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

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

• 0:08
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  Speaker 1: L I T E dot com. Okay, everybody, we're joined
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  Speaker 1: today by author James mccommons. We're gonna talk about how
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  Speaker 1: America uh nearly wiped itself out of dozens of species
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  Speaker 1: of birds during the during what we can think of
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  Speaker 1: as the dark days of American conservation, lost several of
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  Speaker 1: those birds to extinction, and then brought a great many
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  Speaker 1: of them back from the brink of extinction. The name
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  Speaker 1: of the name of his book is The Feather Wars
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  Speaker 1: and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds. James mccommons
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  Speaker 1: is an emeritus does emeredis when you're an emeritus professor.
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  Speaker 1: That means you're a former professor, right but in good standing.
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  Speaker 2: But in good standing, So what.
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  Speaker 1: Would you do, like give me something you would do
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  Speaker 1: to not be just to be able to be that
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  Speaker 1: you were a former professor, not an emeritus professor.
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  Speaker 2: Well, you have to ask for it first, and you yeah,
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  Speaker 2: you have to ask for it, ask to go through
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  Speaker 2: a committee and before they granted to you.
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  Speaker 1: Oh so it's like a gift.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, yeah, it's an honor.
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  Speaker 1: It's an honor to be an emeritus professor.
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  Speaker 2: Right and then oftentimes, particularly at a research based institution,
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  Speaker 2: you get to keep your office, you know, you get
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  Speaker 2: to keep a lot of the grad students and you
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  Speaker 2: get to continue your work.
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  Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, and then sometimes you see professor emeritus.
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  Speaker 1: Well I don't know, you don't know about that, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: either way, he's an emeritus professor at get This, Northern
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  Speaker 1: Michigan University and Marquette where he taught journalism, journalism and
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  Speaker 1: nature writing for twenty years. What's Robert Traver. He's kind
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  Speaker 1: of a big deal up there.
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  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely so, yeah, we would be
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  Speaker 2: anat and all that marr anatomy of a murder is
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  Speaker 2: very important to the community, is sure. But we have
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  Speaker 2: Jim Harrison, which I think you had a show about.
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  Speaker 2: So without a doubt, and and then you know some
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  Speaker 2: other writers that we would go off and do field
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  Speaker 2: trips on in this book. George Shiris is in this
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  Speaker 2: book he was a world's first wildlife photographer. We would
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  Speaker 2: go out to where his first wildlife photographs were taken
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  Speaker 2: and read some of Georgia's stuff.
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  Speaker 1: Oh god, you know, years ago I was working on
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  Speaker 1: a I was researching a book that I never wrote
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  Speaker 1: about the Great Lakes, and I was hanging out at
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  Speaker 1: Lake Independence there. Yeah, and it was like the whole
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  Speaker 1: you know, like the the anatomy of a murder, murder.
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  Speaker 1: The couple was camped there, yeah, the guy was like
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  Speaker 1: a military guy involved with putting some kind of equipment
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  Speaker 1: in there. And then the wife like, depending on who
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  Speaker 1: you asked, there was like a bear hanging around the campground.
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  Speaker 1: She goes down to the local bar, runs into some
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  Speaker 1: guys in the local bar or whatever. The guy comes
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  Speaker 1: and kills a dude in the bar. And I went
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  Speaker 1: in there and I had heard all you can still
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  Speaker 1: see a bullet hole in the wall, yeah, And I
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  Speaker 1: went and asked the Bartender'm like, hey man, is there
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  Speaker 1: really a bullet hole in here? From like the whole
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  Speaker 1: anatomy of a murder thing. And he goes, the reason
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  Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense, He says, where everybody thinks there's
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  Speaker 1: a bullet hole, the bar wasn't at that wall. Back then,
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  Speaker 1: he goes, back then the bar was over on that wall.
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  Speaker 1: So he goes, it doesn't make sense to me that
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  Speaker 1: the bullet hole. You know he's over there. Yeah, you're
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  Speaker 1: familiar with all this.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, ye, I've been in the Lumberjack Cafe.
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  Speaker 1: Was that what?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, his stuff's cool, man, Like, you know, his writing
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  Speaker 1: about all all the fish and stuff and the fishing
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  Speaker 1: quotes and all that. And when they made the movie
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  Speaker 1: with uh tell us his name the same dude from
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  Speaker 1: Its Wonderful Life, Jim Jimmy Stewart Stewart right right, Like
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  Speaker 1: he's always run around trout rolled up.
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  Speaker 2: And and he's tying flies in the courthouse.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's always like he comes down with trout
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  Speaker 1: wrapped up in his newspaper. That's good stuff, man, that's
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  Speaker 1: good stuff. Yeah. There's there's kind of like a little
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  Speaker 1: bit of a literary you know, there's like a literary
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  Speaker 1: aspect to that town.
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  Speaker 2: You know, absolutely, Yeah, Robert Drivers going to rout some
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  Speaker 2: pretty profound things about you know, wanting to be in
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  Speaker 2: the environs of where trout lived. And that's how important
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  Speaker 2: that was too.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, he had cool fishing quotes. He had cool fishing
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  Speaker 1: quotes that still stand today.
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  Speaker 2: They do.
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  Speaker 1: They're good fishing quotes. So what what got you into?
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  Speaker 1: What got you into the bird story?
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  Speaker 2: So you know, George Shiris is in this book, and.
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  Speaker 1: George, so I want to point out the listeners. Sure
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  Speaker 1: the way with the taxonomy of moose, right, yeah, the giants,
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  Speaker 1: you have the Yukon moose, and then in the Rockies
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  Speaker 1: there's other ones. Just like some people argue there's a
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  Speaker 1: new Finland moose in the Rockies. Are moose here Colorado, Montana, Idaho,
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  Speaker 1: Washington and elsewhere.
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  Speaker 2: That is the Shyris Shyris moose.
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  Speaker 1: Also, that's right, but that's the dude, right, it is Okay, it.
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  Speaker 2: Is yeah, you know, on one of his expeditions. So
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  Speaker 2: he was the world's first wildlife photographer. He was taking
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  Speaker 2: pictures in the eighteen eighties eight nineties before anyone else.
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  Speaker 2: He was a lawyer from Pittsburgh whose family would come
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  Speaker 2: to the Upper Peninsula to summer and starting off with
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  Speaker 2: his grandfather and Pittsburgh.
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  Speaker 1: But they would go to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, because Pittsburgh was known back then as the Hell
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  Speaker 2: Hell with the lidoff, the you know, the it was.
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  Speaker 2: It was a nasty place to see. It was industrial, yeah,
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  Speaker 2: in the eighteen eighties, without a doubt, And and so
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  Speaker 2: a lot of the well known and wealthy families in
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  Speaker 2: Pittsburgh would go someplace to spend summer. And the Shyrises
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  Speaker 2: were trout fishermen, and his father first started going up
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  Speaker 2: to the Upper Peninsula very early on, like eighteen thirties,
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  Speaker 2: and then the family started to go up. They established
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  Speaker 2: a relationship with some folks around Marquette and they got
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  Speaker 2: a camp not too far from Marquet and that's where George,
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  Speaker 2: who was a lawyer, first started experimenting with taking pictures
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  Speaker 2: of animals at night. And yeah, so he would he
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  Speaker 2: would go out on Whitefish Lake.
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  Speaker 1: You wrote a whole book about this.
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  Speaker 2: I did.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I did tell people that book, and that is.
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  Speaker 2: How I got interested. But he would go out on
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  Speaker 2: Whitefish Lake and he had a chemical flash that he
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  Speaker 2: would hold up. They would listen for deer coming down
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  Speaker 2: to the shore, and then they would jacklight the deer
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  Speaker 2: and then they would push in slowly with the boat.
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  Speaker 2: George would stand up with this chemical flash take the picture.
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  Speaker 2: Took him three years to get an image, but he
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  Speaker 2: took a lot of images at night. And then the
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  Speaker 2: other thing he was get.
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  Speaker 1: I'm familiar with the pictures. I had no idea that
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  Speaker 1: that's why they look so strange.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they were called the Midnight Series of pictures. And
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  Speaker 2: then so he had a chemical chemical flash. And then
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  Speaker 2: what he found out was that he could put a
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  Speaker 2: trip wire up, set these things at night and then
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  Speaker 2: put them on trails and the deer would trip him.
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  Speaker 2: And so he got pictures of deer, but also pictures
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  Speaker 2: of birds and other animals.
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  Speaker 1: He was like, he's running trail cameras.
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  Speaker 2: He's the inventor of the trail camera. Without a doubt.
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  Speaker 2: He was the one he put it. He took a
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  Speaker 2: patent out on that device, but it was never really
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  Speaker 2: practical for anybody else to use it. Yeah, and so
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  Speaker 2: that's where I got interested in writing this book. Was
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  Speaker 2: I had done a story on or this book on
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  Speaker 2: George Shiris. And the third thing Shyris was he was
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  Speaker 2: a congressman for two years from Pennsylvania and he introduced
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  Speaker 2: the Shiris bird Bill in nineteen oh four, which was
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  Speaker 2: the forerunner of the Migratory Bird Act in the Migratory
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  Speaker 2: Bird Treaty. Well, I didn't all that, yeah, and so
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  Speaker 2: that's that was where I thought there's a bigger story
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  Speaker 2: to this. And then when I was writing that book
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  Speaker 2: it's called Camera Hunter, I really had to learn a
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  Speaker 2: lot about that period of the twentieth century, in late
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  Speaker 2: nineteenth century, and who all these people were. Many of
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  Speaker 2: the characters in this book were friends as Shiriuses, including
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  Speaker 2: Theodore Roosevelt. And and then so that's how this book
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  Speaker 2: came about.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, you know, you start thinking about a book
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  Speaker 1: like that, like I'm kind of I'm working on a
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  Speaker 1: project where I'm kind of in the phase right now
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  Speaker 1: of you might you know what you're gonna do. You know,
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  Speaker 1: you know you're going to do something like whatever some
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  Speaker 1: you know, you know kind of like, well, I'm gonna
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  Speaker 1: do a thing about the blank. But then you get
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: into that phase where you're like, and I'm going to
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  Speaker 1: have to the themes of it. You know, you start
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  Speaker 1: the ideas, start taking shit, you have the umbrella. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: but then lady, you realize that man there's going to
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  Speaker 1: be a lot about this or a lot about that,
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  Speaker 1: or I imagine the takeaway, like the takeaway is going
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  Speaker 1: to be this. When you start thinking about the story
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  Speaker 1: of birds in America, particularly the ones that we hunted
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  Speaker 1: to extirpation, near extinction, extinction, what emerged in your mind
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  Speaker 1: as kind of like the takeaway for people, or like
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  Speaker 1: what is the thing that if you were you think
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  Speaker 1: in your head, like if I don't achieve that for
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  Speaker 1: the reader, I will have failed.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I think at this point shiras when I got
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  Speaker 2: interested in doing it. The Shiris came from this point
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  Speaker 2: of view as a hunter. He was a deer hunter
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  Speaker 2: and his first bill was only to protect certain birds
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  Speaker 2: game birds at that time. And then later what happened
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  Speaker 2: was with the Migratroy Bird Act, they expanded that to
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  Speaker 2: all birds. So I was looking for or a way
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  Speaker 2: to tell the story how Audubon, the audobonn Society, the
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  Speaker 2: folks who are professional ornithologists, and the hunters all came
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  Speaker 2: together to make this happen, and so I wanted to
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  Speaker 2: explore more of that story. And so that was part
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  Speaker 2: of it. And like anything you say when you when
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: you first write your book proposal, which you're pitching to
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: your publishers. I want to write this book. You know
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: it's not going to be exactly the same.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: When you're done it, they be kind of the same.
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  Speaker 2: It may not be you don't know where you're going
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: to go yet because you haven't done the research.
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  Speaker 1: I shouldn't say it's not gonna be kind of the same.
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  Speaker 1: But no, no.
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  Speaker 2: Well yeah, but you know they want a table of contents,
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  Speaker 2: they want all these things, and I understand that.
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  Speaker 1: No, I'm not hacking on for want. And it's a
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  Speaker 1: it's a it's a game. Everybody knows. It's like it's
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  Speaker 1: a dance you do. But do you know you know
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  Speaker 1: the writer Ian Fraser, Sure, Okay, he's on the show,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: and he mentored me when I was young. I remember
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  Speaker 1: him telling me he said, if I ever had to
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  Speaker 1: write a book proposal, the first thing I'd do is
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  Speaker 1: throw it away.
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  Speaker 2: It would be great to get to the point you
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  Speaker 2: don't have to write a book proposal.
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  Speaker 1: That's where he was, and because he's like, I don't
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  Speaker 1: know what the book's gonna be about.
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  Speaker 2: Right right, and so that would you know? This one
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  Speaker 2: was was I just started hitting the road, hitting archives,
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  Speaker 2: and then you know, see where it went.
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  Speaker 1: You started out and doing archive work.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well, and and to tell the story, one
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  Speaker 2: of the interesting stories in here is how after the
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  Speaker 2: Migratory Bird Treaty was okayed by Congress, there was going
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  Speaker 2: to be a test case that literally somebody was going
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  Speaker 2: to go out and violate it, and then that would
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: go up through the courts to make sure that it
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  Speaker 2: was a constitutional law. And in this case, it was
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  Speaker 2: the Attorney General of Missouri who was a duck hunter
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  Speaker 2: name his name was Frank McAllister, and that he was
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  Speaker 2: telling everybody in Missouri like, ignore the law. Spring hunting
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  Speaker 2: is okay, everybody should go spring hunting. And I'm going
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  Speaker 2: to go spring hunting.
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  Speaker 1: And I got yeah, backup, because I got confused. Sure,
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  Speaker 1: you mean they just knew that someone would, not that
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  Speaker 1: they planned that someone would. So they knew that there
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  Speaker 1: would be a violator, or they were planning a violator.
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  Speaker 2: Well, it was kind of a It was kind of
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  Speaker 2: both in the sense that Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and and
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  Speaker 2: so that part of the Mississippi Missouri area, these folks
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  Speaker 2: were deadly against the migratory bird trape.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, I thought you meant they were putting. They were like, okay, Bob,
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  Speaker 1: you go break the law so we can test this
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  Speaker 1: in the court.
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  Speaker 2: In one instance that happened before this. Okay, yeah, the
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  Speaker 2: Weeks McLean Act was tested like that. But anyway, when
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  Speaker 2: the when the migatry Bird Treaty happened, these states were
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  Speaker 2: still not happy with it, and they were saying that,
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  Speaker 2: you know, we still own the birds. The federal government
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  Speaker 2: has nothing to do with this. They can't tell us
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  Speaker 2: what to do. We're going to have a spring shooting season.
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  Speaker 2: And Frank McAllister, the Attorney General, said the same thing.
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  Speaker 2: The young game warden, federal game warden who covered seven states.
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  Speaker 2: His name was Ray Holland. Ray Holland said I'm going
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: to bag them the attorney general, and so he sort
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  Speaker 2: of followed him. The Attorney General went to a duck
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  Speaker 2: club in Nevaden, Missouri, and shot over one hundred ducks.
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  Speaker 2: Holland got himself onto the property and was able to
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: arrest the attorney general. The Attorney General was fined for
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: shooting these ducks, and then the case went all the
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  Speaker 2: way up to the Supreme Court. Or the attorney general
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: actually argued his own case in front seriously and yeah,
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: in front of the US Supreme Court and lost. And
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  Speaker 2: that was the test case for the Migratory Bird Treaty.
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  Speaker 1: And they held that it was sound law.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was sound law. It was his argument was
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  Speaker 2: that the states, and this was the argument previously up
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  Speaker 2: to this time, all through like you know, the twenty
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  Speaker 2: or thirty years prior, was that birds belonging to the states,
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: all wildlife was was owned by the states and the
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: federal government had no jurisdiction. And what this movement was
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: about with was for the federal government to take jurisdiction
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: over birds. Birds were public trust. Migratory birds moved from
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: state to state that each state having its own laws,
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: its own bag limits. When you know birds were going
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: to be shot what seasons didn't make any sense biologically
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: with their nest in migratory patterns. So slowly but surely
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: the Feds moved in to take jurisdiction over those birds,
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: and it culminated in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Yeah,
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: but that was a great story. And I had just
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: heard a little bit of that when I wrote the
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: George Shier's book, and I thought I'll start there. So
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: that's where I started the book, was I want to
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: go find out more about Frank Holland or Ray Holland
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: arresting the Attorney General. And I found his papers in
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Connecticut in a college in Connecticut, and there was an
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: unfinished book biography that it was a finished biography that
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: he wasn't able to get published. And I thought, Okay,
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: there's got to be two or three chapters in there
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: about this great thing he did back then, and there was.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: And so this kind of wonderful anecdote that goes on
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: for ten pages in this book about how these guys
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: arrested the Attorney General came from that got it? Yeah, yeah, you.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Know, people like like a lot of people in our audience,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: our audience are pretty familiar with the commercial duck hunting era. Like,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: for instance, right outside the door here we have a
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you notice coming in, we have
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: a big punt gun.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: Oh I didn't see that.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: No, we have a Holland and Holland London made punt gun,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: like a commercial duck hunting gun.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: So that was made in England.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: And yeah, you know it's funny. It's got the address
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, on the top of the barrel. Painted
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: over in some kind of gun metal, uh, like some
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: kind of like a paint. You used a paint like
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: a like a like a cannon on a boat. Yeah,
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: but then the action is very ornate and fine, you know.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: But if you look, if you can kind of like
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: look through that paint, you can see that there's an
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: address from Holland and Holland we made a big punt
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: gun shooting video that we haven't finished yet. But anyways,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: just in conversations we've had on the show, we've talked
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: about commercial duck hunting, and I don't want to leave
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: that out of our conversation. But the thing we haven't
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: touched on too much is that what we now regard
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: of as songbirds, right, that these at a time were
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: like a heavily exploited bird.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I always joke about and like my father's bird taxonomy.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: He knew game birds, he was a duck hunter, he
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: hunted upland birds. He knew his game birds. He knew
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: two or three other birds, robins, blue jays, chickadeas crows.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: But most birds he saw were tweety birds, and they
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: were like, that's what they were, and they were not
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: of interest, not of a trendous interest, right, because he
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: had that. He had that and I'm not evening, but
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: he had that like hunter's value system of these are
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: the birds that are important are Yeah, these are the
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: birds that I'm interested in. These are the birds that
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: we pay attention to. These are the birds that have regulations.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: These are the birds we eat, right, and a couple
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: other common ones. Butternut he was more like, nah, it's
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: a tweety bird. But at a time like tweety birds.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: And back then they called them dicky birds.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: But at a time, man, there were people like hunting
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: these things. They were, Yeah, tell people about sort of
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: the extent of that, and and who and what and
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: why was going on.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: So Robin's, particularly in the south, when when Robin's goes
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: south into winter, they they flock up, and a lot
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: of farmers would would catch those birds and nuts and
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: they would feed them to their hawks.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: That was.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: But people also ate robin pie and and so yeah,
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: without a doubt, flickers were eating and many woodpeckers as well.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: What I talk about in this book is how immigrants
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: came from southern Europe, parts of Italy and from Eastern
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: Europe who had a tradition of eating small birds. And
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: so when they came to America, particularly like in you know,
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: nineteen ten, nineteen hundred, they were hunting small birds partly
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: because they were poor and this was a way to
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: put protein in the pot. And so there was there's
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: an incident that I write about in Pennsylvania where a
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: lot of these landowners in these farmers just hated the
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: idea that these foreigners were coming out from Pittsburgh on
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: the trains and going on their land and hunting small birds.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: But yeah, with a shotgun, shotgun, yeah, and anything else, woodshock,
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: whatever it took. I mean, it was just getting meat
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: and you know, taking meat back.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: And but there's a one of my colleagues that I
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: worked with on our cook We have a couple of cookbooks,
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: and I worked with a woman named Christy Ruwaine. She
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: has Italian as do I. She has Italian ancestors on
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: the side of her family, and she talks about I
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: don't want to get the guy in trouble. She talks
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: about her grandfather, like she remembers that her grandfather still
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: putting him in, you know, putting him putting songbirds, whatever
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: he could get his hands on, putting him into his
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: sauces and he just cook him down and shred them
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: and be like any other meat you could throw in there,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: but in the pot could be like little just things
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: he kind of got out of his yard or whatever,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: and it was just like a food item.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. And you could put him on
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: a spit. You could put some bread on him, some pork,
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: and you know, you could do it that way.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: And were but like that kind of I want to
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: talk about the I want to talk like the commercial
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: restaurant trade and the feather trade. Just to wrap up
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: on the songbird thing. Was there ever were they able
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: to have population level impacts like take robins? Would that
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: type of harvest? Was it able to have a population
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: level impact, like did we ever see robin numbers decline
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: to a dangerous level?
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: Well, I think robin numbers did decline generally, but on
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: a on a localized level, yes, without a doubt, particularly
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: like in the South in Louisiana, there were you know,
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: tens of thousands of robins that were killed and people
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: I've got a little anecdote in the book where people were,
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: you know, killing these birds and then bringing it bringing
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: them in a new Iberia on a string and selling
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: them for you know, twenty five cents or fifty cents
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: a string. Ok So it was, it was it was
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: kind of an annual thing to be able to buy
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: robbins on the street at that time.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, talk about the the feather trade, because this is
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: the thing like people can picture, like a lot of
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: people can picture that. When people don't have a lot
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: of money, a lot of other game isn't around. You know,
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: we didn't have a lot of the times we're talking about,
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: deer numbers had already been depleted, even going back to
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: the mid seventeen hundreds, you know, so when you get
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: you know, whatever, you get into the late eighteen hundreds,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: there's not as much game around. People want to hunt,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: they're hunting birds, but the feather trade is not personal use.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: The feather trade isn't going out and getting some grub
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: for yourself. The feather trade is like this business.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: You know, yeah, I think you know, people always hunted
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: for feathers for stuffing, you know, mattresses, feather fans like
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: face fans. But it was around the eighteen seventies eighteen
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: eighties where this fashion trend started of having bird feathers
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: you know, in your hat, in women's hats, and that
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: grew fairly quickly that it was everyone needed to have these,
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: you know, these these bird hats as they called them.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: They called them, yeah, yeah, there were names for bird yeah,
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: bird hats.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: You'd be like, I'm going to go to the store
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: and get my mom a bird hat.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: You can get a bird hat. Or there was one
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: called the three story, which was a very tall hat
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: and very wide one.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: As well, all loaded with feathers, all.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Loaded with feathers. Right. In fact, these things kind of
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: became as time went on through the eighteen eighties and
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: eighteen nineties, as the designers competed with one another, these
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: hats became more ostentatious. They had to try to outdo
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: one another, so they got bigger. And then usn't just feathers.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: They were putting taxidermy birds on their heads, and so
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: it wasn't unusual to see three or four birds arranged
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: with maybe some natural materials that would show the bird,
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: you know, So it's like wearable taxidermy.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: It kind of ties into this, like you tell that
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: that's sort of arms race, not arms race, but I
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: remember I can't remember who, but someone was observing how
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: fashion always becomes self parody, meaning someone will make a
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: wide leg gene and then they're like, oh, yeah, you
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: think that's wide, I mean, or like, oh, a little
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: hole in your genes is cool. How about I remove
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: the entire front of my genes, you know. And that's
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: how like fashion goes to self parody and then the
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: thing vanishes. So it's funny to think of feathers being like, oh,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: you think a few feathers are cool, right, well, here's
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: a bird.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: Right, here's the It's exactly what happened, and they got
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: more oscentatious. Sometimes they were really close fitting hats, almost
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: like a close hat, and they were all feathers, and
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: then each time a new season happened, you would have
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: to get a new feathered hat. So I mean, we're
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: talking about sort of Victorian fashions, very long dresses, bustles,
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: you know, lots of petticoats, and women had a lot
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: of clothing on and then it was often topped off
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: by these big hats. And I talked about how some
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: women could not I would have to put their head
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: out the window in order to ride on a street
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: car or in a a coach because their hat was
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: so big it would not fit inside?
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: Was there like if you picture for to be that
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: you know at a time, like you go back to
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: the fifties or whatever, like a like a mink fur
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: that was good. Yeah, if you had a muskrat fur,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: if you had a possum fur, not as good, but
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: a mink fur was the ship.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: Did consumers have a notion of what when? When feathers
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: were the rage? Did consumers have a notion of what
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: feathers they wore? Meaning was there was there were they
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: aware of that this is a very rare feather or
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: that this is sort of an exclusive feather.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: So the breeding feather, the most popular feathers were many
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: of like the Florida Florida wading birds, egrets and the
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: snowy egret especially was its breeding feather the air grat.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: I think it's how you pronounce it.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: That's the feather.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's this long breeding feather that the bird gets,
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: and that was it was quite more than once that
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: it was worth more than its weight in gold. Didn't
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: weigh much of course.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you see exactly, but.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: But it was a beautiful white feather and so those
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: were really popular and and the plume hunters absolutely went
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: after those birds because yeah, snowy egrets and and then
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: the roseate spoonbill was was very popular and that was
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: often for face fans. They were very pretty, of course,
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: so yeah, there was some pecking order. The one of
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: the famous things that.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: That was a good pund right there. Did you know?
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Did you know? Or you just do it on? I
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: just did it, Phil, You catch that? It was great?
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: You caught it. I catch it before I pointed it out.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: No I didn't. That was just you, Steve. Congratulations the
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: h do you know, homut can? Do you know about
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: the great Isbel pun controversy? I I remember hearing about it.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: I do not remember the details, though, how they made
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: a pun and that they insisted that they did it
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: on purpose. But you think that men tell our guest, Okay,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: I'm eating with some friends and we're at this place
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: and they bring a caviar dish out. One of my
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: friends winds up with a caviar egg stuck right here
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: on his lip. Okay, And he says Marilyn Monroe and
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: then goes ha, okay, and he claims he knew all
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: along and made the row joke to us view. We
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: felt there was a delay and that it occurred to
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: him that he had.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: Made after he knew that this was on his lip.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Like he was just going on the fact. No. No, someone said, hey,
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: you got a piece of egg right here, and he says, oh,
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: you know marily Monroe ha, meaning row fish egg. So
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: he's like, oh, no, even when I said Marilyn Monroe,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: I knew I was making a row joke. Other people
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: at the table felt that there was a delay, and
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: you could see him realize after saying it, how spot
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: on it was Marilyn Monroe. We never could settle it.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: We consider trying to get security camera footage from the restaurant. Yeah,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: to see the look in his eye when he realized
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: do you follow me right that he made a yeah.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: He claims to this day that he did it on purpose.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: Either way, the pecking order, did you lose your train
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: of thought?
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: I used to have an editor who would tell me
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: puns all the time, and then I would tell him
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: to shut up, and he would say, we have a
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: lot of pun around here.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: And I'm not gonna take you that far. So order
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: the birds.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: Well, and so what Frank Chapman was a banker, and
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: he was a famous ornithologist, and Chapman wrote Perforce and
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: Stream magazine. He later became uh the curator of birds
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: at the American Museum of Natural History. Yeah, he'd done
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: all kinds of things later in his career, but early
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: in his career when he was a banker and these
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: feathers were appearing on women's hats, he went down and
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: did with what is known as his famous sidewalk survey. Yeah,
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: he went he went to the shopping hearing in New York,
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: took a notebook and noticed that five hundred some women
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: out of seven hundred had feathers in their hats. And
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: because of his his ability to look at these hats
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: and tell what kind of feathers.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: They were, he was that good.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: He was very good, right, and and he could tell
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: that they were you know, flickers and woodpeckers and many
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: their backyard garden birds. And then he wrote an article
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: for Forest and Stream magazine saying women are wearing the
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: feathers of our songsters. And so that was part of
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: that movement.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: But yeah, so he was like, so he's in New
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: York and it is.
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: The heart of the millinery, or but he's.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: But he's seeing like perhaps locally sourced birds.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, Forrest and Stream did an
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: article right around that time where they they went to
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: one of these millinery houses and talked about how many
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: birds were being shipped in from Long Island and that
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: they were coming in every day. Birds in meat, as
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: they called it, they had just been shot with dust shot,
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: and now they needed to be processed.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: What's the shot they would.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: Use so dusty? Could? They called a dust shot? Collectors
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: still use it today, ornithologists that are still permitted to collect.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: It's a very very fine with the shotgun, Like do you.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: Know how you would you know, like a nine shot
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: today would be about that's someone's gonna crack me on this.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: That'd be about as small as you're gonna find. It
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: would be like a nine shot.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: I'd have to look in the book. I didn't.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: I'd be curious what it is, and I didn't.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: Know what it was myself, but I talked to a
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: collector at the University of California, Davis, and that's what
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: they used, and they call it. They call it dust shot.
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: Because I was trying to find somebody to tell me, Okay,
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: what were they using? At that time, and if you
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: got too close to the bird you could blow it apart.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: So you're trying to find it dust shot.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, looking for miller.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like what shot size was dust shot? Did uh?
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: In your book you mentioned like people looking for eggs, right,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: bird eggs, But that's just like that's just people looking
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: for something to eat or is it different than that?
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: It was both. So there was this practice called oohology.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: So if you were interested in birds at that time,
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: say eighteen fifties, right after right after the Civil War,
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: you did three things. You you shot birds, You took
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: their eggs, and you took their nest. And that was
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: sort of the entry into birding at that time. And
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: the reason was that optics weren't very good and there
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: really weren't now good field guys at that time. So
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: if you were interested in birds, you went out with
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: your shotgun and your dust shot. You the birds are
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: That was a birding trip. That was a birding trip. Yeah.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: Number the way, number twelve or so about one twenty
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: one point two seven millimeters.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Wow, So that smaller or bigger than number nine?
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Sa Okay, I don't even heard of it. Like nine
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: is small?
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: Nine would maybe be like, you know, might have applications,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: you know, like some guys will shoot mourning doves.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah with nine, okay, that's small.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: Eight is a more common dove. Yeah, twelve number twelve,
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: I never heard.
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: Of it so smaller than that.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: I guess just for ornithologists that have a permit to
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: do so. So you you would shoot the bird, you'd
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: bring it back, you would, uh, you'd probably have a
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: big thick volume because again there's not really a field
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: guy to take out there with you. You'd identify the bird,
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: and then you would tax it, durm me the bird
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: as a study skin, and then put it away. And
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: then the other thing you would do is you would
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: collect their eggs and blow the egg out and put
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: some nomenclature on the outside in ink. And part of
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: it was at that period they were still studying, you know,
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: where did birds occur, what subspecies was, what, what was
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: the color, the morphology of of the egg, all those
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: kind of things. And then they would take nest. That
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: practice was known as nidology.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Huh.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: So these were like the three things that.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: That man, dude, I have never heard. Oology Oohologyology for
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: idology is collecting bird eggs, but not to eat. But
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: like the collection of science, right, and then idology is
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: collecting a bird nest. But many American children are nidologists whatever. More,
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: it pains them to leave a bird nest. It pains
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: them to leave a bird nest in a tree once
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: they confirmed that it's been vacated.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: It's painful to them. So we still do nideology today.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: I mean people bring them home to look.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: But yeah, my kids are like, there's no way, there's
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: no way I leave that nets.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna take it on because yeah, there you go,
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: there you go. So oologists were people who were interested
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: in science, and many of them were young. There were
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: young men that boys intended to do this.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Like affluent, affluent people.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I guess what I'm leading up to
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: here to say that a lot of oologists were just
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: interested in egg collecting. Collecting bird eggs didn't have any
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: science behind it. It was more like stamp collecting or
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: coin collecting. It was kind of a craze at one time. Really, Yeah,
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: to displayed in what way? Well you you would display
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: them in your cabinet of curiosity? Have you heard that? Yeah?
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: You know, So mine's more of a box.
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: Well exactly.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: So it was.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: It was people entertained back then in the park and
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: they would have a cabinet in their parlor, or they
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: might have a whole room where they would display items
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: of scientific interests, which could be seashells, eggs, fossils. There
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: was a lot of interest during the Gilded Age of
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: that period in scientific discovery. And there was a lot
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: of magazines you could read because magazine journalism was big
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: at that time too, And there was a magazine called
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: the Ooologists. Was a magazine called the Nightologists.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: He's a magazine about it, absolutely.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And so you could read on how to how
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: to do it. You could you could buy and sell
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: those eggs, trade those eggs. So a lot of ooology,
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: a lot of ooologists, and there were tens of thousands
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: of them around the country at that time. Were not
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: all that interested in birds, were interested in science. They
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: were simply interested in these kind of things that looked
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: like they were pretty bobbles in many ways, that you
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: could put put in your cabinet.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: And this is this is creating. What you're telling me,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: I had never heard any of this. What you're telling
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: me is creating, like a really interesting context that that
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: isn't often observed about Theodore Roosevelt, because when you're reading
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: Theodore Roosevelt biographies or talking to Theodore Roosevelt biographers, they
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: always make a big deal about his collecting. Yeah, but
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: no one ever points out that I'm aware of that,
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: like we would be like like many young men of
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: his means, he was a collector. You sort of get
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: the sense that it was like a freak thing. No,
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: it was like a thing people were doing.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It' ever like no one ever does a good
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: job of conveying that he was one of one of many,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: or or a sort of he was a product of
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: his time.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: Sure well, I certainly mentioned that in my book, and
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: I also mentioned, uh, Franklin Roosevelt was also a collector
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: of birds, And I went to Hyde Park to look
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: at his bird collection, and it's it's all there in
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: his cabinet of curiosity. He has mounted birds and they
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: would they would preserve them with arsenic. And his his
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: mother was afraid of FDR using arsenic, and so she
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: sent his birds down river to New York City and
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: a professional would do his birds, but Teddy, Teddy would
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: would do his.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: Line but she was hip to the idea that it
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: was hazardous.
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, and and but yeah. Theodore
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: Theodore had his his own museum specimens. His father was
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: one of the founders at the American Museum of Natural History,
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: so Theodore got to hang out at the museum and
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: learn from some of the taxidermists there. And if you
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: go there today, I think on the first floor there
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: are still a couple of his mouths there. God as well.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: I want to ask the same question I asked about
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: songbird hunters around the egg collectors, bird collectors, private collectors.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Did it have a population level.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: Impact, Yes, particularly on again localized level, and sometimes with
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: certain kinds of birds. So ooologists would trade or sell
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: these birds, and the prices would depend on the difficulty
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: give finding the egg. So one oologist said that to
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: get a peagon falcon egg you had to climb and
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: he said, once you've visited the nest of five duck hawks,
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: which were falcon, you know peagon falcons, you're living on
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: borrowed time. And if you look at the list that
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: I found in the Oologist of the price of these eggs,
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: any kind of raptor egg was much more expensive than
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: the other ones.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: I could definitely see that you'd have population level impact
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: on that for hanmpful reasons like that, like low fecundity,
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: low density. But then you can pretty much go into
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: an area, and if you're like a good observer, you
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: can probably go into an area and spend some time
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: there and be like, there's one there, there's one there,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: and there's one there, and that's it.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Right, right, And so they would go back and forth. Now,
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: so many birds would lay a second clutch, and so
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: if you did this ethically, you would take one clutch,
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: allow them to lay the second clutch and then reproduce.
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: But a lot of these so frictly, but a lot
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: of these folks were greedy and they were trading and selling,
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: and so they would go back time after time after
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: time after again in order to do this.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: Man, I can't believe, Like it's kind of blowing my
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: mind that, like I catch wind all kinds of weird stuff.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: You know, I had no idea this was the thing.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So what the.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: Hell's the word again? Idology?
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: N idology, Well, that's nests, that's nest oohology. T Gilbert Pearson,
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: who was the head of the National Audubon Society in
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: the early part of the century. I think he was
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: the president for twenty twenty five years. He grew up
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: rather poor in Florida, and he was a neurologist, and
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: so he would collect all these eggs and he would
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: go back time after time after time to get as
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: many as he could, and he would sell them. He
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: actually traded his egg collection to a small college in
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: South Carolina in order to go to school. And then
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: his job was to go there and get an education.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: While he was there, take care of the cabinet, Curiosity Cabinet,
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: which was a museum at the Skylight. So he actually
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: traded his egg collection for this. So you know, some
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: of these bird protectors started off this way as young people.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I'm like in my own work right now,
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: looking I'm spending a lot energy looking at the fur
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: trade as a continuum, you know what I mean a
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: lot of times when people get into the fur trade,
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: they're talking about colonial America or whatever. But like looking
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: at it as the thing that never ended. And then
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: observation I have that I'll spend time on, that I'll
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: write about is the like the enormous difference between the
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: people that collect the fur and the people that ultimately
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: wear the fur. Meaning the difference between a kid that
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: grows up on a ranch in Nevada and catches a
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: few bobcats every year and a Russian oligarch's wife who
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: ultimately wears those bobcats not only a big difference, but
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: there's a somewhat of a culturally like a mutual disdain.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: Right the egg guys though, like did the did the
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: egg trade? I know the feather trade did, but did
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: the egg trade? Like kind of hatch a.
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: That was the pun?
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: I knew that. I guess you could say it flew
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: over your head or that dude, that was a good one.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: I knew that hatched where they're like poor kids like
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: farm kids whatever, like poor kids that wouldn't have been
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: the kind of people that had a parlor and a
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: curiosity box, who were just hipped to the idea. They knew.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: They're like listen, man, people will pay money for these eggs. Yes,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: but they weren't. They weren't aspiring ornithologists. They were just collectors,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: that's right.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, there were plenty of folks like that. Pearson actually,
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: to Gilbert Pearson, he loved birds, but that's exactly what
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: he was doing. You know. One year someone wrote to
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: him through the Oologist and said, I will take all
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: the bird eggs from that part of Florida, and so
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: that's what he did. He went out and collected like Christy.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: And he wasn't coming to it as a bird enthusiast.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: He was coming to it as like, Hey, if they're
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: going to pay for it, I'll get it.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, I have my own collection and I know
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: where all these birds are, and so I'm going to
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: do that. But yeah, there were a lot of people
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: who did that, even the bird collectors, many of the
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: shotgun ornithologists to went out and collected their own birds.
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: They didn't have time, or they couldn't get everywhere they
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: needed to get for certain birds that they wanted, so
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: they could buy them, or they could contract with people
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: who called themselves taxidermists, but they were basically just contract
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: hunters who would shoot those birds for them and bring
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: them back.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: Whether we're talking about market hunting for ducks, which is
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: just supplying restaurants meat markets with duck meat, or we're
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: talking about the feather trade shooting egrets, spoon bills for decorations,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: or we're talking about egg collecting, like any of these things,
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: we're talking about when and how extensive? When did the
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: damage start to show, like the resource damage, When did
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: it show? And how extensive did the damage get, regardless
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: of what the ultimate use was, Like, what were we
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: seeing in terms of birds that we now think of
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: as abundant that weren't or birds that we know were
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: wiped out? Right? Like when did it become apparent and
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: how bad did it get?
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: Probably by the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties. When the American
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: Ornithologists Union formed in eighteen eighty three, they created a
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: committee at their second at their second meeting to look
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: at bird protection. Because these guys were I called them
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: birdmen in the book because they were all men, but
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: they were collectors that they were scientists, mostly self educated,
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: because there was no university courses for to become an ornithologist.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: They had this committee that went out and then studied,
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: you know, what was happening with birds and they identified
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: plenty of places where birds were being wiped out. Cape
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: cod was won. I think that the year that they
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: did them they created that committee, they figured that there
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: were sixty thousand turns that were shot for the feather trade,
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: and because in a year, in a year, and because
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: where New York was located, birds were disappearing through Long Island,
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: the Cape, along New Jersey, Barnicut Bay, and further down
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: into the Carolinas too. Eventually, by eighteen ninety, what was
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: they killed the turns for feathers, feathers there, there were
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: all kinds of There were a lot of different kinds
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: of birds were used. Gulls were very popular as well.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think of them as having like a
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: crazy tricked out feather like a heron does or something.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: No, that that's true. But there was a need for
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: a tremendous amount of whatever. And then some of them
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: you could die, and so you could you know, you
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: could change change that.
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: But anyway, so a seagull that throws a white feather
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: that might have turned up on the market as a
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: red feather.
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, as something else, that's right, that's right. But I've
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: got a picture in the book that herring gulls were
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: used to make a hat and a tippet set of
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: I think as they called it. And so at one
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: point by the eighteen nineties it was estimated, and I
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: did talk to a biologist on nath who said, look,
• 50:35
  Speaker 2: we weren't taking really good we didn't have good science
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: back then. But it was estimated back then that ninety
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: five percent of Florida's wading birds disappeared during this period
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: because of the feather trade, and clearly most of the
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: know and rookeries were wiped out. And then that kind
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: of continued through Louisiana and Texas as well. So it
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: was very evident by the eighteen nineties that these showy
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: birds were just being were just being wiped out. And
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: it was clear because the prices had gone up so
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: much from scarcity god that they were harder to get a.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: Thing about just being alive. You know, in America and
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: a lot of places you go, you're sort of haunted
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: by past image, you know, or you're haunted by a
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: sense of absence, right Like you could go to a
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: place like if I'm just thinking around here, you know,
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: you could go to a place where mountain men would
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: talk about hillsides full of big horns, and they're seeing
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: three four hundred big horns on the hillside just ain't
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: gonna happen now, Or you know, herds buffalo that you
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: watch cross a river for three days all day, right,
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: and you feel that absence. But it's interesting to think
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: that that you could be in Florida right today, you
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: could be on vacation down in Florida on the beach,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: and you're like thinking back. You could think back to
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: maybe an era of greater abundance, but you can also
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: think back to an era when you probably wouldn't see
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: any of the things you see.
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: You know, it'd be like an example of oh no,
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: it's better now, like it's been worse, right right, which
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: is true again and again on all kinds of game,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: animals and things. But you just don't, like, I don't
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: anyways think that, you know, you imagine like that you're
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: on a shoreline, that you could have been on a
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: shoreline back then. There were no herons. You see egrets
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: all over in pastures. There were no egrets in those pastures.
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, you know. I'm from Pennsylvania and originally
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: in Pennsylvania had about five hundred deer left around nineteen
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: hundred in the entire state, and I can remember when
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: we did not see eagles. This is you know, nineteen
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: sixties when I was we didn't see eagles, there were
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: no bears in that part of Pennsylvania, and now today
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: there are eagles, there are bears, and so yeah, same
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: things treat you know, true with the with birds as well.
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: That they've come back, they're still not as abundant as
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: they could be, you know, and maybe will be in
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: the future depending on how we take care of them. Right.
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean things around nineteen hundred were pretty bleak,
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: and it went through not just birds, but through you know, deer,
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: big game animals. I have a chapter in this book
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: about George Berger now and Theodore Roosevelt founding the Boone
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: and Crockett Club, and that that did have effect also
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: on birds as well.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes today you hear politicians and they'll talk about
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: like deregulations was the greatest thing in the world. What
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: saved America's birds is.
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: Is regular regulation. That's right.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Like if we had stayed it wasn't even deregulated, it
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: was unregulated. If we had stayed unregulated, they'd be gone.
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: Saving wildlife in America was regulation. It was enacting regulation
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: when the when people started to really realize that we
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: were going to lose stuff, and we did lose stuff
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: because the passenger pigeon went extinct in nineteen I think
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: it was nineteen thirteen. I mean it was effectively extinct
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: well before that, right, the last one died. I rebuilt
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: woodpecker wiped.
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: Out, right, Carolina parakeet.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: Carolina parakeet wiped out. But when it got to where
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: they were, people started to try to get a grip
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: on it, like how did that take place? Like when
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: you if you go look and you have this sense
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: of urgency, they're vanishing, they're still hunting them without regulation,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: where do you even like, where do you begin? Like
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: what were the first things they decided to try?
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I think that was the heart of the
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: book was to look at how these different groups came
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: together to stop this from happening. The politicians in the
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: legislation really came later, partially because of public pressure to
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: do something. But you know, the Audubon movement started in
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: the late eighteen eighties. It went away for a couple
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: of years. I mean, it's a long story, but it was.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: It was resurrected by these women in Massachusetts. Then it
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: spread to different states. These were what they called the
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: birds sentimentalists, we want to save these birds.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: They called themselves that they did. They did it. It
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: seems like a slight.
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: Well it was to some degree because it was often
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: run by women who who again the moors of the
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: time was they're sentimental, they're headed, they're too soft hearted.
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: Even some of the bird men who were concerned about
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: this were very suspicious of the Audubon Society because I
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: shoot birds, you know, I don't look at them. And
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: then the hunting community came in partly because of market hunting.
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: They wanted to stop market hunting, and they saw that
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: there was a synergy between all three of these groups.
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: And then that continued into the nineteen hundreds and eventually
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: began to enlist the politicians. But it was a slow process.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: But part of it was people were looking around and
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: there were just fewer birds. And I think the passenger
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: pigeons decimation, the way the populations dropped off very quickly,
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: really hit people hearts.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah? I think you know a lot of I say
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: in the book that a lot of people never took
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: a train and went across the Gray Plains and saw
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: these great herds of buffalo that were then of course,
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: you know, being killed. But if you're east of the Mississippi,
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: you probably witnessed the passing of the passenger pigeons, which
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: was an epic, you know sight to see where you know.
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: So that was at the time. I know it happened fast,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: but like that was the thing people saw happen like
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: and it struck them emotionally.
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: It did it did it?
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: Did? You know?
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: Again? A lot of them hunted them, They they passenger
• 57:36
  Speaker 2: pigeons were marking, hunted, they were eating in restaurants and cities.
• 57:42
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, it was something people grew
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: up with, was you know, seeing the sky darkened, it
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: sounded like thunder. It would kick all the dust up
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: from from the land, and these birds would take hours
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: to pass by. It was just it was just a
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: sight of nature that no one will ever see again.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: It happened in their lifetime. It was gone. And I
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: think that's true of some of some other birds as well,
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: that birds that were sort of favorites to be on
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: the farm or be in your backyard, we're just not
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: there anymore.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: At that time, was it? Like? Were the were the
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: hunters and then the preservationists or the sentimentalists were there?
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: Were they kind of like uneasy partners.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: Somewhat at the same time, some of the sentimentalists were hunters,
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: you know, and and you know certainly, and we're eating
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: meat and we're eating birds that they were buying down
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: at the market, and so they understood that. So I
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: think it was a matter of of over time coming
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: together saying we can, you know, we can work together.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: And and then it was not so much that, well,
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: we don't like hunters, we don't like market hunters, and
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: we don't like game hogs the pot hunter, and the
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: pot hunter was again the subsistence hunter who had no
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: restraint because of the laws or you could ignore them.
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: So they were going out and shooting a hundred ducks.
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: And then the sport hunter tended to be someone who
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: felt that there ought to be laws and there ought
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: to be some limits. Now. At the same time, when
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: sport hunting first started in the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties,
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: the whole idea was to kill as many things as
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: you could. That was a good day in the field.
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: And George Shiris talks about that even when he introduced
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: his nineteen oh four builder Protect Game Birds. He said,
• 59:49
  Speaker 2: I would go out on a day and kill two
• 59:52
  Speaker 2: hundred birds and just bring a few home and leave
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: the rest there, take them into town and sell them.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: And it was part of this whole mentality of the
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: Gilded Age that we live in a limitless time and
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: there's always going to be more Why because there always
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: has been more yea and dislike the buffalo. And I
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: talk about it in the book that this this began
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: to change. People started to realize you can't cut all
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: the trees down, and someday you will cut all the
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: trees down, or some day you're gonna kill all the buffalo,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: or you're gonna kill all the Canada geese. And that's
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: where the term conservation comes into the lexicon. And that
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: doesn't really come in until the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: So what were some of the legislative steps that helped
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: sort of sure get a grip on things, get things
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: under control.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: So the American Ornithology Issueing first came out with what
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: they called their Model Law, and it was a law
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: that they were asking states to pass to protect non
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: game birds, and that was non game birds, and so
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: they they kind of left all the game birds to sports.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: People, got it, They'll sort that out.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, although later that changed, and so you had
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: some states that adopted these laws, but there wasn't a
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: lot of money for game wardens, you know, to enforce it.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: There were the sheriff's departments in these little counties did
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: not want to arrest anybody for shooting birds. Sometimes their
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: own families were involved in shooting birds. And so it
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: really wasn't until the Lazy Act, which you know, you know,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: I'm sure a lot about.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: Explain it explained.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, the Lazy Act was John Lacy was
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: a lawyer from Iowa in nineteen hundred, and I look
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: at my notes a little bit because I try to remember.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: In nineteen hundred he passed the what became known is
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: the Lacy Act, and that was to try to prevent
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: market hunting, market hunters from bringing birds across state lines.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 2: So if you if you shot birds in Kansas that
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: were in violation of that of Kansas law. Let's say
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: Kansas had a bag season, if you could pack him
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: into barrels, put them on a train, and get them
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: across the border, you could just sell them, and and
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: and so his so the Lacy Act was that birds
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: can't be sold or wildlife in general can't be sold
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: outside of a state where it was killed illegally, and
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: that started to put the damper on feather hunting and
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: meat hunting. And it was really the first federalization of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: wildlife and birds.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, So that was one of the initial introductions of
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: the idea that a state couldn't just decide to wipe
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: something out that's right under the argument that hey, it's
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: our state, don't tell us what to do. Exactly.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: So places like Louisiana and other of these states along
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: to Mississippi Missouri that were still allowing lots of duck
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: shooting could no longer their market. Hunters could not get
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: those birds out of the state. In Solomon, Massachusetts, or
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: Pennsylvania or Chicago got it. So it really cut down
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: on a lot of that.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: And because we hear the Lacy Act now in terms
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: of all kinds of things like you could poach a
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: white tailed buck and bring it to it in Illinois
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: and bring it to a taxi thermist in Indiana and
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: wind up getting a lasiac violation, or it happens around fish,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: but it was conceptualized as a bird thing.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was also there were lazy agents that
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: were created at that time, agents that were going into
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: cold storage facilities and finding, you know, thousands of birds
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: and barrels that they knew had been killed illegally, and
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: then they were confiscating them.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: When you hear that termed birds and barrels, do you
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: have any idea what that means?
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you could pack a bird in a barrel.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: In a brine cleaned birds, or do anything like feathered bird.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: You clean the bird and you could pack it in
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: a zinc barrel and you could pump all the air
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: out of it, and then you could keep it in
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: a cold storage for years. So these cold stories. I
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: have one whole chapter called cold storage Man. And I
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: found this great book in nineteen oh four about a
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: guy who started off being a market market hunter then
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: he became a cold storage man.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, explaining to me again, So I got a bunch
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: I shoot a bunch of birds.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: You say, you shoot a bunch of birds, you know,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: and initially you could put him into and I house
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: with natural ice, and.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: So they might just got him and put him in
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: an ice house.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: That's right, and then try to keep them for six
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: months and then ship them because you got a train.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: Now in many places now you have train transportation, and
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: you could put him in these ice boxes and get
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: them to Chicago and get them to New York. I
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: mean a lot of market hunting went on locally, and
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: but once ice came along, and they and trains came along,
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: then you could start transporting birds and other wildlife, you know,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: one thousand miles, which is what happened with passenger pigeons.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: Passenger pigeons would roost and for weeks people would just
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: kill them. The pigeoneers as they were known, they were hunters,
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 2: could kill them and ship them out on trains.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, but explain the barrel thing to me.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: So with this guy, I mean, and I'm not an
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: expert on this, but but with this guy that they arrested,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: who was known as the he was known as the
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: quail King.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: And.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: He was raised his his ice house was raided and
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: they found tens of thousands of birds in his ice house,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: and he had some in these zincd barrels where I
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: think an airtight barrel, airtight barrel pumped and and that
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: when the warden who came in cut open the barrel,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: they took some of the birds and cooked them and
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: said they tasted quite well. Really yeah, yeah, Now that
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: seems like a long time.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: So he's like creating some kind of like anaerobic environment.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: Exactly. So you know, through in the chapter he talks
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: about how he initially got into this business. So he married,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 2: he was he was in he was in Illinois. He
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: married a woman from Illinois. Anybody wanted to take her
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 2: back to New York to meet the relatives. It was
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: it was spring, it was still kind of cold. He
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: shot a few plover and he shot some prairie chickens.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: He put him in his suitcase and then it was
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: in a cool baggage car. When he got to New York,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: he pulled the birds out. He walked down to an
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: open market, you know, open air market at that time,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: and people surrounded him immediately and wanted to buy his birds.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: And he said he named an outrageous price, and they
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: bought his birds.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: They wanted to buy him to eat them.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and and you know, and he's like, wow,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: you know, they that's a great price. Then he started
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: looking around at the at the other people who were
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: selling birds there and just saw that their birds were
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: just bad looking. Birds and just kind of spoiled and whatever. No,
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: and wonder everybody wanted his birds. His birds still look fresh.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: And he said, I can make a lot of money
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: if I can get these Illinois birds to New York
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: on eye and make money. And that's how his whole business.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: Started selling Illinois birds in New York.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And then as Illinois got shot out, then he
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: moved out to Iowa and Nebraska, and then he stopped
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: hunting completely and just became a cold storage man, a
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: refrigerator mainly what they called him. Yeah, well, I'll have
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: to look. It was a great book to find. It
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: was called the That's why I wrote it down, so
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: I couldn't remember cold storage man. What was the name?
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: That was the name of the what people used to
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: call him, the quail king and the cold storage man.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: And you're asking me a question, I can't find.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: Type that Ingriant coil King, cold storage.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: Man, nineteen oh four, nineteen oh four. I think the
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: book was called The Tale of the Gun.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: The Tale of the Gun, Yeah.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and he wrote it in nineteen oh four about
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: his being a market hunter in his life. It was
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: a great fine I just found it on the internet.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: I thought this thing works perfect.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so if we if we left off, we
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: were talking about Lazy Act, right what like, So lacyac
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: predated the Migratory and Songbird Treaty or whatever.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 2: That's right. So nineteen hundred was really the first federalization
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: of wildlife where the federal government's now moving in and
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: saying that, you know, we're going to do something about.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: And people are probably having a fit.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, particularly millinery industry, the market hunters, they're all worried.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: Nineteen oh four, George Shiris the third introduces the Shyris
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: Bird Bill, which was something like the weak the Migratory
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: Bird Treaty, although George was just saying that only game
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 2: birds should be protected. But what he is saying at
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: that point is that the states cannot protect these birds
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: and they're not acting in coordinations. So as a duck flies,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: you know, south to north, north to south, it's being
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: shot in every state pretty much as it's going because
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 2: there's not uniform regulations across that. Shyrius knew that law
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: was not going to pass, but he wanted to introduce
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: that concept, and he was a lawyer, so he had
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: worked out this legal theory of National Powers Act Police
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: Powers Act to do this, and he knew it wasn't
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: going to pass in Congress then because there were a
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: lot of states rights folks that said, we don't want
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: the federal government, you know, stepping into this.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: Sure man, this conversation never ends, right.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: So over the next few years, though a lot of
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: bad things were happening, birds were still you know, dying off.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: Now there's no passenger pigeons flying around. The Audubon movement.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: The.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: Boone and Crockett folks, and all of these movements in public.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: Pressure is starting to mount on this. So in nineteen
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: eleven twelve, it bubbles up again and that becomes the
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: Week's McLean Act. The other thing that happened at that
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: time was the American Game Protective and Propagation Association, which
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: is this long. They eventually made their name a lot shorter,
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: but that was the AMMO and gun manufacturers. It said,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: we want to help out, and we want to start
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: this organization because we're getting afraid that our people aren't
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: going to have anything to shoot at our sport hunters
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: and they so that's when the hunters really moved into
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: this bird prot thing, and they decided that that you know,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: Their aim was stop market hunting, complete yeah, protect migratory birds,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: get to you know, get the feds and FEDS involved,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: and they came together with the Audubon Society too to
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: push for the passage of this act. Now, the Audubon
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: Society came in and said, you know, we will, we
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: will help you. However, you have to include non game
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: birds and that became the Dickie Bird Amendment, which was
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: bringing in the bird. Yeah, tweety bird exactly, bringing in
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: these little birds.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: Now there were still birds, so that was like an
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: add on.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: It was an ad on, yeah, it was. It was
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: the Audubon Society that came in and said, well, we
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: basically support bird collection. However you're just supporting game.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: Birds, dicky birds.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to add to Dickie birds. So it's
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: called the Dickie Bird Amendment now, which is pretty slang
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: for a little bird like we would say weedy bird here.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: So they added that amendment and then the American game
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: folks were good lobbyists, aggressive lobbyists, and the Campfire Club
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: was involved in that time. There were some other groups
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: there and they all came into Congress and they lobbied
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: for the passage of the Weeks McLean Act, and then
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: that was passed in nineteen thirteen, and then there was
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: a the Agriculture Department had to create rules, and so
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: there was like, you know, no hunting before sun comes up,
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: no hunting after the sun goes down, no spring shooting.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: Closed season on certain birds that were in danger of
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: you know, extinction, including the wood duck at that time.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: And that raised a lot of concern from these states
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: down south that was you know, Missouri and some of
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: these other ones. It still wanted this, you know, they
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: still felt that the state was the ownership of birds. Now,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: two important people evolved in that time, where Howard Taft,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: who was Roosevelt's vice president. Taft had been a judge
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: and a lawyer and later the US Supreme Court. Justice
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 2: Taft said the Weak Macclaims Act is unconstitutional because there
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: was there was law that said the states really do
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: own it, and it's going to lose. And there's also
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: a guy named Elihu Root. He was a senator. He
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: had also been Secretary of State under Roosevelt. He'd been
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: Secretary of War under Taft. And so these two people
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: told Schiras, look, your law is unconstitutional. And if it
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: gets tested, which it did. Guy shot two coots and
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: they went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: So he said, the way to get around that is when.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: They were pointing out that it's unconstitutional, they supported the idea.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: They supported the I thought legislation.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they thought, you know, they thought George's legal theory
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: was just not gonna was just not going to make
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 2: constitutional muster with.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: The Supreme So they're advising him their advisor rather than
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: being an adversary.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: So so the end of round of all of this
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: is like, you need to go to Canada and get
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: a treaty. If you get a treaty with Canada that
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 2: basically we're going to protect birds not only that go
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: across state lines, but also go across international lines, because
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: that's what migratory bird treaty exactly migratory bird treaty because
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: most of the ducks are nesting in Canada and coming
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: back south. So if you get a bird treaty under
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: the supremacy clause, it circumvents the Supreme Court. And so
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: that was the end around. You know you're going to
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: lose in court, and so let's go for the treaty,
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 2: and that'd be the end around. Now they negotiated with Canada,
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: not Mexico because Mexico was still in the revolutionary state
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: at that point. They joined in later they did in
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 2: nineteen thirty is we reopened.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: So that the ability to have that is based on
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: this treaty. But what is the treaty called.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: So the treaty is called the migratroy Bird Act Treaty.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: But it had to have been adopted by Congress.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: It was adopted by Congress, yeah, about about nineteen nineteen,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: nineteen twenty.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: They made it like law law.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they made it a law. But those guys in Missouri,
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 2: including the Attorney General that I talked.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: About earlier, they were still not buying it.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 2: They were still not buying it. That's when they shot
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: those ducks. That's when they were caught by the Felderal
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: ward and it went up to the Supreme Court. Frank McAllister,
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 2: the Attorney General, argued the case in front of the
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: court and the court said, you know, it doesn't make
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: any difference. It's a treaty and that supersedes all states' rights,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: and that's what it was.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: But was this McAllister guy, was he violating his own
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: state law? Because by that point they probably had like
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: kind of a fake law, like they had a law
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: that no one paid any attention to, or did they
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: not have any regulation in his state.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: They had regulations that they could that they had a
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: spring shooting season that extended beyond what the Feds had
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: said to spring counting.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: So he wasn't he was legal in his state. He was, Okay,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: he was, he was.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: It's a great story.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: Actually when what ended up happening to that guy McAllister.
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 2: Well, he was going to be the governor, but he
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 2: thought he was going to be the governor. But this
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: didn't help vote. Yeah, this costume votes. And he ended
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 2: up becoming a lawyer for the Kansas City Insurance Company,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: and he was actually arrested with some Kansas City Insurance executives.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: When he was arrested, they were all shooting out, you know,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 2: shooting these birds. And so I went to Stultz Lake,
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: which is this little duck club of twenty five people
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: in the Vaden, Missouri, just to go there're still there.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: He's still there, and and and to see.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: Where are those guys aware of the sort of role
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: their club played.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: Not completely. It was kind of funny because you know,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: they were saying that they thought it was all a
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: set up, that that that was sort of how the
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: it trickled down that the Attorney General was set up
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: and he actually did this on purpose in order to
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: test a lot. That's not true.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: Oh okay, So it's it's become over time, it's become
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: that it was a little more benevolent. Yeah, And in
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: reality he was like, no, I'm going to do what
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: And and and and he got to this club, and
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: these it's a great story. These guys followed him down.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: They they they got out at four o'clock in the
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: morning at this little town and there was a taxi
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 2: driver there and they said, take us out to the
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: Duck Club. And the guy said, well, what duck club?
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 2: He goes the one max at They called him back,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: and they actually took him out to the club and
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: and and on the way out, they said, you can't
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: get in there because it's locked to keep they keep
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 2: the game wardens out. He goes, don't worry, mac, let
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: us in and it wasn't locked, and they were actually
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: able to drive right in, got dropped off, knocked on
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 2: the clubhouse door, dragged one guy out of bed.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: So apparently those guys had the open fields doctrine and
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: didn't need a warrant. No, because it was game.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: It was a game. Yeah yeah, yeah, because.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: He got in there under subterfuge.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: They did. They did. I don't know that much about
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: the law, that's exactly how.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: So that's like, this is a this could be a
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: follow up, like an addendum if you ever do one
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: for your book, because there's a there's a lively debate
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: right now where if a game warden suspects that there's
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: a violation occurring on private property, he doesn't need a warrant. Okay,
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: So if a game board is standing on a public
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: road and you're shooting away on your private property, right,
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: he can walk on over in a way that like
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: a cop cannot do.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: Right, Okay.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: Then there's this thing, the open fields doctrine, and it's
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: like it gives game wardens a level of latitude on
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: private property that normal police don't enjoy in terms of
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: their ability to go and check out what's going on.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: If they know hunting to be taking place, that gives
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: them what they need to go on to the property
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: and then see is there a violation occurring. They don't
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: need to be motivated by knowledge of it occurring. And
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: this is being tested. Now there's you know, private private
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: property rights advocates are arguing, why in the world would
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: we allow wardens to violate what they perceive to be
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: their constitutional rights and that you'd have like illegal search
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: and seizure or whatever. Why is that okay for a
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: game warden? And so it's being tested. I would picture
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: I'm an aspiring polymarket better. If I was a polymarket
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: betting man, I would go and create one about like
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: in the future. I think that we will see, and
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying I agree with this, in the future,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: we will see a reduction in game wardens' abilities to
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: go and do their work on private property like your
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: buddy with your buddy that caught the like your buddy
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: that caught the bad guy.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: Well, consider how much private land there is, and right,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: so you can only do it on public land.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, public land, do whatever you want.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: What they're what they're contesting is that you know that
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: they can go do what they want, that the game
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: work can go over and be like what's up boys,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: which happens all the time. Yeah, right, you know, right,
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: I've been sitting out there duck hunting cornfields and you
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: turn around. It scares you because it's a game ward
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: standing there, and some people are like, how could that
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: be true? Like like a cop, you know what I mean? Sure, Like,
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: how can that be How can you be standing here
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden on my place? Where's your warrant?
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: You know? It's a robust debate right now.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah, So once you book out, it comes out
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: March seventeenth.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, we're good.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, it's uh yeah, you can basically get it
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: now because you you know.
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can order it one day before, that's right.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's just like when you do that, it
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: just shows up a lot of times. They ship early too. Congratulations.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: I'm holding to thank you for people watching. I'm holding
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: the what's called a galley copy says not for quotation,
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: not for resale, uncorrected proof. In the vernacular, we know
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: these is galley copies. So when you get yours, you'll
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: get a brand spicketty, nice hardcover book.
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's got some two inserts of you know,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: slick photos in there. And I found a lot of
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 2: great historical photos as well.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, they also call these Advanced reader copies, as
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: it says right on the cover. Yeah, idea being this
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: little little publishing inside. If you realize that there's a
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: review for a book the day the book comes out,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: a smart fella might be saying, well, how does he
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: know the book's not out yet? Yeah, so they sent
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: them one of these advanced reader copies. So that's what
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: I'm holding. I want people realize if they order the book,
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: they get like a like a legit book.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, this is just an attractive looking book to.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: An attractive looking book. Again. It's called The Feather Wars
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: and the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds with James
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: James H. Mccommons, what's irish name? Absolutely all right, thanks
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate it too. It's been fun.