Ep. 848: How America Almost Lost Its Birds

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with writer James McCommons https://www.jamesmccommons.com/. Topics discussed: McCommon's new book, The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250286895/thefeatherwars/; who did and didn't want The Migratory Bird Act; the commercial bird hunting era and how tweety birds were heavily exploited; the MeatEater office's punt gun; population level declines; the caviar and Marilyn Monroe pun; oology and nidology; just how small number 12 shot is; how some species disappeared; how many different groups came together to protect birds; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:35Steven Rinella?

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• 3:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay, everybody, we're joined today by author James McCommins. We're going to talk about how America 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, the name of his book is The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds. James McCommons is a emeritus. Does emeritus, when you're an emeritus professor, that means you're a former professor.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:51Steven Rinella?

  But in good standing.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  But in good standing.

• 3:53Steven Rinella?

  So what 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 and not an emeritus professor?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I don't know. Well, you have to ask for it first.

• 4:03Steven Rinella?

  You do?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. You have to ask for it. Ask to go through a committee and before they grant it to you. So.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so it's like a gift?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  It, yeah. Well, yeah, it's an honor.

• 4:12Steven Rinella?

  It's an honor to be an emeritus professor.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. All right. And then sometimes you see professor emeritus.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  You don't know about that?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay, either way, he's an emeritus professor at, get this, Northern Michigan University in Marquette, where he taught journalism, journalism and nature writing for 20 years. What's, uh, um, uh, Robert Traver? He's kind of a big deal up there, right?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, yeah, we would-

• 4:55Steven Rinella?

  Anatomy of a Murder and all that, man?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Right, Anatomy of a Murder is very important to the community.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it is.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Sure, but we have Jim Harrison.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Which I think you had a show about, so, um, without a doubt. And, um, and then, you know, some other writers that, um, we would, um, go off and do field trips on. In, in this book, George Shyrus is in this book, uh, he was a, uh, world's first wildlife photographer. We would go out to where his, uh, first wildlife photographs were taken.

• 5:26Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  And read some of George's stuff.

• 5:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got it. 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, uh, Lake Independence there.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:39Steven Rinella?

  And it was like the whole, you know, like, the, the Anatomy of a Murder, murder. Um, the, the, the couple was camped there.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  That is right, right.

• 5:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and the guy was like a military guy involved with putting some kind of equipment in there. And then the, the wife, like,

• 6:01Steven Rinella?

  depending on who you ask, 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, the guy comes and kills a dude in the bar. And I went in there, and I had heard how you can still see a bullet hole in the wall.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:16Steven Rinella?

  And I went and asked the bartender, I'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, it, the, 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?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Is over there.

• 6:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, are you familiar with all this?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been in the Lumberjack Cafe.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that what it is?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, his stuff's cool, man, like, you know, his writing about all, all the fishing stuff and the fishing quotes and all that, and, and, uh, when they made the movie with, uh- Tells his name, the same dude from It's Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 6:59Steven Rinella?

  Like, he's always running around with trout rolled up and.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  And he's tying flies in the courthouse.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and he's always like, guy, he comes in with trout wrapped up in his newspaper.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 7:10Steven Rinella?

  That was good stuff, man. That's good stuff. Yeah, there's sort of kind of like a little bit of a literary, you know, there's like a literary aspect to that town, you know?

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, Robert Travers, you know, wrote some pretty profound things about, you know, wanting to be in the environs of where trout live.

• 7:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  And that how important that was to him.

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he had cool fishing quotes. He had cool fishing quotes that still stand today.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  They do.

• 7:35Steven Rinella?

  You know, they're good fishing quotes. So what got you into, what got you into the bird story?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So, you know, George Shyrus is in this book and George Shyrus.

• 7:45Steven Rinella?

  So I want to point out to listeners.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 7:49Steven Rinella?

  The way with the taxonomy of moose.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  The giants, you have the Yukon moose.

• 7:57Steven Rinella?

  And then in the Rockies, there's other ones, just like some people argue there's a Newfoundland moose. In the Rockies, our moose here, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Washington,

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  and elsewhere, that is the Shyrus.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Shyrus moose, also Shyrasi, that's right.

• 8:15Steven Rinella?

  But that's the dude, right?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  It is, it is, yeah. You know, on one of his expeditions, so he was the world's first wildlife photographer. He was taking pictures in the 1880s, 1890s, 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 his father.

• 8:41Steven Rinella?

  From where again?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Pittsburgh.

• 8:43Steven Rinella?

  But they would go to Michigan's Upper Peninsula?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, because Pittsburgh was known back then as the hell, hell with the lid off.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  The, you know, the, it was, it was a nasty place to be.

• 8:56Steven Rinella?

  Just because it was industrial.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, in the eighteen eighties without a doubt. And, and so a lot of the, 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.

• 9:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  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 Marquette. And that's where George, who was a lawyer, first started experimenting with taking pictures of animals at night.

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he would, he would go out on Whitefish Lake.

• 9:45Steven Rinella?

  You wrote a whole book about this.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  I did, I did.

• 9:48Steven Rinella?

  Tell people that book.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And, and, and that is 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 jack light 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 did-

• 10:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's funny, I'm familiar with the pictures. I had no idea that that's why they looked so strange.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they were called the midnight series of, of pictures. And then-

• 10:26Steven Rinella?

  So he had a chemical flash?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Chemical flash. And then what he found out was that he could put a tripwire up.

• 10:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Set these things at night and then put them on trails and the deer would trip them. And so he got pictures of deer, but also pictures of birds and other animals as well.

• 10:44Steven Rinella?

  Dude, he was like trail, he's running trail cameras like way ago.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  He's the inventor of the trail camera, without a doubt. He, 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.

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:58Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  And so that's- Where I got interested in writing this book was, I had done a story on, or this book on George Shyras. And the third thing Shyras was, he was a congressman for two years from Pennsylvania. And he introduced the Shyras Bird Bill in 1904, which was the forerunner of the Migratory Bird

• 11:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty.

• 11:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  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 20th century and late 19th century and who all these people were. Many of the characters in this book were friends of Shyras's, including Theodore Roosevelt. And, and then, so that's how this book came about.

• 11:53Steven Rinella?

  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 know what you're gonna do, you know, you know, you're gonna 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 gonna have to, the themes of it, you know, you start, the ideas start taking shape. You have the umbrella.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:29Steven Rinella?

  But then later you realize that, man, there's gonna be a lot about this, or a lot about that. Or I imagine the takeaway, like the takeaway is gonna be this. When you start to think about the story of birds in America, particularly the ones that we hunted to extirpation, near extinction, extinction. Um, what emerged in your mind as kind of like the takeaway for people? Or like, what is the thing that if you, where you think in your head, like, if I don't achieve that for the reader, I will have failed?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think at this point, Shyrus, when I got interested in doing it, I mean, Shyrus 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 Migratory Bird Act, they expanded that to all birds. So I was looking for a way to tell the story, how Audubon, the Audubon Society, the folks who were professional ornithologists, and the hunters all came together to make this happen. And so I wanted to explore more of that story.

• 13:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  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 publisher, I want to write this book. You know, it's not going to be exactly the same when you're done it.

• 14:04Steven Rinella?

  No, it'll be kind of the same.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  It may not be. You don't know where you're going to go yet because you haven't done the research.

• 14:09Steven Rinella?

  I shouldn't say it's not going to be kind of the same, but no, no.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and, but, you know, they want a table of contents. They want all these things. And, and I understand that.

• 14:18Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm not hacking on them for one. And it's, it's a, it's a game. Everybody know, it's like, it's a dance you do. But do you know, you know, the writer Ian Frazier?

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 14:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay. He was 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.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  It'd be great to get to the point, you don't have to write a book proposal.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  That's where he was. And he wasn't knowing how, because he's like, I don't know what the book's going to be about.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Right, right. And so that was, you know, this one was, was I just started hitting the road, hitting archives, and then, you know, see where it went.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  You started out doing archive work?

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the, and, and to tell the story, one of the interesting stories in here is how

• 15:05Speaker 03

  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, his name is 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.

• 15:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, back off, because I got confused.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 15:50Steven Rinella?

  You mean, they just knew that someone would, not that they planned that someone would?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  So...

• 15:55Steven Rinella?

  They knew that there would be a violator, or they were planning a violator?

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Well, it was kind of, it was kind of both, in the sense that Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and so that part of Mississippi-Missouri area.

• 16:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  These folks were deadly against the migratory bird treaty.

• 16:13Steven Rinella?

  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 courts.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  In one instance, that happened before this.

• 16:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Weeks-McLean Act was tested like that. But anyway, when the migratory 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...

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Ray Holland, Ray Holland said, I'm gonna bag the Attorney General. And so he sort of followed him. The Attorney General went to a duck club in Nevada, Missouri, and shot over a 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.

• 17:27Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  The Attorney General actually argued his own case in front of-

• 17:30Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, in front of the US Supreme Court and lost. And that was the test case for the migratory bird treaty.

• 17:41Steven Rinella?

  And they held that it was sound law?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was sound law.

• 17:44Steven Rinella?

  What was his argument?

• 17:45Speaker 03

  His argument was that the states, and this was the argument previously up to this time, all through like, you know, the 20 or 30 years prior, was that birds belonged to the states. All wildlife was owned by the states and the federal government had no jurisdiction.

• 18:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  And what this movement was about 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 gonna be shot, what seasons, didn't make any sense biologically with their nesting and 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.

• 18:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, but that was a great story. And I had just heard a little bit of that when I wrote the George Shira'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.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Or that, well, 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.

• 19:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:33Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:35Steven Rinella?

  You know, people like, like, a lot of people in our audience, our audience are pretty familiar with

• 19:43Steven Rinella?

  the, the commercial duck hunting era. Like, for instance, right outside the door here, we have, I don't know if you noticed coming in, we have a big punt gun.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't see that, no.

• 19:52Steven Rinella?

  We have a Holland and Holland, London-made punt gun.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:56Steven Rinella?

  Like a, like a commercial duck hunting gun.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  So that was made in England?

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm, yeah. You know what's funny? It's got the address on it. Yeah, on, on the top of the barrel. Um, painted over in some kind of gunmetal, uh, like some kind of, like, uh,

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  paint, you'd use the paint like a, like a, like a cannon on a boat.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:17Steven Rinella?

  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

• 20:38Steven Rinella?

  too much is that what we now regard of as, as songbirds, right? That these at a time were like a heavily exploited bird.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:51Steven Rinella?

  I always joke about, in, in, like, my, 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, chickadees, crows, but most birds he saw.

• 21:14Steven Rinella?

  Were Tweety birds and they were like, that's what they were and they were not of interest.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:20Steven Rinella?

  Not of a tremendous interest, right? Because he had that, he had that, and I'm not even criticizing it, but he had that like, hunter's value system of these are the birds that.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Are important.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Are, yeah, he, 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.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Back then they called them Dicky birds.

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay. But at a time, man, there were people like hunting these things.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  They were.

• 21:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell, tell people about sort of the extent of that and, and who and what and why was going on?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  So robins, particularly in the south, when, when robins go south in the winter, they, they flock up. Um, and a lot of farmers would, would, um, uh, catch those birds in nets and they would feed them to their hogs.

• 22:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  That was, but people also ate robin pie. And, and so, yeah, without a doubt, um, flickers were eaten, um, and, and many woodpeckers a- as well. What I talk about in this book is how immigrants came from southern Europe, uh, parts of Italy and from, from eastern Europe who had a, um, a tradition of eating small birds.

• 22:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  And so when they came to America, uh, particularly like in, you know, 1910, 1900, 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, th- there's an incident, um, that I write about in Pennsylvania where,

• 23:07Speaker 03

  A lot of these landowners and these farmers just hated the idea that these foreigners were coming out from Pittsburgh on the trains and going on on their land and hunting small birds. But, uh, yeah.

• 23:22Steven Rinella?

  Shotgun them.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Shotgun, yeah. And, and anything else, woodchuck, whatever it took. I mean, it was just getting meat and, you know, taking meat back and.

• 23:30Steven Rinella?

  But there's a, one of my colleagues that I worked with on our cook, we, we have a couple of cookbooks and I worked with a woman named Krista Ruane. She has Italian, as do I. She has Italian ancestors on the side of her, on the side of her family. And she talks about, I don't want to get the guy in trouble. She talks about that her grandfather, like she remembers that her grandfather still putting them in, you know, putting them, putting songbirds, whatever he could get his hands on, putting them into his sauces.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  And he'd just cook them down and shred them and it'd be like any other meat you could throw in there, but like in the pot could be like low, just things he kinda got out of his yard or whatever. And it was just like a food item, you know?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And you could put them on a spit. You could put some bread on them, some pork and you, you know, you could do it that way.

• 24:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And were they, but like that kind of, I want to talk about the, I want to talk about like the commercial restaurant trade and the feather trade.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 24:31Steven Rinella?

  Just to, 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?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Well, I think robin numbers did decline generally, but on a, on a localized level, yes, without a doubt.

• 24:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Particularly like in the South, in Louisiana, uh, there were, you know, tens of thousands of robins that were, were killed. And people, I've got a little anecdote in the book where people were, um, You know, killing these birds and then bringing it, bringing them into New Iberia on a string and, and selling them for, you know, 25 cents or 50 cents a string.

• 25:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  So it was, it was, it was kind of a, an annual thing to be able to buy robins on the street at that time.

• 25:31Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Okay. Talk about the, uh, the, the, the feather trade. Cause this is the thing, like people can picture, I, I, 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 1700s, you know? So when you get, you know, whatever, you get into the late 1800s, um, there's not as much game around. People want to hunt, they're hunting birds, but the feather trade is not personal use. The, the feather trade isn't going out and getting some grub for yourself.

• 26:14Steven Rinella?

  The feather trade is like, is business, you know?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think, you know, people always hunted for feathers for stuffing, you know, mattresses.

• 26:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Feather fans, um, like face fans. Um, but it was around the 1870s, 1880s where this fashion trend started of having bird feathers, you know, in your hat, in, in women's hats. And that grew fairly quickly that it was, everyone needed to have, um, these, you know, these, these bird hats, as they called them.

• 26:49Steven Rinella?

  That's what they called them?

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. There were names for bird, yeah, bird hats.

• 26:53Steven Rinella?

  You'd be like, I'm gonna go to the store and get my mom a bird hat.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  You could get a bird hat. Or there was one called the three story, which was a very tall hat and very wide one as well.

• 27:04Steven Rinella?

  All loaded with feathers.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  All 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.

• 27:24Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  And, and then it wasn'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.

• 27:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  So it was like wearable taxidermy.

• 27:42Steven Rinella?

  It kind of ties into this, like you taught that like 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 jean. And then they're like, oh, yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:04Steven Rinella?

  You think that's wide? Do you mean, or like, oh, a little hole in your jeans is cool? How about I remove the entire front of my jeans? You know, and that's how like it 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?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:22Steven Rinella?

  Well, here's a bird.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Right. Here's the, it's exactly what happened and it got more ostentatious. Sometimes they were really close fitting hats. Um, almost like a cloche hat. And, um, they were all feathers. And then each time a new season happened, you'd have to get a, a new feathered hat. So, I mean, we're talking about sort of Victorian fashions, very long dresses, bustles, um, you know, lots of petticoats. Women had a lot of clothing on and then it was often topped off by these big hats. And I talk about how some women could not, um, would have to put their head out the window in order to, uh, ride on a streetcar

• 29:09Speaker 03

  or in a, um, I don't, um, a coach because their hat was so big.

• 29:15Steven Rinella?

  Hat was so damn big.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  It would not, it would not fit inside.

• 29:18Speaker 01

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• 29:48Steven Rinella?

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• 30:27Steven Rinella?

  with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Hey, you might not know this. You probably don't know this, but World Mental Health Day is October 10. But your brain does not wait around for October 10. You've got to take care of your mental health at all times. And therapy isn't just for like big life choices. It can be a place to talk through small but important things, like a work situation, taking up too much mental real estate, a relationship dynamic you can't quite name, or simply the sense that something feels off. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks. And eligible members have an average copay

• 31:11Steven Rinella?

  of just $23 per session with insurance. If you don't have insurance or live outside the U.S., you can still get 10% off your first month. Go visit betterhelp.com/meateater to explore your payment options. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com slash meat eater. If you've got something weighing on your mind, taking a toll on you, don't be afraid to reach out. Betterhelp.com/meateater. Was there like, if you picture for...

• 31:43Steven Rinella?

  The bee that, you know, at a time like you go back to the 50s or whatever, it'd be like a, like a mink fur, that was good.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:51Steven Rinella?

  If you had a muskrat fur, if you had a possum fur, not as good, but a mink fur was the shit.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 31:57Steven Rinella?

  Were, did, 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?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  So the breeding feather, um, the most popular feathers were many of like the Florida, Florida waiting birds.

• 32:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Egrets and, and the snowy egret especially was, was, was, uh, it's breeding feather, the air rat. I think is how you pronounce it.

• 32:32Steven Rinella?

  That's the feather?

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:33Steven Rinella?

  The air rat?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, there's this long breeding feather.

• 32:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  That the, the bird gets and that was, um, it was quoted more than once that it was worth more than its weight in gold. Didn't weigh much, of course.

• 32:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you can see.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 32:51Steven Rinella?

  Superlative or whatever.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  But, but it was a beautiful white feather and so those were really popular and, and, um, the plume hunters ab- absolutely went after those birds because.

• 33:03Steven Rinella?

  Snowy egrets?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, snowy egrets and, and then the rosiat spoonbill was, was very popular and that was often for face fans. They were very pretty, of course. So yeah, there, there was some pecking order. The, one of the famous things that.

• 33:20Steven Rinella?

  That was a good pun right there.

• 33:23Steven Rinella?

  Did you know? Did you know or did you just do it on accident?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  I just did it. I didn't know it.

• 33:28Steven Rinella?

  Phil, you catch that pun?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  It was great.

• 33:29Steven Rinella?

  You caught it? Did you catch it before I pointed it out?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  No, I didn't. That was just you, Steve. Congratulations.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  The uh.

• 33:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, do you know, homie, can I, do you know about the great Isbell pun controversy?

• 33:46Speaker 04

  I, I remember hearing about it. I do not remember the details, though, how they, they made a pun. And then they, they insisted that they did it on purpose, but you think that.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna tell our guest.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 34:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:13Steven Rinella?

  And he says.

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  Marilyn Monroe.

• 34:19Steven Rinella?

  And then goes, ha. Okay. And.

• 34:26Steven Rinella?

  He claims he knew all along. And made the Roe joke. To, to us, it viewed, we, we felt there was a delay.

• 34:37Steven Rinella?

  And then it occurred to him. That he had made.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  After he knew that this was on his lip.

• 34:42Steven Rinella?

  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, Marilyn, you know, Marilyn Monroe.

• 34:51Steven Rinella?

  Ha. Meaning Roe. Fish egg. So he's like, oh, no, even when I said Marilyn Monroe, I knew I was making a Roe 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 considered trying to get security camera. Footage from the restaurant.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:19Steven Rinella?

  To see the look in his eye. When he realized. Do you follow me?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Right, that he made a.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  He made a pun.

• 35:29Steven Rinella?

  He claims to this day that he did it on purpose. Either way, the pecking order.

• 35:36Steven Rinella?

  Did you lose your train of thought?

• 35:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  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."

• 35:48Steven Rinella?

  I'm not gonna take it that far. So, does it peck in order to birds?

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Well, and so, what, Frank Chapman was a banker and he was a famous ornithologist.

• 36:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  And Chapman, um, wrote for Forest and Stream magazine. He later became, uh, the curator of, uh, birds at the American Museum of Natural History.

• 36:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, he'd done all kinds of things, uh, later in his career. But early in his career, when he was a banker and these feathers were, uh, appearing on women's hats, he went down and did what, um, what is known as, as his famous sidewalk survey.

• 36:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I heard about this.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, he went, he went to the shopping area in New York, uh, took a notebook and noticed that 500 some women out of 700 had feathers in their hats.

• 36:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I've heard about this guy.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  And because of his, um, his ability to look at these hats and tell what kind of feathers they were.

• 36:48Steven Rinella?

  He was that good.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  He, he was very good, right? And, and he could tell that they were, you know, flickers and woodpeckers and many of 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, um, and so that was part of that movement, but yeah.

• 37:09Steven Rinella?

  So, he was like, so he's in New York.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Which is the heart of the millinery or hat making business.

• 37:16Steven Rinella?

  But he's, but he's seeing like perhaps locally sourced birds.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, Forest 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, and now they needed to be processed.

• 37:42Steven Rinella?

  What's the shot they would use?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  So, dust, they, they called it dust shot. Collectors still use it today, uh, ornithologists that are still permitted to collect. It's very, very fine with the shotgun.

• 37:53Steven Rinella?

  Like, do you know like how you would, um, you know, like, uh? 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. Would be like a nine shot.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  I'd have to look in the book. I didn't.

• 38:11Steven Rinella?

  I'd be curious what it is.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  And I didn't know what it was myself, but I talked to a collector at University of California Davis. And that's what they used. They call it dust shot, because I was trying to find somebody to tell me, okay, what were they using at that time?

• 38:28Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  And if you got too close to the bird, you could blow it apart.

• 38:31Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Um, so.

• 38:32Steven Rinella?

  Are you trying to find it, Grant? Dust shot?

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Dust shot?

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, looking for millimeter.

• 38:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like what shot size was dust shot? Did, uh, in your book, you mentioned like people looking for eggs.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:48Steven Rinella?

  Bird eggs.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Ooology.

• 38:49Steven Rinella?

  But that's just like, that's just people looking for something to eat, or is it different than that?

• 38:53Speaker 03

  It was both. So, uh, there was this practice called oo-ology. So if you were interested in birds at that time, um, say 1850s, right after, uh, right after the Civil War, you did three things. You, you shot birds, you took their eggs, and you took their nest. And, and that was sort of the, the entry into birding at that time. And, and the reason was that optics weren't very good, and there really weren't no good field guides at that time. So if you were interested in birds, you went out with your shotgun and your dust shot, you, the birds are hard.

• 39:33Steven Rinella?

  That was a birding trip.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  That was a birding trip, yeah.

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, number 12 shot.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  By the way, number 12, so about, uh, 1.20, 1.27 millimeters. Wow.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Is that smaller or bigger than number nine?

• 39:46Steven Rinella?

  It's descending.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  That's smaller.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  I didn't, I didn't even heard of it. Like nine is small.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:51Steven Rinella?

  You know, nine, nine would maybe be like, you know, might have applications, you know, like some guys will shoot mourning doves.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 39:59Steven Rinella?

  With nine.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  That's small.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Eight is a more common dove.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:05Steven Rinella?

  Number twelve.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Number twelve.

• 40:07Steven Rinella?

  I've never heard of it.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  So, smaller than that.

• 40:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  I guess just for ornithologists that have a permit to do this.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  So, um, 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, uh, taxidermy the bird as a study skin.

• 40:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  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, um, put some nomenclature on the outside in, in the ink. And part of it was at that period, they were still studying, you know, where did birds occur?

• 40:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  What subspecies was what? What was the color, the, the morphology of, of the egg?

• 41:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Um, all those kinds of things. And then they would take nests. Uh, that practice was known as nidology.

• 41:08Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  So these were like the three things that.

• 41:10Steven Rinella?

  I want to look at my notes here.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  That, that.

• 41:11Steven Rinella?

  Nidology, man, dude, I've never heard oology.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Oology.

• 41:16Steven Rinella?

  Oology or nidology.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Nidology.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  Collecting bird eggs, but not to eat, but like the collection of bird eggs.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:23Steven Rinella?

  And then nidology is collecting a bird nest. Well, they, many American children are nidologists.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Well, there were more back then.

• 41:33Steven Rinella?

  It pains them to leave a bird nest. You know what I mean?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:37Steven Rinella?

  It pains them to leave a bird nest in a tree. Once they confirm that it's been vacated. It's painful to them.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  So, so we still do nidology today. Yeah, I mean, people bring them home to look, but, um.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  I did it the other, you know.

• 41:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, my kids are like, there's no way, there's no way I'm gonna leave that nest.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  I'm gonna take it on.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Put it in the Christmas tree, you know.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go. There you go. So, oologists were.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  People who were interested in science, and many of them were young, there were young men, boys that tended to do this.

• 42:11Steven Rinella?

  Like affluent, affluent people?

• 42:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:31Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:33Steven Rinella?

  Displayed in what way?

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Well, you would display them in your cabinet of curiosity. Have you heard that? Yeah.

• 42:40Steven Rinella?

  Mine's more of a box.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. So it was, it was, people entertained back then in the parlor, and they would have a cabinet in their parlor, or they might have a whole room where they would display items of scientific interest, 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 Oologist, there was a magazine called The Nightologist.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  There was a magazine about it?

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. And so you could read on how to do it, you could buy and sell those eggs, trade those eggs. So a lot of oology, a lot of oologists, and there were tens of thousands of them around the country at that time, were not all that interested in birds or interested in science. They were simply interested in these kind of things that looked like, they were pretty baubles in many ways that you could put in your cabinet.

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. This is, this is creating, what you're telling me, I'd never heard any of this. What you're telling me is creating like a really interesting context 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.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:15Steven Rinella?

  But no one ever points out, that I'm aware of, that like, would be like, like many young men.

• 44:23Steven Rinella?

  Of his means, he was a collector. You sort of get the sense that it was like a freak thing.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  No, not at all.

• 44:30Steven Rinella?

  It was like a thing people were doing.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 44:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. No one 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.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, I certainly mentioned that in my book.

• 44:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  And, and I also mentioned Franklin Roosevelt was also a collector of birds. And I went to Hyde Park to look at his bird collection.

• 44:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:26Steven Rinella?

  Like she was hip to the idea that it was hazardous?

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, and, but yeah, Theodore, Theodore had his, his, his own museum specimens. His father was one of the founders of 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 mounts there.

• 45:55Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  As, as well.

• 45:56Steven Rinella?

  I want to ask the same question I asked about songbird hunters around the egg collectors, bird collectors, private collectors.

• 46:05Steven Rinella?

  Um.

• 46:08Steven Rinella?

  Did it have a population level impact?

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Yes, particularly on, again, localized level and, and, and sometimes with certain kinds of birds. So uologists would trade or sell these birds and the prices would depend on the difficulty of finding the egg.

• 46:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  So one uologist said that.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  To get a paragon falcon egg, you had to climb. And, and he said, once you've visited the nest of five duck hawks, which were falcon, you know, paragon falcons, you're living on borrowed time. And if you look at the list that I found in the oologists of the price of these eggs, any kind of raptor egg was much more expensive than the other ones.

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  I could definitely see that you'd have population level impact on that for a handful of reasons. Like, like low fecundity, um, 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.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Right, right. And so they would go back and forth. Now, some, uh, many birds would, um, 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 folks were greedy. And, and they were trading and selling. And so they would go back time after time after time after again in order to do this.

• 47:49Steven Rinella?

  Man, I can't believe, like, it's kind of blowing my mind that, like, I catch wind of all kinds of weird stuff, you know? I had no idea this was a thing.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  So, uh,

• 47:59Steven Rinella?

  What the hell's the word again? Nidology.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Nidology, right?

• 48:02Steven Rinella?

  No, that's nest.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  That's nest. Oo-ology. Um, T. Gilbert Pearson, who was the head of the National Audubon Society in the early part of the century, I think he, he was the president for twenty, twenty-five years. He grew up rather poor in Florida, and he was an oologist. 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, uh, South Carolina in order to go to school. And then his job was to go there and get an education while he was there,

• 48:44Speaker 03

  take care of the cabinet, the curiosity cabinet, which was a museum at the college. So he actually traded his egg collection for this. So, you know, some of these bird protectors started off this way as young people.

• 48:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, I'm like,

• 49:02Steven Rinella?

  In my own work right now, I'm look, I'm spending a lot of energy looking at the fur trade as a continuum. You know what I mean? Um, a lot of times when people get into the fur trade, they they're talking about colonial America or whatever, but like looking at it as a thing that never ended. Um, and the observation I have that I'll spend time on, that I'll write about is the, the, the like,

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  the enormous difference

• 49:34Steven Rinella?

  between the people that collect the fur and the people that ultimately wear the fur. Meaning the difference between a

• 49:48Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 50:12Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 50:14Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 50:25Speaker 03

  That was the pun.

• 50:26Steven Rinella?

  What's that? Oh. I knew that.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  I guess you could say it flew over your head.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Or is that a pun?

• 50:35Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that was a good one, Phil.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 50:38Steven Rinella?

  I knew that.

• 50:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, 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 hip to the idea. They knew, they're like, listen, man. People will pay money for these eggs.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:00Steven Rinella?

  But they weren't, they weren't aspiring ornithologists. They were just collectors.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  A- absolutely. There were plenty of folks like that. Pearson, actually T. Gilbert Pearson, he loved birds, but that's exactly what he was doing. You know, one year someone wrote to him through the uologist 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 crazy.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  And he wasn't coming to it as an, as a bird enthusiast. He was coming to it as like, hey, if they're gonna pay for it, I'll get it.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I, I have my own collection and I know where all these birds are and so I'm gonna do that. But yeah, there were a lot of people who, who, who did that. Even the bird collectors,

• 51:46Speaker 03

  many of the shotgun ornithologists who 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, with people who called themselves taxidermists, but they were basically just contract hunters who, who would shoot those birds for them and, and bring them back. Yeah.

• 52:11Steven Rinella?

  Whether we're talking about

• 52:16Steven Rinella?

  market hunting for ducks, which is just supplying restaurants, meat markets with duck meat, or we're talking about the feather trade, shooting egrets, spoonbills for decorations, or we're talking about egg collecting, like, like any of these things we're talking about. Um, when and how extensive? What, 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?

• 52:59Steven Rinella?

  Or birds that we know were wiped out, right? Like, when did it become apparent and how bad did it get?

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Probably by the 1880s, 1890s, when the American Ornithologist Union.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Formed in eighteen eighty-three, they created a committee at their second, at their second meeting to look at bird protection.

• 53:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Because these guys were, I called them birdmen in the book because they were all men, but they were, they were collectors, they were scientists, mostly self-educated because there, 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 one.

• 53:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  I think that, the, the year that they did the, they created that committee, they figured that there were sixty thousand terns that were shot for the feather trade. And because-

• 54:07Steven Rinella?

  In a year?

• 54:08Speaker 03

  In a year. And because where New York was located, birds were disappearing through Long Island, the Cape, along New Jersey, Barnegat Bay, and, and further down into the Carolinas too. Eventually, by eighteen ninety-

• 54:27Steven Rinella?

  What were they killing the terns for?

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Feathers, feathers. There was, there were all kinds of, there were a lot of different kinds of birds were used. Gulls were, were very popular as well.

• 54:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't think of them as having like a crazy tricked out feather like a heron does or something.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  No, that, that's true, but there was a need for a tremendous amount of feathers.

• 54:47Steven Rinella?

  Just whatever.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  And, and then some of them you could die. And so you could, you know, you could change, change that. But anyway, they-

• 54:56Steven Rinella?

  So a seagull that throws a white feather, that might have turned up on the market as a red feather.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, as something else, that's right, that's right. But I've, I've got a picture in the book that herring gulls were used to make a hat and a tippet set, as I think as they called it. And so-

• 55:16Speaker 03

  At one point by the 1890s, it was estimated, and I did talk to a biologist on that who said, "Look, we weren't taking really good, we didn't have good science back then, but it was estimated back then that 95% of Florida's wading birds disappeared during this period because of the feather trade." And clearly, most of the known rookeries were wiped out. And then that kind of continued through Louisiana and Texas as well. So it was very evident by the 1890s that these showy birds were just being wiped out.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  And it was clear because the prices had gone up so much from scarcity. Got it. That they were harder to get.

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• 57:19Steven Rinella?

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• 57:46Steven Rinella?

  A thing about just being alive, you know, in America. In a lot of places you go, you're sort of haunted by

• 57:56Steven Rinella?

  past image, you know, or you're haunted by a sense of absence. Right? Like you could go to a place, like 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, 400 big horns on the hillside. He's, and it happened now. Or, you know, herds of 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 in 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.

• 58:40Steven Rinella?

  But you can also think back to an era when you probably wouldn't see any of the things you see.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right.

• 58:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, be like an example of, oh no, it's better now. Like it's been worse, right?

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:51Steven Rinella?

  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 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.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, I'm from Pennsylvania and originally, and Pennsylvania had about 500 deer left around 1900 in the entire state. And I can remember when we did not see eagles. This is, you know, 1960s when I was growing up, 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 thing's true, you know, true with the, with birds as well. 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.

• 59:48Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  Right, but yeah, I mean, things around 1900 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 Nell and Theodore Roosevelt founding the Boone and Crockett Club.

• 1:00:09Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  And that did have effect also on birds as well.

• 1:00:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sometimes today you hear politicians and they'll talk about like deregulation is always the greatest thing in the world. What saved America's birds is.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Regulation.

• 1:00:26Steven Rinella?

  Regulation.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:00:27Steven Rinella?

  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 an acting regulation. 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 19, I think it was 1913.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:51Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it was effectively extinct well before that.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:54Steven Rinella?

  The last one died. Ivory-billed woodpecker wiped out, right?

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Carolina parakeet.

• 1:01:02Steven Rinella?

  Carolina parakeet wiped out. But when it got to where they, where people started to try to get a grip on it. How like, how did that take place? Like what, when you, if you go look and you have this sense of urgency.

• 1:01:20Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I think that was. The heart of the book was to look at how these different groups came together

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  to stop this from happening. The politicians and the legislation really came later, partially because of of public pressure to do something. But, you know, the Audubon movement started in the late 1880s. It went away for a couple of years. I mean, that's a long story, but it was it was resurrected by these women in

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Massachusetts, then it spread to different states. These were what they called the bird sentimentalist. We want to save these birds.

• 1:02:13Steven Rinella?

  They called themselves that.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  They did, they did.

• 1:02:15Steven Rinella?

  That seems like a slight.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Well, it was to some degree because it was often run by women who, who, again, the mores of the time was they're they're sentimental, they're soft-headed, they're they're too soft-hearted. Even some of the birdmen who were concerned about this were very suspicious of the Audubon Society. Because I shoot birds, I don't, I, you know, I don't look at them. And and then the hunting community came in partly because of 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 1900s and eventually began to enlist the politicians.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  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 it the the populations dropped off very quickly, really hit people hard.

• 1:03:19Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  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 Great Plains and saw, you know, 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.

• 1:03:44Steven Rinella?

  So that was at the time. I know it happened fast, but like, that was a thing people saw happen.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  They saw it happen.

• 1:03:52Steven Rinella?

  And it like, and it struck them emotionally.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  It did, it did, it did, you know, again, a lot of them hunted them. They, the, the, um, passenger pigeons were market hunted, they were eaten in restaurants in cities. But at the same time, it was something people grew up with. Was, was, um, you know, seeing the sky darkened, it sounded like thunder.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  It would kick all the dust up from, from the land and these birds would take, um, hours to pass by. It was just, it was just a sight of nature that no one will ever see again.

• 1:04:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  It happened in their lifetime. It was gone. Uh, and I think that's true of some, of some other birds as well. That, that birds that were sort of favorites to be on the farm or be in your backyard, um, were just not there anymore.

• 1:04:49Steven Rinella?

  At that time, was it like, were, were the, were the hunters? And then the preservationists or the sentimentalists? Were, were they, were they kind of like uneasy partners?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Somewhat. At the same time, um, some of the sentimentalists were hunters.

• 1:05:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  You know, and, and, uh, you know, certainly, and, and were eating meat and were eating birds that they were buying down at the market.

• 1:05:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  And, and so they understood that. So I think it was a matter of, of, um, 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.

• 1:05:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And we don't like game hogs, the pot hunter. And the pot hunter was, again, the subsistence hunter.

• 1:05:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Who had no restraint because of the laws, or you, you could ignore him. So they were going out and shooting a hundred ducks. And, and then the sport hunter tended to be. Uh, someone who felt that there ought to be laws and there ought to be um some limits. And 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.

• 1:06:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  And George Shyrus talks about that. Um, even when he introduced his nineteen oh four bill to protect game birds. He said, I would go out, you know, on a day and kill two hundred birds. And, and just bring a few home and leave the, leave the rest there. Uh, or take them into town and sell them.

• 1:06:28Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  And it was part of this whole mentality of the Gilded Age that we live in a limitless time. Uh, and there's always going to be more. Why? Because there always has been more.

• 1:06:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  And just like the buffalo. And I, 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 you, someday you will cut all the trees down. Or someday you're going to kill all the buffalo or you're going to 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.

• 1:07:10Steven Rinella?

  So what were some of the legislative steps that, that helped sort of?

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:07:16Steven Rinella?

  Put, put, get a grip on things or get things under control?

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  So the American Ornithologist Union first came out with, with what they called their model law. And it was a law that, that they were asking states to pass. To protect non-game birds.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  And that was non-game birds. And so they, they kind of left all the game birds to sports people.

• 1:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Like they'll sort that out.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. Although later that changed. Um, and, and so you had some states that adopted these laws, but there wasn't a lot of money for game wardens. Um, you know, to enforce it, there were um.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  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 Lacy Act, which you know, you know, I'm sure a lot about.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, explain it.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the Lacy Act was John Lacy was a lawyer from Iowa in 1900. And I look at my notes a little bit because I'm trying to remember in 1900, he passed the, what became known as 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 them into barrels, put them on a train and get them across the border,

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:09:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  And that started to put a damper on feather hunting and meat hunting. And it was really the first federalization of wildlife and, and birds.

• 1:09:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So that was, that was one of the initial introductions of the idea that a state couldn't just decide to wipe something out.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:09:37Steven Rinella?

  Under the argument that, hey, it's our state, don't tell us what to do.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. So places like Louisiana and other, 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 Selmon, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or Chicago.

• 1:10:01Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  So it really cut down on a lot of that.

• 1:10:04Steven Rinella?

  And because we hear the Lacy Act now in terms of all kinds of things, like you could poach a whitetail buck. And bring it to an Illinois and bring it to a taxidermist in Indiana and wind up getting a lacy act violation, or it happens around fish, but it was conceptualized as a bird thing.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it was also, there were lacy agents that were created at that time, federal agents, that were going into cold storage facilities and, and finding, you know, thousands of birds in barrels that they knew had been killed illegally and then they were confiscating them.

• 1:10:39Steven Rinella?

  When you heard that term birds in barrels, do you have any idea what that means?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you could pack a bird in a barrel, um, and-

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  In a brine, cleaned birds, or do they mean like feathered birds?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  You cleaned the bird and you could pack it in a zinc barrel and you would, you could pump, pump all the air out of it and then you could keep it in a cold storage uh, for years. So these cold storage, I have one whole chapter called Cold Storage Man, and I found this great book in 1904 about a guy who started off being a market, market hunter, then he became a cold storage man.

• 1:11:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay, explain, explain it to me again. So I got a bunch, I, I, I shoot a bunch of birds.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  You say you shoot a bunch of birds, you know, and, and initially you could put them into an ice house-

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  With natural ice and-

• 1:11:29Steven Rinella?

  So you might just gut them and put them in an ice house?

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:11:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  And then try to keep them for six months and then ship them, uh, cause you got a train now, in, in many places now you have train transportation and you could put them in these ice boxes and get them to Chicago and get them to New York.

• 1:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  I mean, a lot of market hunting went on locally and, but once ice came along and they, and, and trains came along, then you could start transporting, um, birds and other wildlife, you know, a thousand miles.

• 1:12:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  Which is what happened with passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons would roost and for weeks, people would just kill them. Uh, the pigeoneers, as they were known, they were hunters, uh, could kill them and, and, um, ship them out on trains.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but, but explain the barrel thing to me.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  So with this guy, I mean, and I, I'm not an expert on this, but, but with this guy that they arrested, who was known as the, uh, he was known as the Quail King and, um- He was raid, his, his ice house was raided and they found tens of thousands of birds in his ice house.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  And he had some in these zinc barrels where I think.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  So an airtight barrel?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Airtight barrel pumped on and, and that when the warden uh who came in uh cut open the barrel, they took some of the birds and cooked them and said they tasted quite well.

• 1:12:57Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Now, that seems like a long time to keep them.

• 1:13:01Steven Rinella?

  So he's like creating some kind of like anaerobic environment by sucking the air out of a barrel?

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, you know, through it, 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.

• 1:13:18Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  He married a, a woman from Illinois, but he wanted to take her back to New York to meet the um relatives.

• 1:13:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  It was, it was spring. It was still kind of cold. He shot a few pullover and he shot some prairie chickens. He put them in his suitcase and then um, um, 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, he, he, he named an outrageous price and um they bought his birds.

• 1:13:55Steven Rinella?

  They wanted to buy them to eat them.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  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 um, 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 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 uh on ice.

• 1:14:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  And, and make money. And that's how his whole business started.

• 1:14:31Steven Rinella?

  Selling Illinois birds in New York?

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  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 man is what they called him. Yeah.

• 1:14:46Steven Rinella?

  What was that guy's name?

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  Well, I, I'll have to look. Uh, it was a great book to find. Um, it was called the. That's why I wrote it down, so I couldn't remember.

• 1:14:58Steven Rinella?

  Cold Storage Man, what was his name?

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  That was, that was the name of, of the, uh, 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.

• 1:15:13Steven Rinella?

  Type that in, Corin, Quail King, Cold Storage Man.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Nineteen oh four.

• 1:15:17Steven Rinella?

  Nineteen oh four.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  And I think the book was called The Tale of the Gun.

• 1:15:21Steven Rinella?

  The Tale of the Gun.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and he wrote it in nineteen oh four about his, um, it's a memoir being a market hunter and, and his life. It was a great find, I just found it on the internet, I thought this thing works perfect.

• 1:15:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Steven Rinella?

  So if we, if we left off, we were talking about Lacy Act.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:40Steven Rinella?

  What, like, so Lacy Act predated the migratory and songbird treaty or whatever.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  That's right, so, so nineteen hundred was really the first federalization of, of wildlife. Where the federal government's now moving in, in saying, you know, we're gonna, uh, do something about.

• 1:16:01Steven Rinella?

  And people are probably having a fit.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely, particularly the millinery industry, the market hunters, they're all worried. Nineteen oh four, George Shyrus, uh, the third, uh, introduces the Shyrus Bird Bill, which was something like the weak, the, the migratory bird treaty, although George was just saying that, um, only, um, 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 coordination. So as a duck flies, you know, south to north, north to south, uh, it's being shot in every state.

• 1:16:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Pretty much as, as it's going, because there's not uniform regulations.

• 1:16:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  Across that. Shyrus knew that law was not gonna pass, but he wanted to introduce that concept. And he was a lawyer, so he had worked out this legal theory of, of National Powers Act, Police Powers Act, to do this. And, um, he knew it wasn't gonna 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.

• 1:17:15Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man, this conversation never ends.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  Right, so.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  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, the Boone and Crockett folks, and all of these movements, and public pressure is starting to mount on this. So, in 1911, 12, it bubbles up again. And that becomes the Weeks-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.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  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, or support hunters." And they... So, that's when the hunters really moved into this bird protection thing. And they decided that, you know, their aim was stop market hunting completely. Yeah. Protect migratory birds. Get the feds involved. And they came together with the Audubon Society to push for the passage of this act.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Now, the Audubon Society came in and said, you know, "We will help you. However, you have to include non-game birds."

• 1:18:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  And that became the Dickey Bird Amendment, which was bringing in these...

• 1:19:01Steven Rinella?

  It's like a Tweety Bird.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tweety Bird, exactly. Bringing in these little birds. Now, there were still birds that were...

• 1:19:06Steven Rinella?

  So, that was like an add-on?

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  It was an add-on, yeah. It was the Audubon Society that came in and said... Well, we basically support bird collection. However, you're just supporting game birds.

• 1:19:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you gotta add the dickey birds.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta add the dickey birds. So it was called the dickey bird amendment now.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Which is British slang for little bird, like we would say Tweety Bird here. So they 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 Weak McLean Act. And then that was passed in 1913. And then there was a, the Agriculture Department had to create rules.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  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, of, you know, extinction, including the wood duck at that time.

• 1:20:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  And, and that raised a lot of concern from these states down south that were, you know, Missouri and some of these other ones that still wanted, this, you know, they still felt that the state was, was the ownership of birds. Now, two important people evolved in that time where Howard Taft,

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  who was Roosevelt's vice president, Taft had been a judge and a lawyer, later the US Supreme Court Justice. Taft said, "The Weak McLean's Act is unconstitutional." Because there was, there was law that said the states really do own it and it's gonna lose. And there's also a guy named Elihu Root. He was a senator. He had also been Secretary of State under, under Roosevelt. He'd been Secretary of War under Taft. And so these two people told Shyrus, "Look, your law is unconstitutional." And if it gets tested, which it did. Guy shot two coots and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  So he said, the way to get around that is.

• 1:21:33Steven Rinella?

  Well, when they were pointing out that it's unconstitutional, they supported the idea.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  They supported the idea.

• 1:21:39Steven Rinella?

  They just thought it was bad legislation.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, they thought, you know, they thought George's legal theory was just not gonna, was just not gonna make constitutional muster with the Supreme Court.

• 1:21:49Steven Rinella?

  So they're advising him.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  They're advising him.

• 1:21:51Steven Rinella?

  Rather than they're, rather than being an adversary.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  So, so the end around of all of this is like, you need to go to Canada and, and get a treaty. If you get a treaty with Canada, that basically we're gonna protect birds, not only that go across state lines, but also go across international lines, because that's what birds do.

• 1:22:11Steven Rinella?

  The migratory bird treaty.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Exactly, migratory bird treaty, because most of the, the ducks are nesting in, in Canada and then coming back south. So if you get a bird treaty, uh, under the supremacy clause, the, um, it circumvents the Supreme Court. And so that was the end around. You know, you're gonna 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.

• 1:22:48Steven Rinella?

  But they joined in later.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  They did, nineteen thirty is, is, we reopened.

• 1:22:52Steven Rinella?

  So that, that, the, the ability to have that is based on this treaty, but what is the treaty called?

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  So the treaty is called the Migratory Bird Act Treaty.

• 1:23:01Steven Rinella?

  But it had to have been adopted by Congress, right?

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  It was adopted by Congress, yeah, about, about nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty.

• 1:23:07Steven Rinella?

  They made it, they made it like law, law.

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  They, yeah, they made it a law, but those guys in Missouri, including the Attorney General that I talked about earlier.

• 1:23:16Steven Rinella?

  They were still not buying it.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  They were still not buying it. That's when they shot those ducks. That's when they were caught by the federal warden. 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, it doesn't make any difference. It's a treaty, and that supersedes all states' rights. And, and that's what it was.

• 1:23:40Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  They had regulations that they could, that they, they had a spring shooting season that extended beyond what the feds had said to spring.

• 1:23:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so he wasn't, he was legal in his state?

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  He was.

• 1:24:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  He was, he was. It, it's a great story. Actually, when.

• 1:24:08Steven Rinella?

  What, what had, what ended up happening to that guy McAllister?

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Well, he was gonna be the governor, but um, he thought he was gonna be the governor, but this didn't help.

• 1:24:17Steven Rinella?

  This cost him votes.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, this cost him votes and, and he ended up um, becoming a, a lawyer for the Kansas City Insurance Company. And he was actually arrested with some Kansas City Insurance executives when he was arrested. Uh, they were all shooting out, uh, you know.

• 1:24:37Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Shooting these birds. And so I went to Stoltz Lake, which is this little duck club.

• 1:24:42Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Of 25 people in Nevada, Missouri, just to, to go there.

• 1:24:47Steven Rinella?

  They're still there.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's still there and, and, and to see where.

• 1:24:50Steven Rinella?

  Are, are those guys aware of the sort of role their club played?

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Not completely. It was kind of funny because, you know, they were saying that they thought it was all a setup. That, that, that, that was sort of how the, it trickled down that the Attorney General was set up. And, and he actually did this on purpose in order to test the law. That's not true.

• 1:25:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. So it's, it's become over time, it's become that it was a little more benevolent.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Steven Rinella?

  In, in reality, he was like, no, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do and.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  And, and, and he got to this club and these, it, it's a great story. These guys followed him down. They, they, they got out at four o'clock in the morning, um, 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, the one Mac's at. They called him back.

• 1:25:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  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, to keep the game wardens out. He goes, don't worry, Mac will let us in. And it wasn't locked and they were a- actually able to drive right in, got dropped off, knocked on the clubhouse door. Uh, dragged one guy out of bed.

• 1:26:01Steven Rinella?

  So apparently those guys had the open fields doctrine and didn't need a warrant.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:26:07Steven Rinella?

  Cause it was game, it was a game.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Probably, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:10Steven Rinella?

  So, cause you got in there under subterfuge.

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  They did, they did. I don't know that much about, but that's exactly how they did it.

• 1:26:18Steven Rinella?

  So that's like, this is a, this could be a follow up, like an addendum, if you ever do one for your book. Cause there's a, there's a lively debate right now where

• 1:26:31Steven Rinella?

  if a game warden suspects that there's a violation occurring on private property,

• 1:26:39Steven Rinella?

  he doesn't need a warrant.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:26:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:26:43Steven Rinella?

  So if a game warden's standing on a public road and you're shooting away on your private property, right? He can walk on over.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  In a way that like a cop cannot do.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:26:56Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:26:57Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, like the, if they know hunting to be taking place, that gives them what they need to go onto the property. And then C, is there a violation occurring? They don't need to be motivated by knowledge of it occurring. And this is being tested now. Um, 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? Um, and that you'd have like illegal search and seizure, whatever. Why is that okay for a game warden? And so it's being tested. I would picture, um, um, I'm an aspiring polymarket better.

• 1:27:58Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:07Steven Rinella?

  In the future, we will see a reduction in game wardens' abilities to go and do their work on private property.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 1:28:18Steven Rinella?

  Like your buddy.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Steven Rinella?

  Like your buddy that caught the, like your buddy that caught the bad guy.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  Well, considering how much private land there is and, and, right, so you could only do it on public land.

• 1:28:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Steven Rinella?

  Public land, do whatever you want.

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:32Steven Rinella?

  What they're, what they're contesting is that, uh, you know, that they can go do what they want. That a game ward can go over and be like, what's up, boys?

• 1:28:44Steven Rinella?

  Which happens all the time.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:28:47Steven Rinella?

  I've been sitting out there duck hunting in cornfields and you turn around and it scares you because there's a game ward standing there and some people are like, how could that be true? Like how, like a cop, you know what I mean?

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:28:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, how can that be true? How can you be standing here all of a sudden? You're at my place. Where's your warrant?

• 1:29:02Steven Rinella?

  You know? It's a robust debate right now.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:29:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, um, when's your book out?

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  It comes out March 17th.

• 1:29:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, we're good.

• 1:29:13Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  It's, uh, yeah, you can basically get it now because you, you know.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can preorder it now.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  One day before.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:29:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and it just like, when you do that, it just shows up. A lot of times they ship early too. Congratulations. I'm holding a, for people watching, I'm holding a, what's called a galley copy. Says, um, not for quotation, not for resale, uncorrected proof. In the vernacular, we know these as galley copies.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:29:41Steven Rinella?

  So when you get yours, you'll get a brand spikety, nice hardcover book.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's got some, um, um, two inserts of, you know, slick photos in there and, and I found a lot of great historical photos as well.

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Oh, they also call these advanced reader copies, as it says right on the cover. Idea being, this little, little, um, publishing inside.

• 1:30:07Steven Rinella?

  If you realize that there's a review for a book, the day the book comes out, a smart feller might be saying, well, how does he know? The book's not out yet.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Steven Rinella?

  So they sent them one of these advanced reader copies. So that's what I'm holding by, one people realize if they order the book, they get like a, like a legit book.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Steven Rinella?

  You know, this is just a.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  An attractive looking book.

• 1:30:25Steven Rinella?

  An attractive looking book. Again, it's called The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds with James, James H. McCommiss.

• 1:30:37Steven Rinella?

  Irish name?

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  Thanks so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  Thank you. I appreciate it too. It's been fun.

• 1:31:12Steven Rinella?

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• 1:32:23Steven Rinella?

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• 1:33:02Speaker 00

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