In 1886, the young ornithologist Frank Chapman spent two afternoons wandering through uptown New York City. He had recently given up a career in banking for the sake of collecting bird migration data for the American Ornithological Union. A few years later, Chapman would originate the tradition of the Christmas bird count, the annual winter census of birds now administered by the Audubon Society.
On those two afternoons, however, he wasn’t counting birds, at least not live ones. Instead, he was scanning ladies’ hats. He must have gotten some odd looks from their wearers, but Chapman likely didn’t care. He was on a mission. For what he found, heaped high on these ladies’ wide-brimmed hats, was depressing indeed: pieces of dead birds, their wings, crests, and sometimes even entire birds, heads down, feathers sticking up, as if they had just dropped out of the sky.
He was only counting the native birds: 4 robins, 9 Baltimore orioles, 15 snow buntings, 21 golden winged woodpeckers, 23 waxwings. Chapman’s list went on. What he had seen was a perverse parade of death, a swaying, shaking, bobbing Golgotha of birds, slaughtered and eviscerated for purely decorative purposes. Unlike the feathers in the war bonnets of Plains Indians, the head ornaments of these women were unearned, symbols of wealth rather than achievement. In the millinery trade, an ounce of heron plumes was worth twice its weight in gold, about four herons were needed to produce an ounce of feathers, and more than a hundred had to die for the average 30-ounce package. We know that 1,608 such packages were sold at auction in London during one year alone. You do the math.
Chapman’s colleague George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) was fully aware of the devastating irony of the situation. In 1887, writing about his hero John James Audubon, Grinnell observed that “there are very few among us capable of realizing the full sense of what is meant by wandering alone in the primeval forest.” Carolyn Merchant movingly evokes Grinnell’s childhood, which was spent playing on Audubon’s estate, Minnie’s Land, right on the Hudson in Upper Manhattan. During lessons with Lucy, Audubon’s widow, he had admired Audubon’s original watercolors for Birds of America. And Grinnell, editor of the hunting magazine Forest and Stream, knew that Audubon, too, had harvested birds en masse—not for hats, of course, but for his art and (as Audubon would have insisted) for the advancement of science.
But in Audubon’s paintings, feathers still were where they belonged, adorning the magnificent bodies of America’s birds, some of them so large that Audubon had to twist and bend their shapes so that they would fit onto his oversized sheets. In 1886, the year that Chapman made his rounds in the urban wilderness of Manhattan, Grinnell announced the establishment of the Audubon Society, a new organization dedicated entirely to the preservation of birds, not as objets d’art but as living, breathing creatures.
Audubon, the subject of a never-ending stream of hyperbolic biographies, has eclipsed the quieter presence of Grinnell—and this is our loss, it seems. One of the delights of this volume, a smart mix of biography and anthology, is the encounter it affords with Grinnell the writer. Merchant takes us back to 1887, when Grinnell inaugurated the first version of the Audubon Magazine, a short-lived enterprise, as it turned out. But the articles he wrote for his new magazine, especially a monthly series of bird portraits now reprinted in Merchant’s volume, endure. Clearly indebted in style and form to Audubon, Grinnell’s essays are not about following birds into the depths of the woods or up the rocky slopes of mountains. Unlike Audubon, whose narratives drip with the solitary observer’s pride that he and only he has seen the scenes of bird life he is describing, Grinnell never refers to himself, dropping the comfortable shield of the first person plural and passive voice only when he turns to the reader to instruct or admonish her.
Throughout these essays, Grinnell shows a distinct fascination with birds’ nests. Audubon wrote about them, too, but usually from the perspective of the invader, hand extended for the grab, because what he had discovered needed to be measured or eaten. For Grinnell, writing decades later and looking at these nests and describing them carefully, drawing attention represented the last chance of a rapprochement between the world of birds and our world. Birds were our friends, he urged in his magazine: We eagerly await their return in March, when they come to spend the summer with us, “building their nests and rearing their broods under our very eyes.” Birds manage their lives pretty much the way we do, and watching them as they build their homes next to ours brings out the best in us:
Of course, not all birds are so neighborly in their choice of breeding grounds, and the ones that are not didn’t fire up Grinnell’s imagination. Night herons, for example, nocturnal, voracious, and rough voiced, live in their own cities, vast, filthy colonies near swamps that often house several hundred individuals. Birds that prefer the edge of the woods, such as the eastern towhee, live dangerously and become the easy prey of foxes, skunks, and snakes.
How much more preferable are the ways of the eastern kingbird, which selects as its habitat the pear tree or sycamore tree in our yard, placing its nest so cleverly that it is supported not only by the branch on which it rests but by the twigs rising from it—an amazing artifact, a crafty mix of small sticks, weed stalks, wool, or, for extra strength, tufts of horsehair. The Baltimore oriole will use anything it can find for its nest, and Grinnell knows of one residence in particular (his own?) where each spring children would leave strands of blue and red yarn on the lawn for the orioles to take and add “a little bright color to their sober gray homes.”
Grinnell’s amiable approach to ornithology might seem as quaint to us today as Audubon’s testosterone-fueled incursions into a vanishing wilderness would have seemed dated in Grinnell’s own day. But the gentle ethics of animal/human companionship he advocated mattered at a time when wealthy women prowled the streets of New York or Chicago festooned with avian body parts. As Grinnell knew, behind every wearer of feathers was a killer of birds, and the gruesome manner in which many of these killings took place quickly became a matter of public record: Birds were shot while sitting on their nests, when they were particularly vulnerable, and the hunters, once they were done, would simply leave the plucked carcasses to rot next to the unhatched eggs.
In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt, an accomplished naturalist, used his executive power as president to declare Pelican Island on the east coast of Florida a National Wildlife Refuge—and therefore off-limits to plume-hunters. Other bird sanctuaries followed, 51 in 17 states. But no legal or political action—not the sanctuaries, not the protective laws that were passed—effectively ended the feather trade. One game warden in south Florida, a repentant onetime hunter for millineries, was murdered. Other sanctuaries soon began to resemble small military garrisons, protected by armed patrols.
Writing in the mid-1880s, Grinnell knew that the only lasting way to keep his beloved birds out of the reach of human greed was to do something about that greed itself. If humans believed that the only way they could interact with nonhuman nature was by killing it, Grinnell’s birds taught them a different path. And people were, he thought, capable of learning. Take the spotted sandpiper, a “trustful little fellow,” whose “distorted skin” was to be found on many a headgear worn by “good but thoughtless women.” The cure for such mindlessness: Watch the small sandpiper protect her young by leading us away from her nest, a fierce little David taking on the Goliath of humankind.
Throughout his monthly essays, Grinnell made it abundantly clear where his sympathies lay, and where his reader’s thoughts should be, too: with the purple martin, for example, that “sturdy, hardworking citizen of the bird world” who, if he makes his dwelling close to ours, will guard not just her young but also our poultry yard; with the wood thrush, who uses newspaper bits and rags for its nests and is so tidy that a lace ribbon from a woman’s cap she had taken to decorate her nest was retrieved undamaged; and with the crow, who builds her nest jointly with her partner, an elaborate, roomy affair, lined with mud and moss and covered by cedar bark and fine bits of wool or hair. And then there are the architects of the bird world, the chimney swifts, who use their saliva to attach their ingenious structures to our houses, little avian annexes that should entitle them, at a minimum, to the courtesy and respect one extends to all one’s neighbors.
Christoph Irmscher, provost professor of English at Indiana University, is the author, most recently, of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.
