“The Feather Wars
By James H. McCommons
St. Martin's, 416 pages, $33
Turns out that "inexhaustible" abundance is not all it's cracked up to be. Take the passenger pigeon. In 1860 a flock 1 mile wide and 300 miles long passed over Fort Mississauga on Lake Ontario. For 14 hours, as James McCommons notes in "The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds," there was a continuous sound of thunder and buffeting winds created by hundreds of millions of snapping wings. The sun was eclipsed, horses were spooked and the pious dropped to their knees.
Passenger pigeons in North America numbered 3 billion at the time, a quarter of all birds in the sky. There was general agreement that the bounty was endless. Farmers gorged their hogs on nesting grounds. Pigeons were plowed into fields as fertilizer. On windy days, children knocked down low-flying birds with sticks. Market hunters used shotguns, nets and traps to fill traincars with passenger pigeons -- as well as robins, woodpeckers, blackbirds and orioles. Game was cheap protein for immigrants who swelled cities.
By 1900, however, the passenger pigeon was functionally extinct. The last one, Martha, died in a zoo in 1914. I've seen her at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In death, she is spectacularly unremarkable, the last bird you'd seek out in the display case.
We're suffering a similar bird crisis today, "a slow-motion extinction trend." The windows of our homes and offices kill a billion birds a year. Cats, domestic and feral, together take another billion. The good news, Mr. McCommons argues, is that we've been here before and -- through unlikely coalitions of amateur naturalists, clubwomen and conservationists -- recognized birds as a resource that needed protection.
Not that we saved them all. Along with the passenger pigeon we exterminated the great auk, the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck and the ivory-billed woodpecker. But we also saved species that were headed for oblivion, including the wild turkey, the wood duck, the bald eagle and -- that bane of airports and golf courses everywhere -- the Canada goose. If we did it once, we can do it again. It's not too late to save the whooping crane, the red-cockaded woodpecker, the piping plover or any of the other 86 birds on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's list of endangered and threatened American birds. As Bob Dylan sings, "it's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there."
The 19th century was the age of the "shotgun ornithologist," the enthusiast who preferred his birds in the hand. To be taken seriously, a birdman needed a large collection of taxidermied birds, skins and eggs. Fifty to 100 of every species was considered a good start. One prominent enthusiast had 40,000 skins, almost certainly preserved with arsenic.
This was also when a mania for natural-history collection swept the nation. Oologists, the fancy name for egg collectors, went to especially drastic lengths. In 1872 Maj. Charles Bendire was leading a patrol against Apaches near what is now Tucson, Ariz., when he saw the nest of a zone-tailed hawk. He approached, climbed the cottonwood tree and snatched a single pale-blue egg. The cries of the objecting parents alerted an Apache band 80 yards away, who fired on the major. With the Apaches in pursuit, Bendire placed the egg in his mouth and fled back to his troops. The soldiers eventually pried open his jaw and removed the egg, intact, breaking one of the major's teeth in the process. That he didn't just crush the egg and spit it out is testament either to his dedication or his madness.
Killing every animal you saw was, until the early 20th century, just what you did. Excursion boats in Florida passed out shotguns so passengers could blaze away at anything that flew. On the Chesapeake Bay, market hunters favored punt guns -- cannons weighing up to 200 pounds, with barrels made from boiler pipe -- that could bring down 100 ducks with one shot. A favorite tactic was to slip into a flock of sleeping birds in a "sneak" boat and slap its sides just before the shot to get the birds' heads up.
Far from the "wastelands" where these wading birds lived, urban women adorned their hats with showy feathers as marks of status. Egret feathers commanded double their weight in gold. When Frank Chapman, who would one day become chief curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, took his "sidewalk survey" on a Manhattan street in 1886, he noted that more than 500 out of the 700 ladies' hats he saw featured bird feathers, 40 species in all.
By the 1920s, the culture had changed. That endless abundance wasn't so endless -- once the cry of extreme outliers -- gained wide acceptance. Fashion became more streamlined and practical as women entered the workforce. Hunters began observing bag limits. Wardens were paid and given the power to arrest violators. Theodore Roosevelt established 52 bird refuges, five national parks and 150 national forests.
The simplest changes the author recommends now are putting decals -- all but invisible to us but obvious to birds -- on windows and not letting your cat venture out unsupervised. Those two steps alone would save billions of birds.
Mr. McCommons is a professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University and the author of "Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service" (2009). He is a solid writer with an encyclopedic grasp of his subject. He occasionally overburdens the reader with minutiae of political and organizational rivalries and is more workman than stylist. But society's realization that birds were a finite resource and worth saving makes for a hell of a story.
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Mr. Heavey is the editor at large of Field & Stream magazine.” [1]
1. Extinction And Revival. Heavey, Bill. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 Mar 2026: A13.
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