beloved Limberlost swamp of Indiana, populating the stories with the birds, insects, and creatures she studied there. “Porter, a quintessential Victorian, viewed the preordained habits of the animals she studied as analogs for human family life,” write Felton Gibbons and Deborah Strom. “In nature study she found the keys to defining wholesome Christian values. She offended no one and pleased everyone—educators, religious leaders, and her young readers.” It was a recipe the public craved; while critics today dismiss her treacly, up-by-the-bootstraps plots, her books sold more than ten million copies in her lifetime.

Citizen Bird also gave its readers a dose of morality that makes a modern birder cringe—not only making the case for “good citizens” like swallows and seed-eating sparrows, but condemning as “really bad cannibals” bird-eating raptors like goshawks and sharp-shinned hawks. Such good bird/bad bird judgments were ubiquitous in the first half of the twentieth century, from backyard birders to the most prominent scientists, and the most common victims of this bias were raptors.

“From the economic standpoint only a few birds . . . may be said to be thoroughly undesirable,” wrote ornithologist George Miksch Sutton in 1928. “The Goshawk is a savage destroyer of small game and poultry. His smaller cousins, the Sharp-shinned Hawk and Cooper’s Hawk, are killers. The Great Horned Owl is destructive at times. Other hawks and owls, the Crow, Kingfisher, Starling, and other species have some destructive or undesirable habits, but they are not altogether bad.”

One of the more remarkable vendettas pursued against “bad” birds was that of Althea Sherman, an idiosyncratic midwesterner who in the 1890s gave up teaching in favor of ornithology when she returned home to Iowa to tend to her aging parents. Over the years, she spent countless hours hunched in blinds, observing the lives of birds on her farm, compiling extraordinarily detailed life history accounts for many species, including chimney swifts that she lured to a specially constructed tower peppered with peepholes through which she could observe the inhabitants. For her work, she was the fourth woman elected to the AOU.

But along the way, Sherman drew some very firm conclusions about which species deserved her hospitality. After discovering that the screech-owls and American kestrels she’d been studying were eating songbirds (no more than a fifth of their diet, but still) she declared them aves non grata. But her greatest venom was directed at the house wrens she had once attracted. In March 1925 she published a paper in The Wilson Bulletin titled “Down with the House Wren Boxes,” and she let fly with both barrels. The house wren was, she charged, “a felon . . . on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors,” and she and others had long witnessed its “criminal character,” in the way wrens will toss out the eggs of other cavity-nesting species, like bluebirds or tree swallows. She railed against those who encouraged house wrens, saying they act “precisely like the parents of vicious children, refusing to believe the evil things their darlings do.”

“Capital punishment has not been demanded, though if no steps are taken to stop his unrestricted breeding it is safe to predict that the time will come when all true bird lovers will wring his neck as cheerfully as they now wring the neck of the pestiferous English Sparrow,” she predicted.

Sherman was correct in charging that house wrens will destroy the eggs, and occupy the nest boxes, of other species, but her wholesale attack was beyond the pale. In the next issue of the journal, the editor’s note acknowledged the receipt of many letters, both of protest and support, and said the ball was now in the court of the wren defenders: “The main question right now is the determination of the House Wren’s status as a good or bad citizen. Let us endeavor to keep an open mind; and above all, let us be willing to know the facts, even though we may choose to exercise a bit of sentiment in our personal attitude toward this bird.” Sherman pressed the attack, a few months later publishing a second article detailing, as she said, “additional evidence of the viciousness of this species” and attacking “the contemptuous leering of incredulity” that had met her original remarks.

Sherman’s comments had so churned the birding waters that Witmer Stone, the editor of the competing journal The Auk, felt compelled to editorialize on the bird’s behalf. “The Wren’s methods are no worse than the parasitic habits of the Cowbird, the predacious habits of certain Hawks and Owls or the egg destroying propensities of the Blue Jay, and why have not these birds a perfect right to practice their living in the way that nature has ordained that they should? The Wren is no more a ‘felon’ for destroying the nest of a bluebird than is a Flicker for destroying a nest of ants.”

If the whole wren brouhaha seems a little farcical today, such attitudes had a tremendous impact on bird conservation. In the view of even leading conservationists, not all birds were created equal. Songbirds—eaters of insects and weed seeds, lovely to see and lovelier to hear—were at the apex, along with game species; nest predators like jays were well below the salt.

It was especially hard to muster support for raptors, although by the 1920s and 1930s, a few farsighted conservationists were battling the prevailing wisdom about “bad birds” and lobbying for the protection of birds of prey as well. One of the most important was a strong-willed New Yorker named Rosalie Barrow Edge, whose relationship with Audubon was a rocky one. It says a lot about Mrs. Edge by knowing that Audubon president T. Gilbert Pearson called her “a common scold”—and that she considered it a compliment.

Audubon had grown beyond anything Harriet Hemenway might have imagined. By the end of the 1920s, there were 125 state and local associations, but most of the power was concentrated in the national board and its staff, led by Pearson.^* Almost five million schoolchildren across the country had been exposed to nature through the Junior Audubon program (including a boy in Jamestown, New York, named Roger Tory Peterson), and Audubon was beginning to assemble a network of sanctuaries, starting with the enormous Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary, in Louisiana.

The organization had also become, in the eyes of many conservationists, overly bureaucratic and cautious, too polite to fight a down-and-dirty battle when the need arose, and altogether too cozy with munitions manufacturers and other advocates of extremely liberal laws for waterfowl hunting, including the use of bait, live decoys, and bag limits of up to twenty-five ducks a day. (After all, many of its original leaders had themselves been avid sportsmen, who loathed the plume trade but felt that waterfowl hunting was harmless.) When it became known that the society was profiting from muskrat trapping on its Rainey Sanctuary (the royalties from pelt sales were coyly marked as “rental” income on the balance sheets), the critics howled even louder, even though the sanctuary managers believed muskrat control was necessary to protect the marsh grasses on which migrant geese fed.

The greatest critic of all was Edge, a New York socialite and battle-scarred veteran of the suffrage movement, who in the 1920s took up birding in Central Park following the collapse of her marriage. Among the friends she made was Dr. Willard Van Name, a zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History. On vacation in Paris in 1929, going through her mail from home, the fifty-two-year-old Edge found a pamphlet from Dr. Van Name titled “A Crisis in Conservation,” charging that Audubon was derelict in its responsibility to birds, especially waterfowl. It electrified Mrs. Edge, and she acted with characteristic force. Back in New York she, Van Name, and one or two others formed what they called the Emergency Conservation Committee, and launched a frontal assault on the National Association of Audubon Societies.

It was a nasty fight; in order to distribute Van Name’s pamphlet to all Audubon members, Edge and the committee successfully sued for the organization’s mailing list, and the court case generated wide and unpleasant publicity for Audubon. Edge and her supporters mounted a three-year proxy fight to take control of the Audubon board, and while they lost, all the negative publicity took a serious toll, with membership falling by 60 percent. In the end, Pearson was forced to resign as president and many of the changes Edge and the ECC pushed were adopted, including an end to trapping on the Rainey sanctuary. Crowed journalist Irving Brandt, an ECC member, “At last a miracle, physiologically impossible, was achieved in the field of morality—the National Audubon Society recovered its virginity.” In the words of Audubon historian Frank Graham Jr., “Rosalie Edge sailed almost without warning into the very center of the conservation establishment and shook it by the scruff of its neck as no one has before or since.”

Edge has been called one of the most important—and overlooked—forces in American conservation. She and the ECC were critical in the creation of Kings Canyon National Park and the enlargement of Yosemite, in California, the protection of western big game, and finally achieving national park status for Olympic National Monument, in Washington, which had been whittled down to barely half its original size by giveaways to the timber industry. But her most notable achievement came, again, through a failure of National Audubon—one that had much to do with the good bird/bad bird dichotomy of the 1930s.

In 1928 George Miksch Sutton—later famous as an ornithologist and bird artist, but then a biologist for the state of Pennsylvania—published a brief article in The Wilson Bulletin about a curious choke point in hawk migration along the Kittatinny Ridge, the front range of the Appalachians in the eastern half of that state. Hawks migrated past there in great numbers, he reported, and gunners shot them from an old sand mine on a high promontory. In 1931 Sutton published another paper, this time about the large number of goshawks turned in for bounty from the site.

That next autumn, a young camera shop owner from Philadelphia named Richard Pough decided to see for himself—and when he climbed to the ridgetop, he was shocked by the carnage. Returning several times that fall, Pough, his brother, and a few friends gathered rank after rank of dead hawks, falcons, and eagles from the woods below the shooting stand, laid them in morbid rows and photographed them. He published a letter in Bird-Lore about the slaughter, worked through the Hawk and Owl Society he helped form, even tried to interest the Lord’s Day Alliance in the issue of Sunday shooting—anything to stop the killing.

 

When National Audubon did nothing to stop the slaughter of migrant hawks in the Appalachians, Rosalie Edge stepped in, founding Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the first refuge in the world for raptors. Mrs. Edge was also instrumental in the creation of other natural areas, including Olympic National Park.

Courtesy of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary

 

Pough (who would later go on to found the Nature Conservancy) finally had a chance to make his case to a number of national conservation leaders, including the ECC and Audubon, which were then at each other’s throats. The meeting ended, Mrs. Edge recalled, with the understanding that Audubon would buy the ridgetop, which was for sale for back taxes. But nothing happened for another year. Unbeknownst to conservationists, a local gun club was debating whether to buy the mountain themselves as a hawk-shooting preserve. Finally, Rosalie Edge could wait no longer. In June 1934 she met Pough in Pennsylvania and agreed the ECC would lease two square miles of the ridge for five hundred dollars, with an option to buy the rest for three thousand more. J. A. Baker, Audubon’s headstrong new director, moved belatedly to try to take over the lease and assume control of the sanctuary, but Mrs. Edge would have none of it. Hiring a tough young ornithologist from Massachusetts named Maurice Broun as curator/warden, she created Hawk Mountain Sanctuary as an independent, private conservation organization.

Today Hawk Mountain is one of the most important institutions in the world for raptor research and protection, but in the early years, simply keeping the migrant birds safe was a dicey proposition. With Broun on the promontory counting the passing birds, it usually fell to his petite wife, Irma, to intercept the arriving gunners, mostly coal miners and Pennsylvania Dutch farmers from the surrounding communities. All were armed, many had been drinking, and most were unhappy, to say the least, about the change in fortunes on the mountain. But private property was something these tough men understood, and angry words aside, conflicts were few.

Rosalie Edge and the ECC bought the ridgetop to protect the hawks from harm, but once the sanctuary was open, an unexpected thing occurred. Visitors started streaming in, often traveling from Philadelphia or New York to see the migration, bumping up the rutted mountain road and climbing the last mile or so to the lookout. They came by the dozens, then the hundreds, and soon the thousands. Weekends were so busy that cars lined the narrow road. Broun was reporting fifteen thousand or more raptors each fall, and not everyone believed him; his reports of dozens of golden eagles each year—a western bird almost unknown in the East—brought scoffs and jeers, so much so that Broun took to charging five dollars for each eagle he showed to skeptics. To support the sanctuary, the Brouns collected a two-dollar annual fee. One day some years later, Mrs. Edge opened a letter from Gilbert Pearson; a check for two dollars fluttered out. Would she enroll him as a member of Hawk Mountain, he asked? The hatchet was buried.

 

BIRD-WATCHING WASN’T popular only at Hawk Mountain. In the previous fifty years, birding and nature study had blossomed across North America; John Burroughs’s books sold more than a million copies, while the books of Ernest Thompson Seton—despite “nature-faking” charges—sold more than two and a half million. When Mabel Osgood Wright’s Birdcraft entered its ninth edition, in 1936, she could look back with justifiable satisfaction at the changes she’d seen.

 

More than twenty years ago this simple record was first sent forth . . . Since then the scene has changed, and a great awakening to the value and beauty of bird life has swept the land. The Audubon movement has not only stimulated knowledge by its fine biographical bird leaflets adequately illustrated, issued by The National Association, but this knowledge has created the general desire to protect the bird.

Not only is the wild bird conceded to be an inheritance of the people, but the people have constituted themselves the trustees of its liberty.

 

In the years between world wars, more and more people were taking to the field, despite the desperate economy and ominous political news. The increasing availability of European optics made it easier to see birds, and the publication of the first truly useful field guides made it at last possible for beginners to identify what they were seeing. Frank Chapman’s idea for an annual Christmas Bird Count was growing by leaps and bounds; from the original twenty-five counts in 1900, the event had expanded to almost two hundred and fifty sites by 1940, with thousands taking part, and their results being printed in Audubon Field Notes. Bird-watching was becoming less an oddity and much more of a mainstream activity. Bird clubs were popping up in many urban areas; the trend that began with the Nuttall Club, and with the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club in Philadelphia in 1890, accelerated in the years around World War I. Sometimes these morphed into Audubon chapters, with an emphasis on education and preservation, while others (like the venerable DVOC) remained focused on research and field birding.^*

One of the enduring myths about modern bird study is that professional ornithology and recreational birding split asunder in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, never the twain to meet. As with most folklore, there is a kernel of truth to this; there was a lot of open hostility in those days, over divisive issues like specimen collecting, and the snobbery that often afflicts entrenched academics when laymen encroach upon their field of expertise. But the fact is that the chasm between birders and academic ornithologists has never been as deep or as permanent as many believe; ornithology remains one of the branches of science most enriched by the work of dedicated amateurs, and it’s hard to find a full-time ornithologist who isn’t also a recreational birder. With the rise of so-called citizen-science in the past thirty years, the line has become even blurrier, with breeding-bird surveys, atlases, migration counts, and a host of other projects, designed by scientists but executed by millions of birders who combine sport and research every time they head for the woods.

But there were certainly some testy moments when things were still sorting themselves out. The biggest headache of all, from the professionals’ perspective, was the “opera-glass observers” showing up at club meetings and reporting rarities based not on a specimen in the hand, which anyone could examine or challenge, but on sight records.

It’s the sort of thing that happens at every monthly bird club and Audubon chapter meeting across the country. The president dispenses with the bits of business—field trip reports, a call for volunteers to help with the weekend birdseed sale—while the evening speaker is fussing with the projector. And then comes the question: “So, who has any sightings to report?”

One after another, members rise to tell what they’ve been seeing, from the banal to the breathtaking. The audience is usually attentive, because you never know what’s going to emerge, and a birder who’s a good showman knows how to play the audience, waiting for the commonplace stuff—reports of cardinals and song sparrows at backyard feeders—to die down, then casually dropping a bombshell that will get everyone murmuring.

But if the report seems to be coming from out of left field—a bird wildly out of range or season, especially one reported by a beginner or someone whose credibility is in doubt—then glances are exchanged among the elders of the tribe; eyebrows are lifted, lips are pursed, heads are shaken ever so slightly. The graybeards start asking questions—politely, of the “Any chance it was a thus-and-such?” variety—but the more surprising the report, the more vigorous the grilling. Some clubs are notorious for the intensity of their inquisitions, and take pride in their rigor. That’s because sightings are the heart and soul of modern birding, central to the whole business, and the only way the clan can determine if the observation is valid is to poke and prod until the observer is sore.

That’s such an accepted part of birding today that it’s hard to imagine the tectonic mental shift it required back in the days of shotguns and specimens. With so many novices getting into birds, filling the minutes of their local bird clubs with reports of their sightings, many of the scientists grumped and harrumphed to one another about how far the ornithological world had fallen. As early as 1883, the Nuttall Club’s Bulletin was slamming the idea: “It is to be hoped . . . the observations made by those who have ‘become acquainted’ with birds in this way will never be put into print as a contribution to ornithology.”

Yet try as hard as they might, shotgun ornithologists couldn’t keep sight records out of the game. More than fifty years after the Nuttall Club complaint, Witmer Stone—generally a supporter of the wave of new amateurs coming into ornithology—objected that bird-watchers armed with new field guides were muddying the water with all sorts of dubious records. He cited an “olive-sided flycatcher” reported in March, sitting by a springhouse and wagging a tail—a bird that, as all of Stone’s readers knew, was certainly just a run-of-the-mill eastern phoebe. Even worse, Stone said, “is the element of competition which naturally creeps in.” During a Christmas Bird Count, “Even the most careful individual observer will, more or less unconsciously, give a record the benefit of a doubt if it adds one more species to his team score.” In the end, Stone said, “The present day arguments on the possibility of identifying closely related species in the field is of no scientific consequence.”

If they were being honest, though, even the most specimen-oriented ornithologists admitted that field glasses provided a window on birdlife, especially behavior, that a shotgun and stuffed skin never could. With an army of eager bird-lovers now found the length and breadth of the continent, it fell to a single (and singularly driven) man to harness their enthusiasm and newfound skills to spectacular ends—the Smithsonian Institution’s twenty-one-volume series Life Histories of North American Birds, which stands as one of the most striking achievements of ornithology.

Where the focus of bird study had once been on collecting, as a means of simply sorting out what species were what (and where they were found), by the end of the nineteenth century there was a growing emphasis on how birds lived—their diet, courtship and nesting behaviors, migrations, and more. The idea of a single resource compiling life history information dated back to Spencer Baird in the 1850s, but not until 1892 did Charles Bendire—no longer being chased through the Arizona desert by Apache but now curator of the Smithsonian’s egg collection—publish the first of an expected six volumes on the subject.

Bendire was an oologist, and his book, not unexpectedly, focused heavily on nests and eggs, with lavish color plates of game bird, owl, and hawk eggs. But Bendire went beyond a narrow oology viewpoint to report on the lives of the birds themselves. A second volume appeared in 1895, but two years later Bendire, just sixty, died of kidney disease, leaving the great work unfinished. An egg collector named William Ralph took over, but he died in 1907 without publishing anything further. That was when the unusually persistent Arthur Cleveland Bent stepped into the breach.

Born in 1866, in eastern Massachusetts, Cleveland Bent was a frail and sickly child whose father began taking him on long outdoor excursions to build his health. It worked; a collegiate boxing career followed, and throughout his long life, Bent chopped wood and lifted weights almost daily to stay in shape. The boy became hooked on birds and, with his friends, began collecting skins and eggs, but after he graduated from Harvard he went into business, eventually becoming a successful manufacturing and public utility tycoon.

But he never lost his interest in birds, a passion that once almost cost him his life. In 1896, he scrambled up a huge, dead oak tree near his home, aiming to collect the eggs of a pair of barred owls nesting in a deep cavity. He used no safety harness and strapped no climbing irons to his feet, but merely shinnied up the tall trunk to the hole—as he had done on countless occasions.

But this time, when Bent reached into the opening for the eggs, he slipped and fell, his arm jamming itself into the narrow cleft at the bottom of the owls’ hole. He was stuck, in excruciating pain, and a long way from help. Before somehow wrenching free and plummeting to the ground—a drop that should have killed or crippled him—he hung there for twenty-five agonizing minutes. This is not an estimate; Bent could see the village clock in the distance, and meticulous to the bone, he carefully noted the duration of his ordeal, which left him with a permanent tremor in his right hand.

Not long after, he began submitting articles to the ornithological journals, although he didn’t get serious about ornithology until he started to ease out of business in his mid-forties, with comfortable means that permitted him to crisscross North America from Newfoundland to the Aleutians. His collection eventually reached thirty thousand eggs (now in the Smithsonian), and although he was an amateur, he later rose to become the president of the AOU. He was also one of the first people Harriet Hemenway approached when she founded Massachusetts Audubon, not long after Bent suffered his climbing accident.

After Bendire’s death, several of Bent’s associates urged him to take up the task of completing the life history series. It was 1910; he was in his mid-forties, still managing many of his business ventures, and over the previous few years, he’d begun to travel widely. No doubt he recognized that finishing Bendire’s series would crimp his style, but with his old Nuttall Club friend Charles Batchelder pushing him, he agreed to complete the six-volume set as Bendire had originally planned. Once he dove in, though, Bent realized he would have to start essentially from scratch, and he told his friends, “It will be my life work.” He was right about that. He was then forty-four years old, and over the next forty-four years he produced nineteen volumes, with an additional two in the later stages of preparation at the time of his death, in 1954. And Bent, made comfortable by his success in business, never accepted a dime in salary from the Smithsonian for all his work.

It was a monumental undertaking, not only in terms of the sheer mass of information, but how he obtained it. Bent combed the scientific literature, of course, quoting experts from Wilson and Audubon to the leading ornithologists of the day, and he also included much of his own scholarship, including his pioneering observations of Bicknell’s thrush. But he also became the clucking, chiding mother hen to a network of more than eight hundred correspondents—many of them highly skilled amateur ornithologists like himself—scattered from the Arctic to the tropics, from the halls of science to the most remote outposts imaginable. The observations of a clerk at a Hudson’s Bay Co. fur trading post in northern Canada carried as much weight as those of the most eminent professor.

Bent’s correspondents sent him letters detailing the minutiae of avian life, from the number of eggs in a great-horned-owl nest near Dried Meat Lake, Alberta, (three) to descriptions of the call of the elegant trogon in Arizona (“almost like the chattering of our gray squirrel”) to the habits of the yellow-rumped warbler on its wintering grounds in Costa Rica. The introduction to every volume carried the same put-up-or-shut-up message:

 

The reader is reminded again that this is a cooperative work; if he fails to find in these volumes anything that he knows about the birds, he can blame himself for not having sent the information to

 

—The Author.

 

It took Bent nine years, until 1919, to produce the first volume, covering diving birds, but after that, a new volume—ranging from three hundred to more than six hundred pages each—was published every few years. The last came out in 1965. Comprising 9,500 pages of text, the Life Histories were at once enormously informative and immensely readable, and they remain incredibly relevant today; no other single resource contains as much sheer in formation on the continent’s birds, and Bent’s series is still one of the most-cited works of ornithological literature.^*

While the pooh-bahs of ornithology were grousing about amateurs and their damnable sight records, ornithology had changed forever around them. The shift from specimens to observation—from the dead bird to the living one—was a gradual but inexorable process, and one that was being driven both by intense birders and a new crop of behavior-and evolution-focused scientists.

Perhaps no one in the professional community did more to smooth the way for this new manifestation of bird study than Ludlow Griscom. A New York—born ornithologist who started his career working under Frank Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History, and then moved to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Griscom had been fascinated by the challenges of field identification all his life. As a boy, he’d been deeply embarrassed when he reported a rare Bicknell’s thrush at a meeting of the stuffy old Linnaean Society. “The resultant storm of criticism rendered me practically speechless,” he recalled. “Then and there I planned to do my best to become a reliable observer and to investigate the scientific possibilities of sight identification.”

And he did. An oft-told story claims that one of the old-school shotgun ornithologists challenged Griscom to identify a warbler high in the treetops. A female Cape May, the young man said—a gutsy call, because this is a notoriously tricky bird to identify. Bang. The warbler falls; it is a Cape May. And that one? Bang—another correct identification. And bang, another, until at last the doubting Thomas is convinced.

True? The story was told by one of Griscom’s own students, so it might well be, but the factuality of it almost doesn’t matter; the story has been told so often because it boils down the emergence of modern birding, with its reliance on the binocular instead of the gun, into a simple parable—the dawn of a new age in a single morning in Central Park, instead of the protracted, messy, far more complex process it actually was, taking more than fifty years.

But in many ways, Griscom was the fulcrum of the shift. His master’s thesis in 1915 was a treatise on duck identification, and in the decades to follow, he proselytized a new, cutting-edge approach to birding, one that entailed looking for just the most important field marks—not the laundry list of minute physical description found in most bird books of the day, but the handful of distinguishing characteristics that separated one species from another, like wing bars, eye stripes, or a phoebe’s wagging tail. Griscom, more than anyone else, proved that it was possible to coax an identification from a distant bird using nothing more than trained eyes and ears, and a knowledge of field marks. He and his friends were also among those who more or less invented the notion of birding as a competitive sport—pitting one birder’s list against another’s, or setting a birder against him- or herself, trying to better previous marks.

While he acknowledged the problem with sloppy identification and inaccurate sight records, Griscom not surprisingly viewed the explosion in the popularity of birding as an enormous plus for ornithology.

 

With the great growth in recent years of interest in bird-study, there has undoubtedly been an increase in poor sight-records and misidentifications . . . It is true that the modern flood of sight records makes the writing of a local avifauna a far more complex and difficult task than the old-fashioned ones, based on the comparatively small number of birds shot. But it is also true that the modern avifauna is far more complete, detailed, and accurate than the old. For every poor record there are at least fifty good ones, which have greatly extended our detailed knowledge of birds in every State of the Union. If scientists can justly complain of their troubles, when science becomes too popular, let them at least remember, that like everybody else they cannot get something for nothing. And what they have got is the assistance of the enthusiastic, reliable amateur.

 

When Griscom wrote of “enthusiastic, reliable amateurs,” he might have had in mind a band of eight or nine eager teenagers from the Bronx, who treated him as something of a birding god, shadowing his footsteps, learning his field methods, even aping his inflections of speech and how he parted his hair. They called themselves the Bronx County Bird Club, and they came together in the mid-1920s, attending meetings of the Linnaean Society at the American Museum of Natural History, where Griscom was a curator.

The Bronx club was a tight-knit group, but they made room for one more fellow—a shy, skinny bird nut from southwestern New York, whom they met in 1925 when the seventeen-year-old visitor attended an AOU meeting at the museum. The boy moved to the city two years later, to start art school, and became the first non-Bronx member of the BCBC. He stayed three years, working when he had to, birding when he could, absorbing everything Griscom and the other hotshot New York birders had to teach. When he left for Boston in 1931, it was with all the ingredients he needed to revolutionize birding—for the young man was Roger Tory Peterson, and he had an idea for a new kind of bird book.