00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. Okay, everybody, we’re joined today by author James mccommons. We’re gonna talk about how America uh nearly wiped itself out of dozens of species of birds during the during what we can think of as the dark days of American conservation, lost several of those birds to extinction, and then brought a great many of them back from the brink of extinction. The name of the name of his book is The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds. James mccommons is an emeritus does emeredis when you’re an emeritus professor. That means you’re a former professor, right but in good standing.
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Speaker 2: But in good standing, So what.
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Speaker 1: Would you do, like give me something you would do to not be just to be able to be that you were a former professor, not an emeritus professor.
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Speaker 2: Well, you have to ask for it first, and you yeah, you have to ask for it, ask to go through a committee and before they granted to you.
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Speaker 1: Oh so it’s like a gift.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, yeah, it’s an honor.
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Speaker 1: It’s an honor to be an emeritus professor.
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Speaker 2: Right and then oftentimes, particularly at a research based institution, you get to keep your office, you know, you get to keep a lot of the grad students and you get to continue your work.
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Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, and then sometimes you see professor emeritus. Well I don’t know, you don’t know about that, Okay, either way, he’s an emeritus professor at get This, Northern Michigan University and Marquette where he taught journalism, journalism and nature writing for twenty years. What’s Robert Traver. He’s kind of a big deal up there.
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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely so, yeah, we would be anat and all that marr anatomy of a murder is very important to the community, is sure. But we have Jim Harrison, which I think you had a show about. So without a doubt, and and then you know some other writers that we would go off and do field trips on in this book. George Shiris is in this book he was a world’s first wildlife photographer. We would go out to where his first wildlife photographs were taken and read some of Georgia’s stuff.
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Speaker 1: Oh god, you know, years ago I was working on a I was researching a book that I never wrote about the Great Lakes, and I was hanging out at Lake Independence there. Yeah, and it was like the whole you know, like the the anatomy of a murder, murder. The couple was camped there, yeah, the guy was like a military guy involved with putting some kind of equipment in there. And then the wife like, depending on who you asked, there was like a bear hanging around the campground. She goes down to the local bar, runs into some guys in the local bar or whatever. The guy comes and kills a dude in the bar. And I went in there and I had heard all you can still see a bullet hole in the wall, yeah, And I went and asked the Bartender’m like, hey man, is there really a bullet hole in here? From like the whole anatomy of a murder thing. And he goes, the reason it doesn’t make sense, He says, where everybody thinks there’s a bullet hole, the bar wasn’t at that wall. Back then, he goes, back then the bar was over on that wall. So he goes, it doesn’t make sense to me that the bullet hole. You know he’s over there. Yeah, you’re familiar with all this.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, ye, I’ve been in the Lumberjack Cafe.
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Speaker 1: Was that what?
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Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, his stuff’s cool, man, Like, you know, his writing about all all the fish and stuff and the fishing quotes and all that. And when they made the movie with uh tell us his name the same dude from Its Wonderful Life, Jim Jimmy Stewart Stewart right right, Like he’s always run around trout rolled up.
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Speaker 2: And and he’s tying flies in the courthouse.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and he’s always like he comes down with trout wrapped up in his newspaper. That’s good stuff, man, that’s good stuff. Yeah. There’s there’s kind of like a little bit of a literary you know, there’s like a literary aspect to that town.
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Speaker 2: You know, absolutely, Yeah, Robert Drivers going to rout some pretty profound things about you know, wanting to be in the environs of where trout lived. And that’s how important that was too.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, he had cool fishing quotes. He had cool fishing quotes that still stand today.
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Speaker 2: They do.
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Speaker 1: They’re good fishing quotes. So what what got you into? What got you into the bird story?
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Speaker 2: So you know, George Shiris is in this book, and.
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Speaker 1: George, so I want to point out the listeners. Sure the way with the taxonomy of moose, right, yeah, the giants, you have the Yukon moose, and then in the Rockies there’s other ones. Just like some people argue there’s a new Finland moose in the Rockies. Are moose here Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Washington and elsewhere.
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Speaker 2: That is the Shyris Shyris moose.
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Speaker 1: Also, that’s right, but that’s the dude, right, it is Okay, it.
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Speaker 2: Is yeah, you know, on one of his expeditions. So he was the world’s first wildlife photographer. He was taking pictures in the eighteen eighties eight nineties before anyone else. He was a lawyer from Pittsburgh whose family would come to the Upper Peninsula to summer and starting off with his grandfather and Pittsburgh.
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Speaker 1: But they would go to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, because Pittsburgh was known back then as the Hell Hell with the lidoff, the you know, the it was. It was a nasty place to see. It was industrial, yeah, in the eighteen eighties, without a doubt, And and so a lot of the well known and wealthy families in Pittsburgh would go someplace to spend summer. And the Shyrises were trout fishermen, and his father first started going up to the Upper Peninsula very early on, like eighteen thirties, and then the family started to go up. They established a relationship with some folks around Marquette and they got a camp not too far from Marquet and that’s where George, who was a lawyer, first started experimenting with taking pictures of animals at night. And yeah, so he would he would go out on Whitefish Lake.
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Speaker 1: You wrote a whole book about this.
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Speaker 2: I did.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I did tell people that book, and that is.
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Speaker 2: How I got interested. But he would go out on Whitefish Lake and he had a chemical flash that he would hold up. They would listen for deer coming down to the shore, and then they would jacklight the deer and then they would push in slowly with the boat. George would stand up with this chemical flash take the picture. Took him three years to get an image, but he took a lot of images at night. And then the other thing he was get.
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Speaker 1: I’m familiar with the pictures. I had no idea that that’s why they look so strange.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, they were called the Midnight Series of pictures. And then so he had a chemical chemical flash. And then what he found out was that he could put a trip wire up, set these things at night and then put them on trails and the deer would trip him. And so he got pictures of deer, but also pictures of birds and other animals.
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Speaker 1: He was like, he’s running trail cameras.
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Speaker 2: He’s the inventor of the trail camera. Without a doubt. He was the one he put it. He took a patent out on that device, but it was never really practical for anybody else to use it. Yeah, and so that’s where I got interested in writing this book. Was I had done a story on or this book on George Shiris. And the third thing Shyris was he was a congressman for two years from Pennsylvania and he introduced the Shiris bird Bill in nineteen oh four, which was the forerunner of the Migratory Bird Act in the Migratory Bird Treaty. Well, I didn’t all that, yeah, and so that’s that was where I thought there’s a bigger story to this. And then when I was writing that book it’s called Camera Hunter, I really had to learn a lot about that period of the twentieth century, in late nineteenth century, and who all these people were. Many of the characters in this book were friends as Shiriuses, including Theodore Roosevelt. And and then so that’s how this book came about.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, you know, you start thinking about a book like that, like I’m kind of I’m working on a project where I’m kind of in the phase right now of you might you know what you’re gonna do. You know, you know you’re going to do something like whatever some you know, you know kind of like, well, I’m gonna do a thing about the blank. But then you get into that phase where you’re like, and I’m going to have to the themes of it. You know, you start the ideas, start taking shit, you have the umbrella. Yeah, but then lady, you realize that man there’s going to be a lot about this or a lot about that, or I imagine the takeaway, like the takeaway is going to be this. When you start thinking about the story of birds in America, particularly the ones that we hunted to extirpation, near extinction, extinction, what emerged in your mind as kind of like the takeaway for people, or like what is the thing that if you were you think in your head, like if I don’t achieve that for the reader, I will have failed.
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Speaker 2: Well, I think at this point shiras when I got interested in doing it. The Shiris came from this point of view as a hunter. He was a deer hunter and his first bill was only to protect certain birds game birds at that time. And then later what happened was with the Migratroy Bird Act, they expanded that to all birds. So I was looking for or a way to tell the story how Audubon, the audobonn Society, the folks who are professional ornithologists, and the hunters all came together to make this happen, and so I wanted to explore more of that story. And so that was part of it. And like anything you say when you when you first write your book proposal, which you’re pitching to your publishers. I want to write this book. You know it’s not going to be exactly the same.
00:11:36
Speaker 1: When you’re done it, they be kind of the same.
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Speaker 2: It may not be you don’t know where you’re going to go yet because you haven’t done the research.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: I shouldn’t say it’s not gonna be kind of the same. But no, no.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: Well yeah, but you know they want a table of contents, they want all these things, and I understand that.
00:11:51
Speaker 1: No, I’m not hacking on for want. And it’s a it’s a it’s a game. Everybody knows. It’s like it’s a dance you do. But do you know you know the writer Ian Fraser, Sure, Okay, he’s on the show, and he mentored me when I was young. I remember him telling me he said, if I ever had to write a book proposal, the first thing I’d do is throw it away.
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Speaker 2: It would be great to get to the point you don’t have to write a book proposal.
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Speaker 1: That’s where he was, and because he’s like, I don’t know what the book’s gonna be about.
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Speaker 2: Right right, and so that would you know? This one was was I just started hitting the road, hitting archives, and then you know, see where it went.
00:12:28
Speaker 1: You started out and doing archive work.
00:12:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well, and and to tell the story, one of the interesting stories in here is how after the Migratory Bird Treaty was okayed by Congress, there was going to be a test case that literally somebody was going to go out and violate it, and then that would go up through the courts to make sure that it was a constitutional law. And in this case, it was the Attorney General of Missouri who was a duck hunter name his name was Frank McAllister, and that he was telling everybody in Missouri like, ignore the law. Spring hunting is okay, everybody should go spring hunting. And I’m going to go spring hunting.
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Speaker 1: And I got yeah, backup, because I got confused. Sure, you mean they just knew that someone would, not that they planned that someone would. So they knew that there would be a violator, or they were planning a violator.
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Speaker 2: Well, it was kind of a It was kind of both in the sense that Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and and so that part of the Mississippi Missouri area, these folks were deadly against the migratory bird trape.
00:13:46
Speaker 1: Okay, I thought you meant they were putting. They were like, okay, Bob, you go break the law so we can test this in the court.
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Speaker 2: In one instance that happened before this. Okay, yeah, the Weeks McLean Act was tested like that. But anyway, when the when the migatry Bird Treaty happened, these states were still not happy with it, and they were saying that, you know, we still own the birds. The federal government has nothing to do with this. They can’t tell us what to do. We’re going to have a spring shooting season. And Frank McAllister, the Attorney General, said the same thing. The young game warden, federal game warden who covered seven states. His name was Ray Holland. Ray Holland said I’m going to bag them the attorney general, and so he sort of followed him. The Attorney General went to a duck club in Nevaden, Missouri, and shot over one hundred ducks. Holland got himself onto the property and was able to arrest the attorney general. The Attorney General was fined for shooting these ducks, and then the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Or the attorney general actually argued his own case in front seriously and yeah, in front of the US Supreme Court and lost. And that was the test case for the Migratory Bird Treaty.
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Speaker 1: And they held that it was sound law.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it was sound law. It was his argument was that the states, and this was the argument previously up to this time, all through like you know, the twenty or thirty years prior, was that birds belonging to the states, all wildlife was was owned by the states and the federal government had no jurisdiction. And what this movement was about with was for the federal government to take jurisdiction over birds. Birds were public trust. Migratory birds moved from state to state that each state having its own laws, its own bag limits. When you know birds were going to be shot what seasons didn’t make any sense biologically with their nest in migratory patterns. So slowly but surely the Feds moved in to take jurisdiction over those birds, and it culminated in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Yeah, but that was a great story. And I had just heard a little bit of that when I wrote the George Shier’s book, and I thought I’ll start there. So that’s where I started the book, was I want to go find out more about Frank Holland or Ray Holland arresting the Attorney General. And I found his papers in Connecticut in a college in Connecticut, and there was an unfinished book biography that it was a finished biography that he wasn’t able to get published. And I thought, Okay, there’s got to be two or three chapters in there about this great thing he did back then, and there was. And so this kind of wonderful anecdote that goes on for ten pages in this book about how these guys arrested the Attorney General came from that got it? Yeah, yeah, you.
00:17:08
Speaker 1: Know, people like like a lot of people in our audience, our audience are pretty familiar with the commercial duck hunting era. Like, for instance, right outside the door here we have a I don’t know if you notice coming in, we have a big punt gun.
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Speaker 2: Oh I didn’t see that.
00:17:24
Speaker 1: No, we have a Holland and Holland London made punt gun, like a commercial duck hunting gun.
00:17:31
Speaker 2: So that was made in England.
00:17:32
Speaker 1: And yeah, you know it’s funny. It’s got the address on it. Yeah, on the top of the barrel. Painted over in some kind of gun metal, uh, like some kind of like a paint. You used a paint like a like a like a cannon on a boat. Yeah, but then the action is very ornate and fine, you know. But if you look, if you can kind of like look through that paint, you can see that there’s an address from Holland and Holland we made a big punt gun shooting video that we haven’t finished yet. But anyways, just in conversations we’ve had on the show, we’ve talked about commercial duck hunting, and I don’t want to leave that out of our conversation. But the thing we haven’t touched on too much is that what we now regard of as songbirds, right, that these at a time were like a heavily exploited bird.
00:18:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: I always joke about and like my father’s bird taxonomy. He knew game birds, he was a duck hunter, he hunted upland birds. He knew his game birds. He knew two or three other birds, robins, blue jays, chickadeas crows. But most birds he saw were tweety birds, and they were like, that’s what they were, and they were not of interest, not of a trendous interest, right, because he had that. He had that and I’m not evening, but he had that like hunter’s value system of these are the birds that are important are Yeah, these are the birds that I’m interested in. These are the birds that we pay attention to. These are the birds that have regulations. These are the birds we eat, right, and a couple other common ones. Butternut he was more like, nah, it’s a tweety bird. But at a time like tweety birds.
00:19:22
Speaker 2: And back then they called them dicky birds.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: But at a time, man, there were people like hunting these things. They were, Yeah, tell people about sort of the extent of that, and and who and what and why was going on.
00:19:36
Speaker 2: So Robin’s, particularly in the south, when when Robin’s goes south into winter, they they flock up, and a lot of farmers would would catch those birds and nuts and they would feed them to their hawks.
00:19:51
Speaker 1: That was.
00:19:52
Speaker 2: But people also ate robin pie and and so yeah, without a doubt, flickers were eating and many woodpeckers as well. What I talk about in this book is how immigrants came from southern Europe, parts of Italy and from Eastern Europe who had a tradition of eating small birds. And so when they came to America, particularly like in you know, nineteen ten, nineteen hundred, they were hunting small birds partly because they were poor and this was a way to put protein in the pot. And so there was there’s an incident that I write about in Pennsylvania where a lot of these landowners in these farmers just hated the idea that these foreigners were coming out from Pittsburgh on the trains and going on their land and hunting small birds. But yeah, with a shotgun, shotgun, yeah, and anything else, woodshock, whatever it took. I mean, it was just getting meat and you know, taking meat back.
00:21:03
Speaker 1: And but there’s a one of my colleagues that I worked with on our cook We have a couple of cookbooks, and I worked with a woman named Christy Ruwaine. She has Italian as do I. She has Italian ancestors on the side of her family, and she talks about I don’t want to get the guy in trouble. She talks about her grandfather, like she remembers that her grandfather still putting him in, you know, putting him putting songbirds, whatever he could get his hands on, putting him into his sauces and he just cook him down and shred them and be like any other meat you could throw in there, but in the pot could be like little just things he kind of got out of his yard or whatever, and it was just like a food item.
00:21:46
Speaker 2: That’s right, that’s right. And you could put him on a spit. You could put some bread on him, some pork, and you know, you could do it that way.
00:21:55
Speaker 1: And were but like that kind of I want to talk about the I want to talk like the commercial restaurant trade and the feather trade. Just to wrap up on the songbird thing. Was there ever were they able to have population level impacts like take robins? Would that type of harvest? Was it able to have a population level impact, like did we ever see robin numbers decline to a dangerous level?
00:22:22
Speaker 2: Well, I think robin numbers did decline generally, but on a on a localized level, yes, without a doubt, particularly like in the South in Louisiana, there were you know, tens of thousands of robins that were killed and people I’ve got a little anecdote in the book where people were, you know, killing these birds and then bringing it bringing them in a new Iberia on a string and selling them for you know, twenty five cents or fifty cents a string. Ok So it was, it was it was kind of an annual thing to be able to buy robbins on the street at that time.
00:23:05
Speaker 1: Okay, talk about the the feather trade, because this is the thing like people can picture, like a lot of people can picture that. When people don’t have a lot of money, a lot of other game isn’t around. You know, we didn’t have a lot of the times we’re talking about, deer numbers had already been depleted, even going back to the mid seventeen hundreds, you know, so when you get you know, whatever, you get into the late eighteen hundreds, there’s not as much game around. People want to hunt, they’re hunting birds, but the feather trade is not personal use. The feather trade isn’t going out and getting some grub for yourself. The feather trade is like this business.
00:23:50
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, I think you know, people always hunted for feathers for stuffing, you know, mattresses, feather fans like face fans. But it was around the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties where this fashion trend started of having bird feathers you know, in your hat, in women’s hats, and that grew fairly quickly that it was everyone needed to have these, you know, these these bird hats as they called them. They called them, yeah, yeah, there were names for bird yeah, bird hats.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: You’d be like, I’m going to go to the store and get my mom a bird hat.
00:24:29
Speaker 2: You can get a bird hat. Or there was one called the three story, which was a very tall hat and very wide one.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: As well, all loaded with feathers, all.
00:24:39
Speaker 2: Loaded with feathers. Right. In fact, these things kind of became as time went on through the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, as the designers competed with one another, these hats became more ostentatious. They had to try to outdo one another, so they got bigger. And then usn’t just feathers. They were putting taxidermy birds on their heads, and so it wasn’t unusual to see three or four birds arranged with maybe some natural materials that would show the bird, you know, So it’s like wearable taxidermy.
00:25:16
Speaker 1: It kind of ties into this, like you tell that that’s sort of arms race, not arms race, but I remember I can’t remember who, but someone was observing how fashion always becomes self parody, meaning someone will make a wide leg gene and then they’re like, oh, yeah, you think that’s wide, I mean, or like, oh, a little hole in your genes is cool. How about I remove the entire front of my genes, you know. And that’s how like fashion goes to self parody and then the thing vanishes. So it’s funny to think of feathers being like, oh, you think a few feathers are cool, right, well, here’s a bird.
00:25:57
Speaker 2: Right, here’s the It’s exactly what happened, and they got more oscentatious. Sometimes they were really close fitting hats, almost like a close hat, and they were all feathers, and then each time a new season happened, you would have to get a new feathered hat. So I mean, we’re talking about sort of Victorian fashions, very long dresses, bustles, you know, lots of petticoats, and women had a lot of clothing on and then it was often topped off by these big hats. And I talked about how some women could not I would have to put their head out the window in order to ride on a street car or in a a coach because their hat was so big it would not fit inside?
00:26:52
Speaker 1: Was there like if you picture for to be that you know at a time, like you go back to the fifties or whatever, like a like a mink fur that was good. Yeah, if you had a muskrat fur, if you had a possum fur, not as good, but a mink fur was the ship.
00:27:09
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:27:10
Speaker 1: Did consumers have a notion of what when? When feathers were the rage? Did consumers have a notion of what feathers they wore? Meaning was there was there were they aware of that this is a very rare feather or that this is sort of an exclusive feather.
00:27:28
Speaker 2: So the breeding feather, the most popular feathers were many of like the Florida Florida wading birds, egrets and the snowy egret especially was its breeding feather the air grat. I think it’s how you pronounce it.
00:27:45
Speaker 1: That’s the feather.
00:27:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s there’s this long breeding feather that the bird gets, and that was it was quite more than once that it was worth more than its weight in gold. Didn’t weigh much of course.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see exactly, but.
00:28:05
Speaker 2: But it was a beautiful white feather and so those were really popular and and the plume hunters absolutely went after those birds because yeah, snowy egrets and and then the roseate spoonbill was was very popular and that was often for face fans. They were very pretty, of course, so yeah, there was some pecking order. The one of the famous things that.
00:28:33
Speaker 1: That was a good pund right there. Did you know? Did you know? Or you just do it on? I just did it, Phil, You catch that? It was great? You caught it. I catch it before I pointed it out. No I didn’t. That was just you, Steve. Congratulations the h do you know, homut can? Do you know about the great Isbel pun controversy? I I remember hearing about it. I do not remember the details, though, how they made a pun and that they insisted that they did it on purpose. But you think that men tell our guest, Okay, I’m eating with some friends and we’re at this place and they bring a caviar dish out. One of my friends winds up with a caviar egg stuck right here on his lip. Okay, And he says Marilyn Monroe and then goes ha, okay, and he claims he knew all along and made the row joke to us view. We felt there was a delay and that it occurred to him that he had.
00:29:52
Speaker 2: Made after he knew that this was on his lip.
00:29:55
Speaker 1: Like he was just going on the fact. No. No, someone said, hey, you got a piece of egg right here, and he says, oh, you know marily Monroe ha, meaning row fish egg. So he’s like, oh, no, even when I said Marilyn Monroe, I knew I was making a row joke. Other people at the table felt that there was a delay, and you could see him realize after saying it, how spot on it was Marilyn Monroe. We never could settle it. We consider trying to get security camera footage from the restaurant. Yeah, to see the look in his eye when he realized do you follow me right that he made a yeah. He claims to this day that he did it on purpose. Either way, the pecking order, did you lose your train of thought?
00:30:52
Speaker 2: I used to have an editor who would tell me puns all the time, and then I would tell him to shut up, and he would say, we have a lot of pun around here.
00:31:00
Speaker 1: And I’m not gonna take you that far. So order the birds.
00:31:04
Speaker 2: Well, and so what Frank Chapman was a banker, and he was a famous ornithologist, and Chapman wrote Perforce and Stream magazine. He later became uh the curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History. Yeah, he’d done all kinds of things later in his career, but early in his career when he was a banker and these feathers were appearing on women’s hats, he went down and did with what is known as his famous sidewalk survey. Yeah, he went he went to the shopping hearing in New York, took a notebook and noticed that five hundred some women out of seven hundred had feathers in their hats. And because of his his ability to look at these hats and tell what kind of feathers.
00:32:01
Speaker 1: They were, he was that good.
00:32:02
Speaker 2: He was very good, right, and and he could tell that they were you know, flickers and woodpeckers and many their backyard garden birds. And then he wrote an article for Forest and Stream magazine saying women are wearing the feathers of our songsters. And so that was part of that movement.
00:32:21
Speaker 1: But yeah, so he was like, so he’s in New York and it is.
00:32:26
Speaker 2: The heart of the millinery, or but he’s.
00:32:28
Speaker 1: But he’s seeing like perhaps locally sourced birds.
00:32:32
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, Forrest and Stream did an article right around that time where they they went to one of these millinery houses and talked about how many birds were being shipped in from Long Island and that they were coming in every day. Birds in meat, as they called it, they had just been shot with dust shot, and now they needed to be processed.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: What’s the shot they would.
00:32:55
Speaker 2: Use so dusty? Could? They called a dust shot? Collectors still use it today, ornithologists that are still permitted to collect. It’s a very very fine with the shotgun, Like do you.
00:33:07
Speaker 1: Know how you would you know, like a nine shot today would be about that’s someone’s gonna crack me on this. That’d be about as small as you’re gonna find. It would be like a nine shot.
00:33:22
Speaker 2: I’d have to look in the book. I didn’t.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: I’d be curious what it is, and I didn’t.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: Know what it was myself, but I talked to a collector at the University of California, Davis, and that’s what they used, and they call it. They call it dust shot. Because I was trying to find somebody to tell me, Okay, what were they using? At that time, and if you got too close to the bird you could blow it apart.
00:33:44
Speaker 1: So you’re trying to find it dust shot.
00:33:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, looking for miller.
00:33:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, like what shot size was dust shot? Did uh? In your book you mentioned like people looking for eggs, right, bird eggs, But that’s just like that’s just people looking for something to eat or is it different than that?
00:34:06
Speaker 2: It was both. So there was this practice called oohology. So if you were interested in birds at that time, say eighteen fifties, right after right after the Civil War, you did three things. You you shot birds, You took their eggs, and you took their nest. And that was sort of the entry into birding at that time. And the reason was that optics weren’t very good and there really weren’t now good field guys at that time. So if you were interested in birds, you went out with your shotgun and your dust shot. You the birds are That was a birding trip. That was a birding trip. Yeah.
00:34:48
Speaker 3: Number the way, number twelve or so about one twenty one point two seven millimeters.
00:34:56
Speaker 2: Wow, So that smaller or bigger than number nine?
00:34:59
Speaker 1: Sa Okay, I don’t even heard of it. Like nine is small?
00:35:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
00:35:05
Speaker 1: Nine would maybe be like, you know, might have applications, you know, like some guys will shoot mourning doves.
00:35:11
Speaker 2: Yeah with nine, okay, that’s small.
00:35:15
Speaker 1: Eight is a more common dove. Yeah, twelve number twelve, I never heard.
00:35:20
Speaker 3: Of it so smaller than that.
00:35:23
Speaker 2: I guess just for ornithologists that have a permit to do so. So you you would shoot the bird, you’d bring it back, you would, uh, you’d probably have a big thick volume because again there’s not really a field guy to take out there with you. You’d identify the bird, and then you would tax it, durm me the bird as a study skin, and then put it away. And then the other thing you would do is you would collect their eggs and blow the egg out and put some nomenclature on the outside in ink. And part of it was at that period they were still studying, you know, where did birds occur, what subspecies was, what, what was the color, the morphology of of the egg, all those kind of things. And then they would take nest. That practice was known as nidology.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: Huh.
00:36:21
Speaker 2: So these were like the three things that.
00:36:24
Speaker 1: That man, dude, I have never heard. Oology Oohologyology for idology is collecting bird eggs, but not to eat. But like the collection of science, right, and then idology is collecting a bird nest. But many American children are nidologists whatever. More, it pains them to leave a bird nest. It pains them to leave a bird nest in a tree once they confirmed that it’s been vacated.
00:36:55
Speaker 2: It’s painful to them. So we still do nideology today. I mean people bring them home to look.
00:37:02
Speaker 1: But yeah, my kids are like, there’s no way, there’s no way I leave that nets.
00:37:09
Speaker 2: I’m gonna take it on because yeah, there you go, there you go. So oologists were people who were interested in science, and many of them were young. There were young men that boys intended to do this.
00:37:24
Speaker 1: Like affluent, affluent people.
00:37:26
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I guess what I’m leading up to here to say that a lot of oologists were just interested in egg collecting. Collecting bird eggs didn’t have any science behind it. It was more like stamp collecting or coin collecting. It was kind of a craze at one time. Really, Yeah, to displayed in what way? Well you you would display them in your cabinet of curiosity? Have you heard that? Yeah?
00:37:53
Speaker 1: You know, So mine’s more of a box.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: Well exactly.
00:37:56
Speaker 1: So it was.
00:37:57
Speaker 2: It was people entertained back then in the park and they would have a cabinet in their parlor, or they might have a whole room where they would display items of scientific interests, which could be seashells, eggs, fossils. There was a lot of interest during the Gilded Age of that period in scientific discovery. And there was a lot of magazines you could read because magazine journalism was big at that time too, And there was a magazine called the Ooologists. Was a magazine called the Nightologists.
00:38:33
Speaker 1: He’s a magazine about it, absolutely.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so you could read on how to how to do it. You could you could buy and sell those eggs, trade those eggs. So a lot of ooology, a lot of ooologists, and there were tens of thousands of them around the country at that time. Were not all that interested in birds, were interested in science. They were simply interested in these kind of things that looked like they were pretty bobbles in many ways, that you could put put in your cabinet.
00:39:03
Speaker 1: And this is this is creating. What you’re telling me, I had never heard any of this. What you’re telling me is creating, like a really interesting context that that isn’t often observed about Theodore Roosevelt, because when you’re reading Theodore Roosevelt biographies or talking to Theodore Roosevelt biographers, they always make a big deal about his collecting. Yeah, but no one ever points out that I’m aware of that, like we would be like like many young men of his means, he was a collector. You sort of get the sense that it was like a freak thing. No, it was like a thing people were doing.
00:39:45
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:39:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. It’ ever like no one ever does a good job of conveying that he was one of one of many, or or a sort of he was a product of his time.
00:39:58
Speaker 2: Sure well, I certainly mentioned that in my book, and I also mentioned, uh, Franklin Roosevelt was also a collector of birds, And I went to Hyde Park to look at his bird collection, and it’s it’s all there in his cabinet of curiosity. He has mounted birds and they would they would preserve them with arsenic. And his his mother was afraid of FDR using arsenic, and so she sent his birds down river to New York City and a professional would do his birds, but Teddy, Teddy would would do his.
00:40:39
Speaker 1: Line but she was hip to the idea that it was hazardous.
00:40:42
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, and and but yeah. Theodore Theodore had his his own museum specimens. His father was one of the founders at the American Museum of Natural History, so Theodore got to hang out at the museum and learn from some of the taxidermists there. And if you go there today, I think on the first floor there are still a couple of his mouths there. God as well.
00:41:09
Speaker 1: I want to ask the same question I asked about songbird hunters around the egg collectors, bird collectors, private collectors. Did it have a population level.
00:41:22
Speaker 2: Impact, Yes, particularly on again localized level, and sometimes with certain kinds of birds. So ooologists would trade or sell these birds, and the prices would depend on the difficulty give finding the egg. So one oologist said that to get a peagon falcon egg you had to climb and he said, once you’ve visited the nest of five duck hawks, which were falcon, you know peagon falcons, you’re living on borrowed time. And if you look at the list that I found in the Oologist of the price of these eggs, any kind of raptor egg was much more expensive than the other ones.
00:42:12
Speaker 1: I could definitely see that you’d have population level impact on that for hanmpful reasons like that, like low fecundity, low density. But then you can pretty much go into an area, and if you’re like a good observer, you can probably go into an area and spend some time there and be like, there’s one there, there’s one there, and there’s one there, and that’s it.
00:42:35
Speaker 2: Right, right, And so they would go back and forth. Now, so many birds would lay a second clutch, and so if you did this ethically, you would take one clutch, allow them to lay the second clutch and then reproduce. But a lot of these so frictly, but a lot of these folks were greedy and they were trading and selling, and so they would go back time after time after time after again in order to do this.
00:43:02
Speaker 1: Man, I can’t believe, Like it’s kind of blowing my mind that, like I catch wind all kinds of weird stuff. You know, I had no idea this was the thing.
00:43:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So what the.
00:43:12
Speaker 1: Hell’s the word again? Idology?
00:43:14
Speaker 2: N idology, Well, that’s nests, that’s nest oohology. T Gilbert Pearson, who was the head of the National Audubon Society in the early part of the century. I think he was the president for twenty twenty five years. He grew up rather poor in Florida, and he was a neurologist, and so he would collect all these eggs and he would go back time after time after time to get as many as he could, and he would sell them. He actually traded his egg collection to a small college in South Carolina in order to go to school. And then his job was to go there and get an education. While he was there, take care of the cabinet, Curiosity Cabinet, which was a museum at the Skylight. So he actually traded his egg collection for this. So you know, some of these bird protectors started off this way as young people.
00:44:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I’m like in my own work right now, looking I’m spending a lot energy looking at the fur trade as a continuum, you know what I mean a lot of times when people get into the fur trade, they’re talking about colonial America or whatever. But like looking at it as the thing that never ended. And then observation I have that I’ll spend time on, that I’ll write about is the like the enormous difference between the people that collect the fur and the people that ultimately wear the fur. Meaning the difference between a kid that grows up on a ranch in Nevada and catches a few bobcats every year and a Russian oligarch’s wife who ultimately wears those bobcats not only a big difference, but there’s a somewhat of a culturally like a mutual disdain. Right the egg guys though, like did the did the egg trade? I know the feather trade did, but did the egg trade? Like kind of hatch a.
00:45:37
Speaker 2: That was the pun?
00:45:39
Speaker 1: What’s that?
00:45:39
Speaker 2: Oh?
00:45:41
Speaker 1: I knew that. I guess you could say it flew over your head or that dude, that was a good one. I knew that hatched where they’re like poor kids like farm kids whatever, like poor kids that wouldn’t have been the kind of people that had a parlor and a curiosity box, who were just hipped to the idea. They knew. They’re like listen, man, people will pay money for these eggs. Yes, but they weren’t. They weren’t aspiring ornithologists. They were just collectors, that’s right.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, there were plenty of folks like that. Pearson actually, to Gilbert Pearson, he loved birds, but that’s exactly what he was doing. You know. One year someone wrote to him through the Oologist and said, I will take all the bird eggs from that part of Florida, and so that’s what he did. He went out and collected like Christy.
00:46:37
Speaker 1: And he wasn’t coming to it as a bird enthusiast. He was coming to it as like, Hey, if they’re going to pay for it, I’ll get it.
00:46:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, I have my own collection and I know where all these birds are, and so I’m going to do that. But yeah, there were a lot of people who did that, even the bird collectors, many of the shotgun ornithologists to went out and collected their own birds. They didn’t have time, or they couldn’t get everywhere they needed to get for certain birds that they wanted, so they could buy them, or they could contract with people who called themselves taxidermists, but they were basically just contract hunters who would shoot those birds for them and bring them back.
00:47:25
Speaker 1: Whether we’re talking about market hunting for ducks, which is just supplying restaurants meat markets with duck meat, or we’re talking about the feather trade shooting egrets, spoon bills for decorations, or we’re talking about egg collecting, like any of these things, we’re talking about when and how extensive? When did the damage start to show, like the resource damage, When did it show? And how extensive did the damage get, regardless of what the ultimate use was, Like, what were we seeing in terms of birds that we now think of as abundant that weren’t or birds that we know were wiped out? Right? Like when did it become apparent and how bad did it get?
00:48:19
Speaker 2: Probably by the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties. When the American Ornithologists Union formed in eighteen eighty three, they created a committee at their second at their second meeting to look at bird protection. Because these guys were I called them birdmen in the book because they were all men, but they were collectors that they were scientists, mostly self educated, because there was no university courses for to become an ornithologist. They had this committee that went out and then studied, you know, what was happening with birds and they identified plenty of places where birds were being wiped out. Cape cod was won. I think that the year that they did them they created that committee, they figured that there were sixty thousand turns that were shot for the feather trade, and because in a year, in a year, and because where New York was located, birds were disappearing through Long Island, the Cape, along New Jersey, Barnicut Bay, and further down into the Carolinas too. Eventually, by eighteen ninety, what was they killed the turns for feathers, feathers there, there were all kinds of There were a lot of different kinds of birds were used. Gulls were very popular as well.
00:49:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t think of them as having like a crazy tricked out feather like a heron does or something.
00:49:54
Speaker 2: No, that that’s true. But there was a need for a tremendous amount of whatever. And then some of them you could die, and so you could you know, you could change change that.
00:50:08
Speaker 1: But anyway, so a seagull that throws a white feather that might have turned up on the market as a red feather.
00:50:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, as something else, that’s right, that’s right. But I’ve got a picture in the book that herring gulls were used to make a hat and a tippet set of I think as they called it. And so at one point by the eighteen nineties it was estimated, and I did talk to a biologist on nath who said, look, we weren’t taking really good we didn’t have good science back then. But it was estimated back then that ninety five percent of Florida’s wading birds disappeared during this period because of the feather trade, and clearly most of the know and rookeries were wiped out. And then that kind of continued through Louisiana and Texas as well. So it was very evident by the eighteen nineties that these showy birds were just being were just being wiped out. And it was clear because the prices had gone up so much from scarcity god that they were harder to get a.
00:51:19
Speaker 1: Thing about just being alive. You know, in America and a lot of places you go, you’re sort of haunted by past image, you know, or you’re haunted by a sense of absence, right Like you could go to a place like if I’m just thinking around here, you know, you could go to a place where mountain men would talk about hillsides full of big horns, and they’re seeing three four hundred big horns on the hillside just ain’t gonna happen now, Or you know, herds buffalo that you watch cross a river for three days all day, right, and you feel that absence. But it’s interesting to think that that you could be in Florida right today, you could be on vacation down in Florida on the beach, and you’re like thinking back. You could think back to maybe an era of greater abundance, but you can also think back to an era when you probably wouldn’t see any of the things you see.
00:52:17
Speaker 2: That’s right, that’s right.
00:52:19
Speaker 1: You know, it’d be like an example of oh no, it’s better now, like it’s been worse, right right, which is true again and again on all kinds of game, animals and things. But you just don’t, like, I don’t anyways think that, you know, you imagine like that you’re on a shoreline, that you could have been on a shoreline back then. There were no herons. You see egrets all over in pastures. There were no egrets in those pastures.
00:52:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, you know. I’m from Pennsylvania and originally in Pennsylvania had about five hundred deer left around nineteen hundred in the entire state, and I can remember when we did not see eagles. This is you know, nineteen sixties when I was we didn’t see eagles, there were no bears in that part of Pennsylvania, and now today there are eagles, there are bears, and so yeah, same things treat you know, true with the with birds as well. That they’ve come back, they’re still not as abundant as they could be, you know, and maybe will be in the future depending on how we take care of them. Right. But yeah, I mean things around nineteen hundred were pretty bleak, and it went through not just birds, but through you know, deer, big game animals. I have a chapter in this book about George Berger now and Theodore Roosevelt founding the Boone and Crockett Club, and that that did have effect also on birds as well.
00:53:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes today you hear politicians and they’ll talk about like deregulations was the greatest thing in the world. What saved America’s birds is.
00:53:58
Speaker 2: Is regular regulation. That’s right.
00:54:01
Speaker 1: Like if we had stayed it wasn’t even deregulated, it was unregulated. If we had stayed unregulated, they’d be gone. Saving wildlife in America was regulation. It was enacting regulation when the when people started to really realize that we were going to lose stuff, and we did lose stuff because the passenger pigeon went extinct in nineteen I think it was nineteen thirteen. I mean it was effectively extinct well before that, right, the last one died. I rebuilt woodpecker wiped.
00:54:33
Speaker 2: Out, right, Carolina parakeet.
00:54:35
Speaker 1: Carolina parakeet wiped out. But when it got to where they were, people started to try to get a grip on it, like how did that take place? Like when you if you go look and you have this sense of urgency, they’re vanishing, they’re still hunting them without regulation, where do you even like, where do you begin? Like what were the first things they decided to try?
00:55:03
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I think that was the heart of the book was to look at how these different groups came together to stop this from happening. The politicians in the legislation really came later, partially because of public pressure to do something. But you know, the Audubon movement started in the late eighteen eighties. It went away for a couple of years. I mean, it’s a long story, but it was. It was resurrected by these women in Massachusetts. Then it spread to different states. These were what they called the birds sentimentalists, we want to save these birds.
00:55:46
Speaker 1: They called themselves that they did. They did it. It seems like a slight.
00:55:50
Speaker 2: Well it was to some degree because it was often run by women who who again the moors of the time was they’re sentimental, they’re headed, they’re too soft hearted. Even some of the bird men who were concerned about this were very suspicious of the Audubon Society because I shoot birds, you know, I don’t look at them. And then the hunting community came in partly because of market hunting. They wanted to stop market hunting, and they saw that there was a synergy between all three of these groups. And then that continued into the nineteen hundreds and eventually began to enlist the politicians. But it was a slow process. But part of it was people were looking around and there were just fewer birds. And I think the passenger pigeons decimation, the way the populations dropped off very quickly, really hit people hearts.
00:56:52
Speaker 1: Is that right?
00:56:53
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think you know a lot of I say in the book that a lot of people never took a train and went across the Gray Plains and saw these great herds of buffalo that were then of course, you know, being killed. But if you’re east of the Mississippi, you probably witnessed the passing of the passenger pigeons, which was an epic, you know sight to see where you know.
00:57:17
Speaker 1: So that was at the time. I know it happened fast, but like that was the thing people saw happen like and it struck them emotionally.
00:57:28
Speaker 2: It did it did it?
00:57:29
Speaker 1: Did? You know?
00:57:30
Speaker 2: Again? A lot of them hunted them, They they passenger pigeons were marking, hunted, they were eating in restaurants and cities. But at the same time, it was something people grew up with, was you know, seeing the sky darkened, it sounded like thunder. It would kick all the dust up from from the land, and these birds would take hours to pass by. It was just it was just a sight of nature that no one will ever see again. It happened in their lifetime. It was gone. And I think that’s true of some of some other birds as well, that birds that were sort of favorites to be on the farm or be in your backyard, we’re just not there anymore.
00:58:22
Speaker 1: At that time, was it? Like? Were the were the hunters and then the preservationists or the sentimentalists were there? Were they kind of like uneasy partners.
00:58:34
Speaker 2: Somewhat at the same time, some of the sentimentalists were hunters, you know, and and you know certainly, and we’re eating meat and we’re eating birds that they were buying down at the market, and so they understood that. So I think it was a matter of of over time coming together saying we can, you know, we can work together. And and then it was not so much that, well, we don’t like hunters, we don’t like market hunters, and we don’t like game hogs the pot hunter, and the pot hunter was again the subsistence hunter who had no restraint because of the laws or you could ignore them. So they were going out and shooting a hundred ducks. And then the sport hunter tended to be someone who felt that there ought to be laws and there ought to be some limits. Now. At the same time, when sport hunting first started in the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties, the whole idea was to kill as many things as you could. That was a good day in the field. And George Shiris talks about that even when he introduced his nineteen oh four builder Protect Game Birds. He said, I would go out on a day and kill two hundred birds and just bring a few home and leave the rest there, take them into town and sell them. And it was part of this whole mentality of the Gilded Age that we live in a limitless time and there’s always going to be more Why because there always has been more yea and dislike the buffalo. And I talk about it in the book that this this began to change. People started to realize you can’t cut all the trees down, and someday you will cut all the trees down, or some day you’re gonna kill all the buffalo, or you’re gonna kill all the Canada geese. And that’s where the term conservation comes into the lexicon. And that doesn’t really come in until the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties.
01:00:44
Speaker 1: So what were some of the legislative steps that helped sort of sure get a grip on things, get things under control.
01:00:52
Speaker 2: So the American Ornithology Issueing first came out with what they called their Model Law, and it was a law that they were asking states to pass to protect non game birds, and that was non game birds, and so they they kind of left all the game birds to sports.
01:01:11
Speaker 1: People, got it, They’ll sort that out.
01:01:14
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, although later that changed, and so you had some states that adopted these laws, but there wasn’t a lot of money for game wardens, you know, to enforce it. There were the sheriff’s departments in these little counties did not want to arrest anybody for shooting birds. Sometimes their own families were involved in shooting birds. And so it really wasn’t until the Lazy Act, which you know, you know, I’m sure a lot about.
01:01:46
Speaker 1: Explain it explained.
01:01:47
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the Lazy Act was John Lacy was a lawyer from Iowa in nineteen hundred, and I look at my notes a little bit because I try to remember. In nineteen hundred he passed the what became known is the Lacy Act, and that was to try to prevent market hunting, market hunters from bringing birds across state lines. So if you if you shot birds in Kansas that were in violation of that of Kansas law. Let’s say Kansas had a bag season, if you could pack him into barrels, put them on a train, and get them across the border, you could just sell them, and and and so his so the Lacy Act was that birds can’t be sold or wildlife in general can’t be sold outside of a state where it was killed illegally, and that started to put the damper on feather hunting and meat hunting. And it was really the first federalization of wildlife and birds.
01:02:59
Speaker 1: Okay, So that was one of the initial introductions of the idea that a state couldn’t just decide to wipe something out that’s right under the argument that hey, it’s our state, don’t tell us what to do. Exactly.
01:03:14
Speaker 2: So places like Louisiana and other of these states along to Mississippi Missouri that were still allowing lots of duck shooting could no longer their market. Hunters could not get those birds out of the state. In Solomon, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania or Chicago got it. So it really cut down on a lot of that.
01:03:38
Speaker 1: And because we hear the Lacy Act now in terms of all kinds of things like you could poach a white tailed buck and bring it to it in Illinois and bring it to a taxi thermist in Indiana and wind up getting a lasiac violation, or it happens around fish, but it was conceptualized as a bird thing.
01:03:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was also there were lazy agents that were created at that time, agents that were going into cold storage facilities and finding, you know, thousands of birds and barrels that they knew had been killed illegally, and then they were confiscating them.
01:04:12
Speaker 1: When you hear that termed birds and barrels, do you have any idea what that means?
01:04:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you could pack a bird in a barrel.
01:04:20
Speaker 1: In a brine cleaned birds, or do anything like feathered bird.
01:04:24
Speaker 2: You clean the bird and you could pack it in a zinc barrel and you could pump all the air out of it, and then you could keep it in a cold storage for years. So these cold stories. I have one whole chapter called cold storage Man. And I found this great book in nineteen oh four about a guy who started off being a market market hunter then he became a cold storage man.
01:04:51
Speaker 1: Okay, explaining to me again, So I got a bunch I shoot a bunch of birds.
01:04:55
Speaker 2: You say, you shoot a bunch of birds, you know, and initially you could put him into and I house with natural ice, and.
01:05:02
Speaker 1: So they might just got him and put him in an ice house.
01:05:04
Speaker 2: That’s right, and then try to keep them for six months and then ship them because you got a train. Now in many places now you have train transportation, and you could put him in these ice boxes and get them to Chicago and get them to New York. I mean a lot of market hunting went on locally, and but once ice came along, and they and trains came along, then you could start transporting birds and other wildlife, you know, one thousand miles, which is what happened with passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons would roost and for weeks people would just kill them. The pigeoneers as they were known, they were hunters, could kill them and ship them out on trains.
01:05:47
Speaker 1: Okay, but explain the barrel thing to me.
01:05:50
Speaker 2: So with this guy, I mean, and I’m not an expert on this, but but with this guy that they arrested, who was known as the he was known as the quail King.
01:05:59
Speaker 1: And.
01:06:01
Speaker 2: He was raised his his ice house was raided and they found tens of thousands of birds in his ice house, and he had some in these zincd barrels where I think an airtight barrel, airtight barrel pumped and and that when the warden who came in cut open the barrel, they took some of the birds and cooked them and said they tasted quite well. Really yeah, yeah, Now that seems like a long time.
01:06:35
Speaker 1: So he’s like creating some kind of like anaerobic environment.
01:06:40
Speaker 2: Exactly. So you know, through in the chapter he talks about how he initially got into this business. So he married, he was he was in he was in Illinois. He married a woman from Illinois. Anybody wanted to take her back to New York to meet the relatives. It was it was spring, it was still kind of cold. He shot a few plover and he shot some prairie chickens. He put him in his suitcase and then it was in a cool baggage car. When he got to New York, he pulled the birds out. He walked down to an open market, you know, open air market at that time, and people surrounded him immediately and wanted to buy his birds. And he said he named an outrageous price, and they bought his birds.
01:07:28
Speaker 1: They wanted to buy him to eat them.
01:07:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and and you know, and he’s like, wow, you know, they that’s a great price. Then he started looking around at the at the other people who were selling birds there and just saw that their birds were just bad looking. Birds and just kind of spoiled and whatever. No, and wonder everybody wanted his birds. His birds still look fresh. And he said, I can make a lot of money if I can get these Illinois birds to New York on eye and make money. And that’s how his whole business.
01:08:03
Speaker 1: Started selling Illinois birds in New York.
01:08:06
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then as Illinois got shot out, then he moved out to Iowa and Nebraska, and then he stopped hunting completely and just became a cold storage man, a refrigerator mainly what they called him. Yeah, well, I’ll have to look. It was a great book to find. It was called the That’s why I wrote it down, so I couldn’t remember cold storage man. What was the name? That was the name of the what people used to call him, the quail king and the cold storage man. And you’re asking me a question, I can’t find.
01:08:46
Speaker 1: Type that Ingriant coil King, cold storage.
01:08:48
Speaker 2: Man, nineteen oh four, nineteen oh four. I think the book was called The Tale of the Gun.
01:08:54
Speaker 1: The Tale of the Gun, Yeah.
01:08:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he wrote it in nineteen oh four about his being a market hunter in his life. It was a great fine I just found it on the internet. I thought this thing works perfect.
01:09:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so if we if we left off, we were talking about Lazy Act, right what like, So lacyac predated the Migratory and Songbird Treaty or whatever.
01:09:21
Speaker 2: That’s right. So nineteen hundred was really the first federalization of wildlife where the federal government’s now moving in and saying that, you know, we’re going to do something about.
01:09:34
Speaker 1: And people are probably having a fit.
01:09:36
Speaker 2: Absolutely, particularly millinery industry, the market hunters, they’re all worried. Nineteen oh four, George Shiris the third introduces the Shyris Bird Bill, which was something like the weak the Migratory Bird Treaty, although George was just saying that only game birds should be protected. But what he is saying at that point is that the states cannot protect these birds and they’re not acting in coordinations. So as a duck flies, you know, south to north, north to south, it’s being shot in every state pretty much as it’s going because there’s not uniform regulations across that. Shyrius knew that law was not going to pass, but he wanted to introduce that concept, and he was a lawyer, so he had worked out this legal theory of National Powers Act Police Powers Act to do this, and he knew it wasn’t going to pass in Congress then because there were a lot of states rights folks that said, we don’t want the federal government, you know, stepping into this.
01:10:48
Speaker 1: Sure man, this conversation never ends, right.
01:10:51
Speaker 2: So over the next few years, though a lot of bad things were happening, birds were still you know, dying off. Now there’s no passenger pigeons flying around. The Audubon movement.
01:11:05
Speaker 1: The.
01:11:07
Speaker 2: Boone and Crockett folks, and all of these movements in public. Pressure is starting to mount on this. So in nineteen eleven twelve, it bubbles up again and that becomes the Week’s McLean Act. The other thing that happened at that time was the American Game Protective and Propagation Association, which is this long. They eventually made their name a lot shorter, but that was the AMMO and gun manufacturers. It said, we want to help out, and we want to start this organization because we’re getting afraid that our people aren’t going to have anything to shoot at our sport hunters and they so that’s when the hunters really moved into this bird prot thing, and they decided that that you know, Their aim was stop market hunting, complete yeah, protect migratory birds, get to you know, get the feds and FEDS involved, and they came together with the Audubon Society too to push for the passage of this act. Now, the Audubon Society came in and said, you know, we will, we will help you. However, you have to include non game birds and that became the Dickie Bird Amendment, which was bringing in the bird. Yeah, tweety bird exactly, bringing in these little birds.
01:12:38
Speaker 1: Now there were still birds, so that was like an add on.
01:12:41
Speaker 2: It was an ad on, yeah, it was. It was the Audubon Society that came in and said, well, we basically support bird collection. However you’re just supporting game.
01:12:50
Speaker 1: Birds, dicky birds.
01:12:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to add to Dickie birds. So it’s called the Dickie Bird Amendment now, which is pretty slang for a little bird like we would say weedy bird here. So they added that amendment and then the American game folks were good lobbyists, aggressive lobbyists, and the Campfire Club was involved in that time. There were some other groups there and they all came into Congress and they lobbied for the passage of the Weeks McLean Act, and then that was passed in nineteen thirteen, and then there was a the Agriculture Department had to create rules, and so there was like, you know, no hunting before sun comes up, no hunting after the sun goes down, no spring shooting. Closed season on certain birds that were in danger of you know, extinction, including the wood duck at that time. And that raised a lot of concern from these states down south that was you know, Missouri and some of these other ones. It still wanted this, you know, they still felt that the state was the ownership of birds. Now, two important people evolved in that time, where Howard Taft, who was Roosevelt’s vice president. Taft had been a judge and a lawyer and later the US Supreme Court. Justice Taft said the Weak Macclaims Act is unconstitutional because there was there was law that said the states really do own it, and it’s going to lose. And there’s also a guy named Elihu Root. He was a senator. He had also been Secretary of State under Roosevelt. He’d been Secretary of War under Taft. And so these two people told Schiras, look, your law is unconstitutional. And if it gets tested, which it did. Guy shot two coots and they went all the way up to the Supreme Court. So he said, the way to get around that is when.
01:15:07
Speaker 1: They were pointing out that it’s unconstitutional, they supported the idea. They supported the I thought legislation.
01:15:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, they thought, you know, they thought George’s legal theory was just not gonna was just not going to make constitutional muster with.
01:15:22
Speaker 1: The Supreme So they’re advising him their advisor rather than being an adversary.
01:15:26
Speaker 2: So so the end of round of all of this is like, you need to go to Canada and get a treaty. If you get a treaty with Canada that basically we’re going to protect birds not only that go across state lines, but also go across international lines, because that’s what migratory bird treaty exactly migratory bird treaty because most of the ducks are nesting in Canada and coming back south. So if you get a bird treaty under the supremacy clause, it circumvents the Supreme Court. And so that was the end around. You know you’re going to lose in court, and so let’s go for the treaty, and that’d be the end around. Now they negotiated with Canada, not Mexico because Mexico was still in the revolutionary state at that point. They joined in later they did in nineteen thirty is we reopened.
01:16:26
Speaker 1: So that the ability to have that is based on this treaty. But what is the treaty called.
01:16:32
Speaker 2: So the treaty is called the migratroy Bird Act Treaty.
01:16:34
Speaker 1: But it had to have been adopted by Congress.
01:16:36
Speaker 2: It was adopted by Congress, yeah, about about nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty.
01:16:41
Speaker 1: They made it like law law.
01:16:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, they made it a law. But those guys in Missouri, including the Attorney General that I talked.
01:16:48
Speaker 1: About earlier, they were still not buying it.
01:16:50
Speaker 2: They were still not buying it. That’s when they shot those ducks. That’s when they were caught by the Felderal ward and it went up to the Supreme Court. Frank McAllister, the Attorney General, argued the case in front of the court and the court said, you know, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s a treaty and that supersedes all states’ rights, and that’s what it was.
01:17:13
Speaker 1: But was this McAllister guy, was he violating his own state law? Because by that point they probably had like kind of a fake law, like they had a law that no one paid any attention to, or did they not have any regulation in his state.
01:17:25
Speaker 2: They had regulations that they could that they had a spring shooting season that extended beyond what the Feds had said to spring counting.
01:17:32
Speaker 1: So he wasn’t he was legal in his state. He was, Okay, he was, he was.
01:17:39
Speaker 2: It’s a great story.
01:17:40
Speaker 1: Actually when what ended up happening to that guy McAllister.
01:17:45
Speaker 2: Well, he was going to be the governor, but he thought he was going to be the governor. But this didn’t help vote. Yeah, this costume votes. And he ended up becoming a lawyer for the Kansas City Insurance Company, and he was actually arrested with some Kansas City Insurance executives. When he was arrested, they were all shooting out, you know, shooting these birds. And so I went to Stultz Lake, which is this little duck club of twenty five people in the Vaden, Missouri, just to go there’re still there. He’s still there, and and and to see.
01:18:23
Speaker 1: Where are those guys aware of the sort of role their club played.
01:18:28
Speaker 2: Not completely. It was kind of funny because you know, they were saying that they thought it was all a set up, that that that was sort of how the it trickled down that the Attorney General was set up and he actually did this on purpose in order to test a lot. That’s not true.
01:18:44
Speaker 1: Oh okay, So it’s it’s become over time, it’s become that it was a little more benevolent. Yeah, And in reality he was like, no, I’m going to do what I’m going to do.
01:18:52
Speaker 2: And and and and he got to this club, and these it’s a great story. These guys followed him down. They they they got out at four o’clock in the morning at this little town and there was a taxi driver there and they said, take us out to the Duck Club. And the guy said, well, what duck club? He goes the one max at They called him back, and they actually took him out to the club and and and on the way out, they said, you can’t get in there because it’s locked to keep they keep the game wardens out. He goes, don’t worry, mac, let us in and it wasn’t locked, and they were actually able to drive right in, got dropped off, knocked on the clubhouse door, dragged one guy out of bed.
01:19:34
Speaker 1: So apparently those guys had the open fields doctrine and didn’t need a warrant. No, because it was game.
01:19:41
Speaker 2: It was a game. Yeah yeah, yeah, because.
01:19:44
Speaker 1: He got in there under subterfuge.
01:19:45
Speaker 2: They did. They did. I don’t know that much about the law, that’s exactly how.
01:19:51
Speaker 1: So that’s like, this is a this could be a follow up, like an addendum if you ever do one for your book, because there’s a there’s a lively debate right now where if a game warden suspects that there’s a violation occurring on private property, he doesn’t need a warrant. Okay, So if a game board is standing on a public road and you’re shooting away on your private property, right, he can walk on over in a way that like a cop cannot do.
01:20:29
Speaker 2: Right, Okay.
01:20:30
Speaker 1: Then there’s this thing, the open fields doctrine, and it’s like it gives game wardens a level of latitude on private property that normal police don’t enjoy in terms of their ability to go and check out what’s going on. If they know hunting to be taking place, that gives them what they need to go on to the property and then see is there a violation occurring. They don’t need to be motivated by knowledge of it occurring. And this is being tested. Now there’s you know, private private property rights advocates are arguing, why in the world would we allow wardens to violate what they perceive to be their constitutional rights and that you’d have like illegal search and seizure or whatever. Why is that okay for a game warden? And so it’s being tested. I would picture I’m an aspiring polymarket better. If I was a polymarket betting man, I would go and create one about like in the future. I think that we will see, and I’m not saying I agree with this, in the future, we will see a reduction in game wardens’ abilities to go and do their work on private property like your buddy with your buddy that caught the like your buddy that caught the bad guy.
01:21:57
Speaker 2: Well, consider how much private land there is, and right, so you can only do it on public land.
01:22:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, public land, do whatever you want.
01:22:05
Speaker 2: Right.
01:22:06
Speaker 1: What they’re what they’re contesting is that you know that they can go do what they want, that the game work can go over and be like what’s up boys, which happens all the time. Yeah, right, you know, right, I’ve been sitting out there duck hunting cornfields and you turn around. It scares you because it’s a game ward standing there, and some people are like, how could that be true? Like like a cop, you know what I mean? Sure, Like, how can that be How can you be standing here all of a sudden on my place? Where’s your warrant? You know? It’s a robust debate right now.
01:22:38
Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, So once you book out, it comes out March seventeenth.
01:22:46
Speaker 1: Oh, we’re good.
01:22:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, it’s uh yeah, you can basically get it now because you you know.
01:22:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can order it one day before, that’s right.
01:22:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it’s just like when you do that, it just shows up a lot of times. They ship early too. Congratulations. I’m holding to thank you for people watching. I’m holding the what’s called a galley copy says not for quotation, not for resale, uncorrected proof. In the vernacular, we know these is galley copies. So when you get yours, you’ll get a brand spicketty, nice hardcover book.
01:23:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it’s got some two inserts of you know, slick photos in there. And I found a lot of great historical photos as well.
01:23:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, they also call these Advanced reader copies, as it says right on the cover. Yeah, idea being this little little publishing inside. If you realize that there’s a review for a book the day the book comes out, a smart fella might be saying, well, how does he know the book’s not out yet? Yeah, so they sent them one of these advanced reader copies. So that’s what I’m holding. I want people realize if they order the book, they get like a like a legit book.
01:23:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, this is just an attractive looking book to.
01:23:58
Speaker 1: An attractive looking book. Again. It’s called The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds with James James H. Mccommons, what’s irish name? Absolutely all right, thanks so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.
01:24:17
Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate it too. It’s been fun.
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