The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 848: How America Almost Lost Its Birds

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with writer James McCommons. Topics discussed: McCommon's new book, The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds; 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 and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26, presented by Maltry Mobile and On X Maps. 12 of Meat Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes, so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour

trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light.

When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Okay, everybody, we're joined today by author James McCommons.

We're going to talk about how America nearly wiped itself out of dozens of species of birds during what we can think of as the dark days of American conservation, lost several of those birds to extinction, and then brought a great many of them back from the brink of extinction. The name of his book is The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds. James McComons is an emeritus. Does Ameritus, when you're an emeritus professor,

that means you're a former professor. Right. But in good standing. But in good standing. 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. Well, you have to ask for it first. You do?

Yeah. You have to ask for it. It has to go through a committee and before they grant it to you. Oh, so it's like a gift. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's an honor. It's an honor to be an emeritus professor. 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. Oh, okay. All right. And then sometimes you see Professor Emeritus. Well, I don't know. You don't know about that? Okay. Either way, he's an Emeritus Professor at, get this, Northern Michigan University in Marquette, where he taught journalism and nature writing for 20 years. What's Robert Traver? He's kind of a big deal up there. Oh yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. So yeah, we would- Anatomy of a murder and all that, man. Right. Anatomy of a murder is very important to the community. Yeah, it is. Sure. But we have Jim Harrison, which I think you had a show about.

So without a doubt. And then some other writers that we would go off and do field trips on. In this book, George Shyrus, in this book. He was a world's first wildlife photographer. We would go out to where his first wildlife photographs were taken

and read some of Georgia's stuff. Oh, got it. Yeah. You know, years ago, I was working on a, I was researching a book that I never wrote about the Great Lakes and I was hanging out at Lake Independence there. Yeah. And it was like the whole, you know, like the anatomy of a murder,

murder. the couple was camped there. That is right. Yeah, and the guy was like a military guy involved with putting some kind of equipment in there. And then the wife, like, depending on who you asked, there was like a bear hanging around the campground. She goes down to the local bar, runs into some guys in the local bar, whatever. 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 Yeah 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

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 Is over there Yeah are you familiar with all this Yeah I've been in the lumberjack cafe

Oh, is that what it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, his stuff's cool, man. Like, you know, his writing about all the fishing stuff and the fishing quotes and all that. And when they made the movie with, uh, tells his name, the same dude from, it's a wonderful life. Jimmy Stewart. Oh, right. Right.

Like, he's always running around with trout rolled up and. And he's tying flies in the courthouse. Yeah. And he's always like, guy, he comes in with trout wrapped up in his newspaper. Right. Exactly. That was good stuff, man. That's good stuff.

Yeah, so it's kind of like a little bit of a literary, you know, there's like a literary aspect to that town, you know. Absolutely. Yeah, Robert Travers, you know, wrote some pretty profound things about, you know, wanting to be in the environs of our trout live. Yeah. And that how important that was, too. Yeah, he had cool fishing quotes. He had cool fishing quotes that still stand today. They do.

You know, they're good fishing quotes. So what got you into the bird story? So, you know, George Chiris is in this book. And George Shirevish... So I want to point out the listeners. Sure. The way with the taxonomy of moose. Oh, yeah.

The giants. You have the Yukon Moose. And then in the Rockies, there's other ones. There's like some people argue there's a New Finland moose. In the Rockies, our moose here, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Idaho, Washington, and elsewhere. That is the Chiris. Chiris Moose, also Shirassie. That's right.

But that's the dude, right? It is. Okay. 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. Where again? Pittsburgh. But they would go to Michigan's Auburn Peninsula. Yeah, because Pittsburgh was known back then as the hell with the lid off. The, you know, the, it was, it was a nasty place to be. Just because it was industrial.

Yeah, in the 1880s, without a doubt. And so a lot of the well-known and wealthy families in Pittsburgh would go someplace to spend summer. And the Shiruses were trout fishermen. And his father first started going up to the Upper Peninsula very early on, like 1830s. Okay. And then the family started to go up. They established their 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. Oh, is that right? Yeah, so he would go out on Whitefish Lake. You wrote a whole book about this. I did, I did. Tell people that book. And that is how I got interested.

But he would go out on Whitefish Lake, and he had a chemical flash, and he would hold up. They would listen for deer coming down to the shore. And then they would jacklight the deer, and then they would push in slowly with the boat. George would stand up. With this chemical flash, take the picture. Took him three years to get an image. But he took a lot of images at night. And then the other thing he did.

He was probably I'm familiar with the pictures. I had no idea that that's why they looked so strange. Yeah, they were called the midnight series of pictures. And then... So he had a chemical flash? Chemical flash. And then what he found out was that he could put a trip wire up, set these things at night, and then put them on trails.

And the deer would trip him. And so he got pictures of deer, but also pictures of birds and other animals as well. Dude, he was like, he's running trail cameras. He's the inventor of the trail camera, without a doubt. Huh. He was the one. He took a patent out on that device, but it was never really practical for anybody else to use. Got it.

Yeah. Wow. And so that's where I got interested in writing this book was I had done a story on, or this book on George Chiris. And the third thing Shira's was he was a congressman for two years from Pennsylvania, and he introduced the Shira's Bird Bill in 1904, which was the forerunner of the Migratory Bird Act in the Migratory Bird Treaty. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. And so that's that was where I thought there's a bigger story to this. And then when I was writing that book, it's called Camera Hunter, I really had to learn a lot about that period of.

the 20th century and late 19th century and who all these people were many of the characters in this book were friends of Shiris's including Theodore Roosevelt and And then so that's how this book came about Yeah, well, you know when you start thinking about a book like that Like I'm kind of I'm working on a project where I'm kind of in the phase right now of You might you know what you're gonna do you know you know you're gonna do something like whatever some 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 the ideas start taking shape you have the umbrella yeah 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, what emerged in your mind as kind of like the takeaway for people? Or like, what is the thing that if you, were you think in your head, like, if I don't achieve that for the reader, I will have failed?

Well, I think at this point, Shira's, when I got interested in doing it, and Shira's 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 ornithologist, and the hunters all came together to make this happen.

And so I wanted to explore more of that story. Yeah. And so that was part of it. And like anything, you say when you first write your book proposal, which you're pitching to your publishers, I want to write this book, you know it's not going to be exactly the same when you're done at the end. It may not be. You don't know where you're going to go yet because you haven't done the research.

I shouldn't say it's not going to be kind of the same, but no, no. Well, yeah. But, you know, they want a table of contents. They want all these things. And I understand that. No, I'm not hacking on them for want. And 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? Sure. 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. It would be great to get to the point. You don't have to write a book proposal. That's where he was.

And he wasn't knowing how good. Because he's like, I don't know what the book's going to be about. Right, right. And so that would, you know, this one was, was I just started hitting the road, hitting archives, and then, you know, see where it went. You started out and doing archive work? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so tell the story.

One of the interesting stories in here is how after the migratory bird, treaty was okayed by Congress, there was going to be a test case that literally somebody was going to go out and violate it. And then that would go up through the courts to make sure that it was a constitutional law. And in this case, it was the Attorney General of Missouri, who was a duck hunter. His name was Frank McAllister, and that he was telling him. everybody in Missouri, like, ignore the law. Spring hunting is okay. Everybody should go spring hunting, and I'm going to go spring hunting. And I got, hold on, you have back up because I got

confused. Sure. You mean they just knew that someone would, not that they planned that someone would. So they knew that there would be a violator or they were planning a violator. Well, it was kind of a, it was kind of both in the sense that Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and sort of that part of the Mississippi, Missouri area. Okay. These folks were deadly against the migratory bird trading. 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. In one instance, that happened before this. Okay. 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 gay morden, federal game warden, who covered seven states, his name was Ray Holland. Ray Holland said, I'm going to 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 100 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. Good. The Attorney General actually argued his own case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. and that was the test case for the migratory bird treaty. And they held that it was sound law. Yeah, it was sound law.

What was his argument? 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 belong to the states. All wildlife was owned by the states, and the federal government had no jurisdiction. Okay. 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 birds were going to be shot, what seasons didn't make any sense biologically with their nesting in migratory patterns. So slowly but surely the feds moved in. to take jurisdiction over those birds. And it culminated in the Maggotory Bird Treaty Act. Okay. Yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. And there was.

And so this kind of wonderful anecdote that goes on for 10 pages in this book about how these guys arrested the attorney, general came from that. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, people, like, a lot of people in our audience, our audience are pretty familiar with the commercial duck hunting era. Like, for instance, right outside the door here, we have a, I don't know if you know what

was coming in. We have a big punt gun. Oh, I didn't see that. No. Yeah. We have a Holland and Holland, London made punt gun. Okay. Like a commercial duck hunting gun.

So that was made in England. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, it's funny. It's got the address on it. it on the top of the barrel. Paint it over in some kind of gun metal, like some kind of like a paint you'd use to paint like a like a,

like a cannon on a boat. Yeah. But then the action is very ornate and fine, you know. But if you look, if you can kind of like look through that paint, you can see that there's an address from Holland and Holland. We made a big punt gun shooting video that we haven't finished yet. But anyways,

just in conversations we've had on the show, We've talked about commercial duck hunting. And I don't want to leave that out of our conversation. But the thing we haven't touched on too much is that what we now regard of as songbirds, right? These at a time were like a heavily exploited bird. Yeah. I always joke about in like my father's bird taxonomy. He knew game birds.

He was a duck hunter. He hunted upland birds. He knew his game birds. He knew two or three other birds, Robbins, Blue Jays, chickadees, crows. But most birds he saw were Tweety birds. And they were like, that's what they were. And they were not of interest, not of a 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 are important are yeah here 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 butternat he was more like yeah it's a tweety bird but at a time like tweety birds back then they called them dicky birds okay but at a time man there were people like hunting these things they were yeah tell tell people about sort of the extent to that and who and what and why was going on? So Robbins, particularly in the south, when Robbins goes south in the winter, they flock up.

And a lot of farmers would catch those birds and nets and they would feed them to their hogs. Oh, okay. But people also ate Robin Pie. And so, yeah, without a doubt, flickers were eaten. and many woodpeckers as well. What I talk about in this book is how immigrants came from southern Europe, parts of Italy and from Eastern Europe, who had a tradition of eating small birds.

And so when they came to America, particularly like in, you know, 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, there's an incident that I write about in Pennsylvania where a lot of these landowners in these farmers just hated the idea that these foreigners were coming out from Pittsburgh on the trains

and going on on their land and hunting small birds. But, yeah, with shotgun. Shotgun, yeah. And anything else. woodchuck whatever it took i mean it was just getting meat and you know taking meat back and 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 christie ruane she has italian as do i she has italian ancestors on the side of her family and she talks about i don't want to get the guy in trouble she talks about her grandfather

like she remembers that her grandfather still putting them in in, you know, putting them, putting songbirds, whatever he could get his hands on, putting them into his sauces. Yeah. 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 loke, just things he kind of got out of his yard or whatever. And it was just like a food item.

That's right. That's right. And you could put him on a spit. You could put some bread on them, some pork. And, you know, you could do it that way. Yeah. And we're, but like that kind of. I want to talk about the commercial restaurant trade and the feather trade.

Sure. Just to wrap up on the songbird thing, was there ever, were they able to have population level impacts? Like, take Robbins. Would that type of harvest, was they able to have a population level impact? Like, did we ever see Robin numbers decline to a dangerous level? Well, I think Robin numbers did decline generally, but on a localized level, yes. Yes, without a doubt. Particularly like in the south, in Louisiana,

there were, you know, tens of thousands of robins that were killed. And people, I've got a little anecdote in the book where people were, you know, killing these birds and then bringing them in a new Iberia on a string and selling them for, you know, 25 cents or 50 cents a string. Okay. So it was it was it was kind of an annual thing to be able to buy Robbins on the street at that time. Hmm. Okay.

Talk about the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the feather trade. Because this is the thing, like, people can picture, I think, like, a lot of people can picture that when people don't have a lot of money, a lot of other game isn't around, you know, we didn't have a lot of the times we're talking about deer numbers had already been depleted even going back to the mid-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 feather trade isn't going out and getting some grub for yourself the feather trade is like is business you know yeah i think you know people always hunted for feathers

for stuffing, you know, mattresses, feather fans, like face fans. But it was around the 1870s, 1880s, where this fashion trend started of having bird feathers, you know, in your hat, in women's hats. And that grew fairly quickly that it was everyone needed to have

these, you know, these bird hats, as they called them. That's what they called them? Yeah, there were names for bird. Yeah, bird hats. You'd be like, I'm going to go to the store and get my mom a bird hat. 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. All loaded with feathers.

All loaded with feathers, right? In fact, these things kind of became, as time went on through the 1880s and 1890s, as the designers competed with one another, these hats became more ostentatious. they had to try to outdo one another, so they got bigger. Okay. And then it wasn't just feathers. They were putting taxidermy birds on their heads. And so it wasn't unusual to see three, four birds arranged with maybe some natural materials that would show the bird.

So it was like wearable taxidermy. It kind of ties into this, like you tell that sort of arms race, not arms race, but... I can't remember who, but someone was observing how fashion always becomes self-parody, meaning someone will make a wide-leg gene. And then they're like, oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. 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, fashion goes to self-parody and then the thing vanishes. So it's funny to think of feathers being like, like, like, oh, you think a few feathers are cool. Right. Well, here's a bird. Right.

Here's the, it's exactly what happened. And they got more ascentation. Sometimes they were really close-fitting hats, almost like a close hat. And they were all feathers. And then each time a new season happened, you would have to get a new feathered hat. So, I mean, we're talking about sort of Victorian fashions, very long dresses, bustles. you know, lots of petticoats. 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 would have to put their head out the window in order to ride on a streetcar or in a coach because their hat was so big. It would not fit inside. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired or lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moultry Mobile and OnX Maps.

12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. was there like if you picture fur the bee that

you know at a time like you go back to the 50s or whatever be like a like a mink fur that was good yeah if you had a muskrat fur if you had a possum fur not as good but a mink fur was the shit yep were did consumers have a notion of what 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 so the breeding feather the most popular feathers were many of like the Florida Florida waiting birds okay eagrets and and the snowy egret especially was was it's breeding feather the airgrat I think is how you pronounce it that's the feather yeah the air grad yeah there's there's this long breeding feather

that the bird gets. And that was, it was quoted more than once that it was worth more than its weight in gold. Didn't weigh much, of course. Yeah, yeah, you can see. It's a good superlative or whatever. Exactly. But it was a beautiful white feather. And so those were really popular.

And the plume hunters absolutely went after those birds because. Snowy eagrots. Yeah, snowy eagrots. and then the rose at spoonbill was very popular, and that was often for face fans. They were very pretty, of course. So, yeah, there was some pecking order. One of the famous things that...

That was a good pun right there. Did you know? Did you know or did you just do it on accident? I just did it. That's good. I didn't know it. Phil, you catch that pun? It was great.

You caught it? Did you catch it before I pointed it out? No, I didn't. That was just you, Steve. congratulations. The, or do you know, a moment,

can I, do you know about the great Isbell pun controversy? I, I remember hearing about it. I do not remember the details, though,

how they, they made a pun, and then they insisted that they did it on purpose, but you think that, it's BS. Okay. I'm meeting with some friends.

And we're at this place and they bring a caviar dish out. One of my friends winds up with a caviar, egg stuck right here on his lip. Okay. And he says Marilyn Monroe.

And then goes, ha! Okay. And he claims he knew all along and made the row joke. To us, we felt there was a delay. And that it occurred to him that he had made.

After he knew that this was on his lip. 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 Monroe. Ha! Meaning row, fish egg. So he's like, oh, no, even when I said Marilyn Monroe, I knew I was making a row joke.

Other people at the table felt that there was a delay. And you could see him realize after saying it how spot on it was, Marilyn Monroe. We never could settle it. We consider trying to get security camera footage from the restaurant. Yeah. To see the look in his eye when he realized, do you follow me? Right, that he made a pun. He claimed to this day that he did it on purpose.

Be the way, the pecking order. Did you lose your train of thought? No. 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. I'm not going to take it that far.

So there's a peck in order to birds. Well, and so Frank Chapman was a banker, and he was a famous ornithologist. Okay. And Chapman wrote for, Forrest and Stream magazine. He later became the curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History. Oh, okay.

He'd done all kinds of things later in his career. But early in his career, when he was a banker and these feathers were appearing on women's hats, he went down and did what is known as his famous sidewalk survey. Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, he went to the shopping hearing in New York. Took a notebook and noticed that 500-some women out of 700 had feathers in their hats. And because of his ability to look at these hats and tell what kind of feathers they were. He was that good.

He was very good. 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 so that was part of that movement. But yeah. So he was like, so he's in New York. And he's the heart of the millinery or hat-making business.

But he's seeing like perhaps locally sourced birds. Oh yeah. Yeah. In fact, Forest and Stream did an article right around that time where they went to one of these millinery houses and talked about how many birds were being shipped. in from Long Island and that they were coming in every day. Birds in meat, as they called it. They had just been shot with dust shot, and now they needed to be processed.

What's the shot they would use? So dust. They called it dust shot. Collectors still use it today, ornithologists that are still permitted to collect. It's very, very fine with the shotgun. Do you know how you would, you know, like a nine shot today, would be about, that's,

someone's gonna crack me on this, that'd be about as small as you're gonna find. It would be like a nine shot. I'd have to look in the book. I didn't. I'd be curious what it is. And I didn't know what it was myself,

but I talked to, um, a collector at, uh, University of California, Davis. And, uh, that's what they use. And they call it dust shot.

Because I was trying to find somebody to tell me, okay, what were they using at that time? Yeah. And if you got too close to the bird, you could blow it apart. Yeah. So. Are you trying to find it,

Grant? Dust shot? Yeah, looking for milling. Yeah. Like what shot size was dust shot? Did, uh, in your book you mentioned, like, people looking for eggs. Right. Bird eggs.

Uol. But that's just like, that's just people looking for something to eat, or is it different than that? It was both. So there was this practice called uology. Okay. So if you were interested in birds at that, time, say 1850s, right after the Civil War, you did three things.

You shot birds, you took their eggs, and you took their nest. And that was sort of the entry into birding at that time. And the reason was that optics weren't very good, and there really weren't 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. That was a birding trip. That was a birding trip.

Oh, number 12. By the way, number 12. So about 1.20, 1.27 millimeters. Wow. Is that smaller or bigger than number nine? It's descending. Okay. I didn't, I don't even heard of it.

Like, nine is small. Yeah. You know, nine would maybe be like, you know, might have applications, you know, like some guys will shoot morning doves. Yeah. With nine. Okay. That's small.

Yeah. Eight is a more common dove. Yeah. Number 12. Number 12. Never heard of it. So, smaller than that. Yeah.

I guess just for ornithologists that have a permit to do this. So, so you would shoot the bird, you'd bring it back. You would, you'd probably have a big, thick volume because, again, there's not really a fuel guide to take out there with you. You'd identify the bird, and then you would attack.

Exidermy the bird as a study skin and then put it away and then the other thing you would do is you would collect their eggs and blow the egg out and Put some nomenclature on the outside in the ink and Part of it was at that period they were still studying you know where did birds occur okay, what subspecies was what? What was the color the the the morphology of of the egg? all those kind of things and then they would take nest uh that practice was known as nydology huh so these were like the three things that one look at my nose that that that i man dude i've never heard oology uology oology or nydology is collecting bird eggs but not to eat but like the collection of birds eggs right and then nydology is collecting a bird nest

Many American children are nidologists. Well, there were more back then. It pains them to leave a bird nest. You know what I mean? Right. It pains them to leave a bird nest in a tree. Once they confirm that it's been vacated, it's painful to them. So we still do ninaology today.

I mean, people bring them home to look. But, um. Yeah. My kids are like, there's no way. There's no way I'm going to leave that nest. Yeah. I'm going to take it. The Christmas tree.

Yeah, there you go. There you go. So urologists were people who were interested in science, and many of them were young. There were young men that boys attended to do this. Like affluent. Affluent people? Yeah, well, and I guess what I'm leading up to here to say that a lot of urologists were just interested in egg collecting, collecting bird eggs didn't have any science behind it.

It was more like stamp collecting or coin collecting. It was kind of a craze at one time. Really? Yeah. Displayed in what way? Well, you would display them in your cabinet of curiosity. Have you heard that? Yeah.

You know, so. Mine's more of a box. Well, exactly. So 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. Okay.

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 Uolologist. There was a magazine called The Nidologist. There was a magazine about it. 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. There were pretty bibles in many ways that you could put in your cabinet. Yeah. And this is, this is creating what you're telling me, I 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. Yeah. But no one never points out that I'm aware of that like, would be like like many young men of his means he was a collector you sort of get the sense that it was like a freak thing no not at all it was like a thing people were doing absolutely 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 sure um well hope i certainly mentioned that in my book Yeah. And I also mentioned Franklin Roosevelt was also a collector of birds. And I went to Hyde Park to look at his bird collection. Okay. And it's all there in his cabinet of curiosity. He has mounted birds. And they would preserve them with arsenic.

Okay. And his mother was afraid of FDR using arsenic. And so she sent his birds downriver. to New York City and a professional would do his birds. But Teddy, Teddy would do his... Like she was hip to the idea that it was hazardous. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, but, yeah, Theodore had his own museum specimens.

His father was one of the founders at the American Museum of Natural History. So Theodore got to hang out at the museum and learn from some of the taxidermines. there. And if you go there today, I think on the first floor, there are still a couple of his mounts there as well. I want to ask the same question I asked about songbird hunters around the egg collectors, bird collectors, private collectors. Did it have a population level impact? Yes, particularly on, again, localized level. And sometimes with certain kinds of birds. So urologists would trade or sell these birds and the prices would depend on the difficulty of finding me egg. So one urologist said that to get a paragon falcon egg, you had to

climb. And he said once you visited the nest of five duck hawks, which were paragon falcons, you're living on borrowed time. And if you look at the list, um, that you're, that I found in the urologist of the price of these eggs, any kind of raptor egg was much more expensive than the other ones. I could definitely see that you'd have population level impact on that for a handful reasons. Like low fecundity, low density, but then you can pretty much go into an area.

And if you're like a good observer, you can probably go into an area and spend some time there and be like, there's one there. There's one there and there's one there. And that's it. Right, right. And so they would go back and forth. Now, many birds would lay a second clutch.

Yep. 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 they were trading and selling. And so they would go back time after time, after time, after again in order to do this. man i can't believe like it's kind of blown my mind that like i catch wind to all kinds of weird stuff you know i had no idea this was the thing yeah yeah so uh what hell's the word again nightology nightology right no that's nest that's nest uology ology um t gilbert pearson

who was the head of the national ottobon society in the early part of the century i think He was the president for 20, 25 years. He grew up rather poor in Florida, and he was a neologist. And so he would collect all these eggs, and he would go back time after time after time to get as many as he could, and he would sell them. He actually traded his egg collection to a small college in South Carolina in order to go to school. And then his job was to go there and get an education while he was there, take care of the cabinet, the Curiosity Cabinet, which was a museum at the Scholarly.

So he actually traded his egg collection for this. So, you know, some of these bird protectors started off this way as young people. Yeah. You know, I'm like in my own work right now, I'm looking, I'm spending a lot of energy looking at the fur trade as a continuum. You know what I mean? A lot of times when people get into the fur trade, they were talking about colonial. America or whatever, but like looking at it as the thing that never ended. Um, and an observation I have that I'll spend time on, that I'll write about is the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, like, the enormous difference between the people that collect the fur and the people that ultimately wear the fur, meaning the difference between a A kid that grows up on a ranch in Nevada and catches a few bobcats every year. And a Russian oligarch's wife who ultimately wears those bobcats. Not only a big difference, but there's somewhat of a culturally, like a mutual disdain. Right. the egg guys though like did the egg trade i know the feather trade did the egg trade like kind of hatch a that was the pun what that oh i knew that i guess you could say it flew over your head or is that

a pun but it was a good one phil thank you i knew that hatched Were 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. Yes. But they weren't, they weren't aspiring ornithologists. They were just collectors. That's right. Yeah. Absolutely.

There were plenty of folks like that. Pearson actually, to you, Gilbert Pearson, he loved birds, but that. That's exactly what he was doing. You know, one year, someone wrote to him through the urologist 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. And he wasn't coming to it as a bird enthusiast. He's coming to it as like, hey, if they're going to pay for it, I'll get it.

Yeah, exactly. I have my own collection and I know where all these birds are. And so I'm going to do that. But, yeah, there were a lot of people who did that. Even the bird collectors, many of the shotgun ornithologists 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 people who called themselves taxidermists, but they were basically just contract hunters who would shoot those birds for them and bring them back.

whether we're talking about market hunting for ducks which is just supplying restaurants meat markets with duck meat or we're talking about the feather trade shooting egrets spoonbills for decorations or we're talking about egg collecting like any of these things we're talking about um when and how extensive what when did the the damage start to show, like the resource damage? When did it show and how extensive did the damage get? Regardless of what the ultimate use was, like, what were we seeing in terms of birds that we now think of as abundant that weren't, or birds that we know were wiped out, right? Like, when did it become apparent and how bad did it get?

Probably by the 1880s, 1890s, when the American Ornithologist Union formed in 1883, they created a committee at their second meeting to look at bird protection. Okay. Because these guys were, I called them bird men in the book because they were all men, but they were, they were collectors, they were scientists, mostly self-educated because there was no university courses for it to become an ornithologist. They had this committee that went out and then studied what was happening with birds. And they identified plenty of places where birds were being wiped out. Cape Cod was one. I think that the year that they did the they created that committee,

they figured that there were 60,000 turns that were shot for the feather trade. In a year. In a year. And because where New York was located, birds were disappearing through Long Island, the Cape, along New Jersey, Barnaget Bay, and further down into the Carolinas, too. Eventually, by 1890s... What were they killing the turns for? Feathers. Feathers.

There were all kinds of... There were a lot of different kinds of birds were used. Gulls were very popular as well. Yeah, I don't think of them as half. having like a crazy tricked out feather like a heron does or something. No, that, that's true. But, um, there was a need for a tremendous amount of feathers. Just whatever.

And, and then some of them you could die. And so you could, you know, you could change, change that. Um, but anyway, so what, so a seagull that throws a white feather, that might have turned up on the market as a red feather. Yeah, as something else. That's right. That's right. But I've got a picture in a book that, uh, herring galls were used to make a, a, a, a

hat and a tippet set of, I think, as they called it. And so at one point, by the 1890s, it was estimated, and I did talk to a biologist on Nath who said, look, we weren't taking really good, we didn't have good science back then, but it was estimated back then that 95% of Florida's waiting 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 the showy birds were just being wiped out.

And it was clear because the prices had gone up so much from scarcity. Got it. that they were harder to get. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now got my own show. If you're tired or lazy takes,

if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms and the IHeart Radio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26, presented by Maltry Mobile and On X Maps. 12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts

from the last year, released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. a thing about

just being alive in America in a lot of places you go you're sort of haunted by past image you know or you're haunted by a sense of absence right

like you could go to a place like if I'm just thinking around here you know you could go to a place where mountain men would talk about hillsides full of big horns and they're seeing three 400 big horns on the hillside you just ain't going to happen now or you know herds buffalo that you watch cross a river

for three days all day right and you feel that absence but it's interesting to think that that you could be in florida right today you could be on vacation down in florida on the beach and you're like thinking back you could think back to maybe an era of greater abundance but you can also think back to an era when you probably wouldn't see any of the things you see. That's right. That's right. You know, it'd be like an example of, oh, no, it's better now. Like, it's been worse, right? Right. Which is true again and again on all kinds of game animals and things, but you just don't, like, I don't, anyways, think that, you know, you imagine like that you're on a shoreline, that you could have been on a shoreline back then, there were no herons.

You see eagrots all over in pastures. There were no eagrots in those pastures. Yeah, I think, you know, I'm from Pennsylvania and originally, and Pennsylvania had about 500, 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, 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, yes, 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 we'll be in the future depending on how we take care of them. 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 Berg-Rournell and Theodore Roosevelt founding the Boone and Crockett Club. And that did have effect also on birds as well.

Yeah, sometimes today you hear politicians, and they'll talk about like deregulation as though it's the greatest thing in the world. What saved America's birds is, is regulation. That's right. Like if we had stayed, it wasn't even deregulated, it was unregulated. If we had stayed unregulated, they'd be gone. Saving wildlife in America was regulation. It was enacting regulation.

when 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. I mean, it was effectively extinct well before that. Right. But the last one died. Ivery-built woodpecker wiped out, right? Caroline parakeet. Carolina parakeet wiped out.

But when it got to where people started to try to get a grip on it, how did that take place? Like what when you if you go look and you have this sense of urgency Um 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? Well yeah I think that was the heart of the book was to look at how these different groups came together

Um To stop this from happening. Mm-hmm. The politicians and the legislation really came later, partially because 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 resurrected by these women in Massachusetts. Then it spread to different states.

These were what they called the bird sentimentalist. we want to save these birds. They called themselves that. They did. They did. That seems like a slight. Well, it was to some degree because it was often run by women who, again, the moors of the time was, they're sentimental, they're soft-headed. 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, you know, I don't look at them. And then the hunting community came in partly because of market hunting. They wanted to stop market hunting. And they saw that there was a synergy between all three of these groups. And then that continued into the 1900s and eventually began to enlist the politicians. But it was a slow process.

But part of it was people were looking around and there were just fewer birds. And I think the passenger pigeons decimation, the way the populations dropped off very quickly, really hit people hard. Is that right? 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 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 – the passenger pigeons, which was an epic, you know, site to see where, you know. So that was at the time, I know it happened fast, but like that was a thing people saw

happen. They saw it happen. And it like, and it struck them emotionally. It did. It did. It did. You know, again, a lot of them hunted them. They, the, the, um, passenger pigeons were marking hunted.

They were eaten in restaurants and. cities. But at the same time, it was something people grew up with. Uh-huh. It was, you know, seeing the sky darkened. It sounded like thunder. It would kick all the dust up from the land. And these birds would take hours to pass by. It was just a sight of nature that no one will ever see again. Yeah. It happened in their lifetime. It was gone. And I think that's true. some other birds as well.

Yeah. That birds that were sort of favorites to be on the farm or be in your backyard were just not there anymore. At that time, was it like were the hunters and then the preservationists or the sentimentalists? Were they kind of like uneasy partners? Somewhat. At the same time, some of the sentimentalists were hunters. Yeah. You know, and, you know, certainly, and we're eating meat and we're eating birds that they were buying down at the market.

Okay. And so they understood that. So I think it was a matter of over time coming together saying, we can, you know, we can work together. And then it was not so much that, well, we don't like hunters. We don't like market hunters. And we don't like game hogs, the pot hunter. And the pot hunter was, again, the subsistence hunter who had no restraint because of the laws, or you could ignore them. So they were going out and shooting a hundred ducks.

And then the sport hunter tended to be someone who felt that there ought to be laws and there ought to be some limits. And at the same time, when sport hunting first started in the 1870s, 1880s, the whole idea was to kill as many things as you could. That was a good day in the field. And George Chiris talks about that even when he introduced his 1904 bill to protect game birds. He said, I would go out on a day and kill 200 birds and just bring a few home and leave the rest there or take him into town and sell them. And it was part of this whole mentality of the gilded age that we live in a limitless time. And there's always going to be more. Why?

Because there always has been more. Yeah. And just like the buffalo. And I talk about it in the book that this began to change. People started to realize you can't cut all the trees down. And someday you will cut all the trees down. Or 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 in.

the lexicon. And that doesn't really come in until the 1880s, 1890s. So what were some of the legislative steps that help sort of get a grip on things or get things under control? So the American Ornithologist Union first came out with what they called their model law. And it was a law that they were asking states to pass to protect non-game birds. And that was non-game birds. And that was non-game birds. And so they kind of left all the game birds to sports people. Got it. They'll sort that out.

Exactly. Exactly. Although later that changed. And so you had some states that adopted these laws, but there wasn't a lot of money for game wardens to enforce it. There were the sheriff's departments in these little counties did not want to arrest anybody for shooting birds. Sometimes their own families were involved in shooting. birds. And so it really wasn't until the Lacey Act, which, you know, you know, I'm sure, a lot about. No, explain it. Explain it. Well, you know, the Lacey Act was John Lacey was a lawyer

from Iowa in 1900. And I look at my notes a little bit because I try to remember. In 1900, he passed the, what became known as the Lacey Act. And that was to try to prevent, market hunting, market hunters from bringing birds across state lines. So 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, you could just sell them. And so his, so the Lacey 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.

Okay. And that started to put a damper on feather hunting and meat hunting. And it was really the first federalization of wildlife and birds. Okay. So that was one of the initial introductions of the idea that a state couldn't just decide to wipe something out. That's right. Under the argument that, hey, it's our state,

don't tell us what to do. Exactly. So places like Louisiana and other 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 sell them in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or Chicago. Got it. So it really cut.

down on a lot of that. Because we hear the Lacey Act now in terms of all kinds of things. Like you could poach a white tail buck and bring it to it in Illinois and bring it to a taxidermist in Indiana and wind up getting a Lacey Act violation or it happens around fish, but it was conceptualized as a bird thing. Yeah. And it was also there were Lacey agents that were created at that time, federal agents that were going into cold storage facilities and finding, you know,

thousands of birds and barrels that they knew had been killed illegally, and then they were confiscating them. When you heard that term birds and barrels, do you have any idea what that means? Yeah, I mean, you could pack a bird in a barrel. In a brine, cleaned birds? Or do they mean like feathered birds? You cleaned the bird, and you could pack it in a zinc barrel, and you could pump all the air out of it, and then you could keep it in a cold storage for a year. So these cold stories, 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 hunter. Then he became a cold storage man. Okay, explain it to me again. So I got a bunch, I shoot a bunch of birds. You say you shoot a bunch of birds, you know, and initially you could put him into an ice house with natural ice. So you might just gut them and put him in an ice house. That's right. And then try to keep them from.

six months and then ship them because you've got to train now 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. I mean, a lot of market hunting went on locally. But once ice came along and trains came along, then you could start transporting birds and other wildlife, you know, 1,000 miles, which is what happened with passenger pigeons, passenger pigeons would roost and for weeks people would just kill them the pigeoniers as they were known they were hunters could kill them and and ship them out on trains okay but but explain the

barrel thing to me 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 to he was known as to 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. Okay. And he had some in these zinced barrels where I think. So an airtight barrel. Airtight barrel pumped out and that when the warden who came in cut open the barrel, they took some of the birds and cooked them and said they tasted quite well.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. Now that seems like a long. time. So he's like creating some kind of like anaerobic environment by sucking the air out of a barrel. 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. He married a woman from Illinois, but he wanted to take her back to New York to meet the, um, the relatives. It was, it was spring.

It was still kind of cold. He shot a few plover and he shot some prairie. chickens. He put him in his suitcase and then it was in a cool baggage car. When he got to New York, he pulled the birds out. He walked down to an open market, you know, open air market at that time. And people surrounded him immediately and wanted to buy his birds. And he said he named an outrageous price and they bought his birds. They wanted to buy him to eat them. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, And, you know, and he's like, wow, you know, they, that's a great price. Then he started looking around at the, at the other people who were selling birds there and just saw that their birds were just bad looking birds and just kind of spoiled and whatever.

No wonder everybody wanted his birds. His birds still look fresh. And he said, I can make a lot of money. If I can get these Illinois birds to New York on ice. Yeah. And make money. And that's how his whole business started. Selling Illinois birds in New York.

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. Really? What was that guy's name? Well, I'll have to look. It was a great book to find. It was called the, that's why I wrote it down.

I couldn't remember. Cold Storage Man. What was the name? That was the name of what people used to call. McQuail King and the Cold Storage Man. And you're asking me a question I can't find. Type that in, Corinne. Quail King, Cold Storage Man. 1904.

1904. I think the book was called The Tale of the Gun. The Tale of the Gun. Yeah. Yeah. And he wrote it in 1904 about his, it's a Metmar being a market hunter in his life. It was a great fine.

I just found it on the internet. I thought this thing works perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So if we left off where we were talking about Lacey Act. Right. What, like, so Laceyac predated the migratory and songbird treaty or whatever. That's right.

So 1900 was really the first federalization of wildlife where the federal government's now moving in and saying, you know, we're going to do something about. And people are probably having a fit. Absolutely, particularly the millinery industry, the market hunters, they're all worried. 1904, George Chiris, the third, introduces the Shira's bird bill, which was something like the migratory bird treaty, although George was just saying that only game birds should be protected. But what he is saying at that point is that the states cannot protect these birds and they're not acting in coordination. So as a duck flies, you know, south to north, north to south, it's being shot in every state pretty much as it's going because there's not uniform regulations across that.

Chiris knew that law was not going to pass, but he wanted to introduce that concept. And he was a lawyer, so he had worked out this legal theory of National Powers Act, police powers act, to do this. And he knew it wasn't going to pass in Congress then because there were a lot of states' rights folks that said, we don't want the federal government, you know, stepping into this. Sure, man. This conversation never ends. Right.

So over the next few years, though, a lot of bad things were happening. Birds were still, you know, dying off. Now there's no passenger pigeons flying around. The Audubon movement, the Boone and Crocket folks, and all of these movements in public pressure starting to mount on this. So in 1911, 12, it bubbles up again. And that becomes the Weeks-McClean Act. The other thing that happened at that time was the American-Gargette.

Game, Protective and Propagation Association, which is long, they eventually made their name a lot shorter. But that was the ammo and gun manufacturers that 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 sport 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, you know, get the feds involved. And they came together with the Audubon Society to push for the passage of this act. Now, the Audubon Society came in and said, you know, will help you, however, you have to include non-game birds. Okay. And that became the Dickie Bird Amendment, which was bringing in these. It's like a Tweety Bird. Yeah, the Tweety Bird, exactly.

Bringing in these little birds. Now, there were still birds. So that was like an add-on. 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. Yeah, you got to add the Dickie Birds. Yeah, you got to add to Dickie Birds.

So it was called a Dickey Bird Amendment, which is British slang for a little bird, like we would say Tweety Bird here. So they added that amendment. And then the American game folks were good lobbyists, aggressive lobbyists. And the Campfire Club was involved in that time. There were some other groups there. And they all came into Congress and they lobbied for the passage of the week's month. The Klan Act. And then that was passed in 1913.

And then there was a, the agriculture department had to create rules. And so there was like, you know, no hunting before sun comes up. No hunting after the sun goes down. No spring shooting. Close season on certain birds that were in danger of, you know, extinction, including the wood. wood duck at that time. Okay.

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 the ownership of birds. Now, two portent and people evolved in that time were Howard Taft, who was Roosevelt's vice president, Taft had been a judge. and a lawyer, later to U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Taff said the weak McLean's Act is unconstitutional. Because there was law that said the states really do own it, and it's going to lose. And there's also a guy named Elehue Root.

He was a senator. He had also been Secretary of State under Roosevelt. He'd been Secretary of War under Taft. And so these two people told Chiris, look, you're law. is unconstitutional and if it gets tested which it did guy shot two coups and it went all way up to the Supreme Court so he said the way to get around that is well when they were pointing out that it's unconstitutional they supported the idea they supported the idea it's bad legislation yeah they thought you know they thought George's legal theory was

just not gonna was just not gonna make constitutional muster yeah with the Supreme So they're advising him. They're advising him. Rather than being an adversary. So the end around of all of this is like you need to go to Canada and get a treaty. If you get a treaty with Canada that basically we're going to protect birds not only that go across state lines, but also go across international lines because that's what birds do. The migratory bird treaty. Exactly.

Migratory bird treaty because most of the ducks are nesting in Canada. And then coming back south. So if you get a bird treaty under the supremacy clause, the, it circumvents the Supreme Court. And so that was the end around. You know, you're going to lose in court. And so let's go for the treaty. And that would be the end around.

Now, they negotiated with Canada and not Mexico, because Mexico was still in a revolutionary state at that point. But they joined in later. They did. 1930 is we reopened. So that, that, the ability to have that is based on this treaty. But what is the treaty called? So the treaty is called the Migratory Bird Act Treaty.

But it had to have been adopted by Congress, right? It was adopted by Congress. Yeah, about 19, 19, 1920. They made it like law law. They, yeah, they made it a law. But those guys in Missouri, including the Attorney General, that I talked about earlier. They were still not buying it. 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 doesn't make any difference. It's a treaty. And that supersedes all state's rights. And that's what it was.

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? They had regulations that they could, that they had a spring shooting season that extended beyond what the feds had said to spring shooting. So he wasn't, he was legal in his state. He was. Okay. He was.

He was. It's a great story. Actually, when. What ended up happening to that guy, McAllister? Well, he was going to be the governor, but he thought he was going to be the governor, but this didn't help. This cost him votes. Yeah, this cost him votes. And he ended up becoming a lawyer for the Kansas City Insurance Company.

And he was actually arrested with some Kansas City insurance executives when he was arrested. They were all shooting out, you know, shooting these birds. And so I went to Stoltz Lake, which is this little duck club of 25 people in Nevada, Missouri, just to go. They're still there. It's still there. And to see where... Are those guys aware of the sort of role their club played? Not completely.

It was kind of funny because, you know, they were saying that they thought it was all a setup. That was sort of how it had trickled down that the Attorney General was set up. And he actually did this on purpose in order to test a lot. That's not true. Oh, okay. So it's become over time, it's become that it was a little more benevolent. Yeah. In reality, he was like, no, I'm going to do what I'm going to do.

And he got to this club, and it's a great story. These guys followed him down. They got out at 4 o'clock in the morning at this little town. And there was a taxi driver there. And they said, take us out to the duck club. And the guy said, well, what duck club? He goes, the one Mac's at. They called him back.

And they actually took him out to the club. And on the way out, they said, you can't. get in there because it's locked to keep the game wardens out. He goes, don't worry, Mackle let us in. And it wasn't locked. And they were actually able to drive rate in, got dropped off, knocked on the clubhouse door, dragged one guy out of bed. So apparently those guys had the open fields doctrine and didn't need a warrant.

No. Because it was a game. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. So because you got in there under subterfuge. They did. They did.

I don't know that much about. But that's exactly how they did it. So that's like, this could be a follow-up, like an addendum, if you ever do one for your book. Because there's a lively debate right now where if a game warden suspects that there's a violation occurring on private property, he doesn't need a warrant. Okay. So if a game warden standing on a public road and you're shooting away on your private property, right? He can walk on over. Sure.

In a way that like a cop cannot do. Right. Right. Okay. 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. Right. Like, like the, if they know hunting to be taking place, that gives them what they need to go on to 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. There's you know private private property rights advocates are arguing why in the world would we allow wardens to violate what they perceive to be their constitutional rights and that you'd have like illegal search and seizure or whatever. Why is that okay for a game warden? And so it's being tested. I would picture, um, um, um,

I'm an aspiring polymarket better. If I was a polymarket betting man, I would go and create one about like in the future, I think that we will see, and I'm not saying I agree with this. Right. In the future, we will see a reduction in game warden's abilities to go and do their work

on private property. That's interesting. Like your body. Yeah. Like your body that caught the bad guy. Well, considering how much private land there is. And right. So you could only do it on public land.

Yeah. Public land do wherever you want. Right. What they're contesting is that, you know, that they can go do what they want. That the game work and go over and be like, what's up, boys? Which happens all the time. Yeah. Right.

Right. I've been sitting out there, doctor. hunting in cornfields and it scares you because there's a game warden staying there and some people were like how could that be true like how like a cop you know i mean sure like how could that be you how can you be standing here all of a sudden you're on my place where's your warrant you know it's a robust debate right now interesting yeah so um when's your book out it comes out march 17th oh we're good yeah okay it's uh yeah you can basically get it now because you're you know,

you can pre-order it down. One day before. That's right. Yeah. And it's just like, when you do that, it just shows up. A lot of times they ship early, too. Congratulations. I'm holding,

thank you. For people watching, I'm holding what's called a galley copy. Says, um, not for quotation, not for resale, uncorrected proof. In the vernacular, we know these is galley copies. Sure. So when you get yours, you'll get a brand spikety, nice hardcover book. Yeah. And it's got some, uh,

two inserts of, you know, slick photos in there. And I found a lot of great historical photos as well. Oh, they also call these advanced reader copies, as it says right on the cover. Idea being, this is a little publishing inside, if you realize that there's a review for a book the day the book comes out, the smart fella might be saying, well, how does he know? The book's not out yet. Yeah. So they sent them one of these advanced reader copies.

So that's what I'm holding by. I want people to realize if they order the book, they get like a legit book. Yeah. This is just an attractive looking book too. An attractive looking book. Again, it's called The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds with James H. McComons.

Irish name? Absolutely. Thanks so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate it, too. It's been fun. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Maltry Mobile and OnX Maps.

12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters' YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26

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