WILD GOOSE CHASE:
THE COMMUNAL SCIENCE OF WATERFOWL MIGRATION STUDY IN
NORTH AMERICA, 1880-1940
A thesis presented
by
Molly Clare Wilson
to
The Department of the History of Science in partial fulfillment for an honors degree in History and Science
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts March, 2006
ABSTRACT
Wild Goose Chase: The Communal Science of Waterfowl Migration Study in North America, 1880-1940
Molly Clare Wilson
Bird migration study is a field shaped by its unusual demands; the tension between the moving study object and the stationary data collector led to the creation of observation networks, standardized and managed in varying ways. I consider three figures in early waterfowl migration studies, Frank Chapman, Jack Miner, and Frederick Lincoln, each of whom is emblematic of a particular philosophy of public participation. The layering of their aims and rhetorics brings out the discipline’s complicated epistemology and growing pragmatism as wildlife conservation and land use policy became an increasingly pressing concern.
Keywords: ornithology, observation, migration, hunting, wildlife, conservation
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My advisor, Luis Campos, has followed this project with me from beginning to end, helping me unfold, anchor, and organize my ideas along the way. Sarah Jansen provided invaluable encouragement and insight throughout the research and writing process. Peter Buck helped me pull the sense of my argument out of an enthusiastic but jumbled pile of facts, and John Mathew assisted me in refining my focus as my chapters changed shape and substance.
Brigitte Rollier and Joëlle Defay at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Nice gave me time, space, and archives access to begin my research over the summer. Jeremiah Trimble and Alison Pirie at the Museum of Comparative Zoology lent me their time and expertise, and Fred Burchsted at Widener Library gave me invaluable pointers for research in ornithological history.
Christie Riehl and Andrew Karas were as generous with their writing advice and revision suggestions as with their friendship. I would not have enjoyed this project nearly as much as I did without the contagious excitement of Christine Delucia, who shared her work on Faulkner and migration with me; the thoughtful theory of Robin Brown; and the good counsel and welcome company of Lauren Brandt, who joined Jack Miner’s fan club early on.
Fran Moore patiently listened to my every trial and tribulation. Anne Porter taught me the lessons a would-be scholar most needs to learn: how to nourish the joys of research, ride out the botherations, and take heart despite it all. And I am so fortunate to have had Anna Bingham, a stellar intellectual companion and kindred spirit, by my side through four years in History of Science.
I dedicate this thesis to Elizabeth Cowie, zoologist, philosopher, politician, and birdwatcher. She is as much my friend and my inspiration as she is my grandmother.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Community, coordination, and flight dreams...... 1 1. “Everyone is born with a bird in his heart”: Frank Chapman, writer and educator...... 9 Chapman’s scientific homecoming ...... 11 From shotguns to opera-glasses...... 15 Measuring the “feathered tide”: early migration studies ...... 20 An army of observation ...... 23 2. Honk if you love Jesus: Jack Miner, evangelist and popularizer...... 31 A young hunter’s transformation...... 33 Winged missionaries...... 35 From banded bird to data point...... 40 “Kingsville, Ontario is the hub of America”...... 43 3. “A duck for every puddle”: Frederick Lincoln, accountant and surveyor.... 50 A movable feast: waterfowl as natural resource ...... 51 Fair game: hunting regulation...... 57 Flyways, refuges, and bringing migration down to earth ...... 62 Conclusion: “We have learnt from the birds and continue to learn”...... 73 Works Cited ...... 78
TABLE OF FIGURES
Fig. 1. The American Ornithologists’ Union ...... 30 Fig. 2. Jack Miner...... 48 Fig. 3. Miner’s map of Canada goose migration...... 49 Fig. 4. Frederick Lincoln...... 71 Fig. 5. Lincoln’s map of the Mississippi Flyway...... 72
Introduction: Community, coordination, and flight dreams
Nils “had never dreamed that it could be so fresh and bracing as it was up
in the air; or that there arose from the earth such a fine scent of resin and soil.” A
popular children’s book from 1906 puts this boy, shrunk to elfin size, on the
backs of migrating geese one spring. Holding fast to the goose’s neck and
watching the patchwork of fields stretch into Arctic wildness “was just like flying
away from sorrow and trouble and annoyances of every kind that could be
thought of.”1 An older migration flight of fancy comes from Francis Godwin’s
1638 The Man in the Moone. The adventurer Domingo Gonsales harnesses geese to
his ship, “mindfull of their usuall voyage,” as it was “the season that these Birds
were wont to take their flight away, as our Cuckoes and swallowes doe in Spaine
towards the Autumne.”2 As of one mind, the geese head straight up into the sky and away from the earth, winging through space with their human passenger until they reach their destination: the moon. “As I now well perceived,” remarks
Gonsales, geese, swallows, and nightingales “spend the time of their absence from us, even there in that world.”3
Today we are quite sure there are no geese on the moon. A hundred years
ago, though, the tundra where the Canada goose (Branta canadensis) breeds might
1 Lagerlöf, Selma. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Mary Hamilton Frye, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1915), 23. 2 Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone: or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither (London: John Norton, 1638). Available at
as well have been another planet; no human could follow the birds’ route, either by shrinking to elf-size or by tagging birds with today’s radio transmitters. When ornithologists first began to launch large-scale studies attempting to map the movements of birds, communication between relatively immobile observers was the only way to guess at migration routes. Humans were making progress in the quest to move people and information through space as quickly and universally as possible. By the turn of the century, trains, automobiles, ships, and airplanes were ushering in an era of transportation, enabling a certain degree of mobility and information exchange but stopping short of allowing ornithologists all the freedom of the birds they studied. Comparisons between human achievement and nature were inevitable, and the barriers encountered by machines heightened the allure of animal migration study. “There are mountaintops so high and so steep that man has never succeeded in climbing them,” wrote ornithologist Frank Chapman. “But the birds may use them as resting-places and soar about in the sky far above them. I think we may safely say that the bird is not only the greatest of aviators, but that he is also the greatest of travelers,” he finished. “Not even man can excel him.”4
The ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century were faced with the challenge of bridging the disjuncture between fascination and fact collection.
“Although the coming of the birds in the spring and their departure in the fall are among the most apparent of natural phenomena about us, and must be
4 Chapman, Frank M. The Travels of Birds (New York: Appleton, 1916), 3.
noticed by everyone, it is quite another matter when it comes to the details of
their movements,” wrote migration scientist Leon Cole in 1909.5 Of course,
technologies such as Doppler radar and signal-emitting tracking bands enable us
to gather information about birds that early 20th-century ornithologists never would have thought possible: precise flight speeds, changing shapes of flocks, exact routes of flight and interactions with weather patterns.
Yet most of our information about migration comes from banding, a technique pioneered systematically in the early 1900s. The history of banding is inseparable from the history of migration studies. Banding is quite simple: one person puts a numbered tag on the leg of a bird, and whoever finds the tagged bird reports back. But a bird band is more than a strip of metal, more, indeed, than a numbered strip of metal, or even a numbered strip of metal with a return address – it is part of an epistemic system. Each band applied to a bird represents the possibility of a data point, a stab at following an individual’s life history.
This method was particularly important as applied to geese and ducks.
Essayist Florence Jaques saw bird banding in action during a 1939 visit to a waterfowl refuge. Jaques and her nature artist husband, Lee, had come to the refuge both to hunt and to help Lee’s friends out with the daily chore of trapping, banding, and releasing. “Dick held the birds, Nick snapped the bands on skillfully, and Lee recorded the numbers in a notebook,” she recalled. “The
5 Cole, Leon J. “The Tagging of Wild Birds as a Means for Studying Their Movements.” Auk 26.2 (Apr. 1909): 138.
bands were small aluminum rings stamped with numbers… if the number on the
band sent in, the place and time of death can be compared with the place and
time of banding, and knowledge of bird wandering acquired.”6 Waterfowl have
provided some of the most abundant data simply because their bands are recovered and returned more often. The U.S. government estimates that over three million Canada geese have been banded to date in North America, of which 725,000 are reported recovered, about a 25% return rate. (In comparison, the recovery rate for bands on all bird species is just over 6%.)7 Because of the
game value of ducks and geese, sportspeople and wildlife managers have always
been particularly interested in understanding their behavior. The
commodification of game birds, particularly waterfowl, was a primary driving
force behind the development of migration studies. Our knowledge of migration
depends on hunting, at the same time as the ecology of controlled hunting
demands investigation into birds’ movement patterns. “After the ducks were
banded they were tossed into the air, and flew off looking rather dazed from
their strange adventure,” recounted Jaques.8 The birds’ further adventures,
formerly the provenance of hunters’ guesswork, now had at least a chance at
becoming known to humans. Waterfowl thus became a kind of model organism
6 Jaques, Florence Page. The Geese Fly High (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1939), 66. 7 Tompkins, Shannon. “Banding Keeps Tabs on Subjects.” Houston Chronicle 2 Feb. 2006: 11. 8 Jaques, 66.
for migration study, a condition which had an enormous influence on the theoretical and practical course of the discipline.9
Organized efforts to collect data on migration, both banding records and sight records, started early in America. The founding of the American
Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) in 1883 galvanized the previously scattered
ornithological community with the possibilities of concerted activity. At the
AOU’s very first meeting, members created “a very ambitious committee…
evidently not afraid of hard work” charged with administering a nationwide
bird migration study.10 With this first study, ornithology relinquished any
possibility of a professional monopoly on bird migration. By nature, it was an
enterprise that demanded widely dispersed agents. In order to study bird
distribution and movement, migration scientists had to first grapple with the
distribution and behavior of their field observers; in order to manage bird
populations, they needed to manage their data collectors. At first, the process of
openly recruiting public help seemed straightforward enough, but as more
people became involved and the stakes rose, migration studies began to rely
more on organized surveys and less on individual reports.
9 For more on model organisms, see F.L. Holmes, “The Old Martyr of Science: The Frog in Experimental Physiology.” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (1993): 311-328. Holmes looks at the dialectic between the organism’s availability and its suitability as a way to interpret the history of a science. See also Sarah Jansen, “An American Insect in Imperial Germany: Visibility and Control in Making the Phylloxera in Germany, 1870-1914.” Science in Context 13 (2000): 31-70. Jansen locates a single organism at the “[point] of intersection of scientific-technological- practices, administrative practices, and cultural symbols,” an analytical construction applicable to waterfowl as well as to insect pests. 10 Rowan, William. “Fifty Years of Bird Migration.” Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology (New York: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1933), 51.
The uneasy yet inevitable coexistence of professional scientists and amateurs is endemic to bird migration study. Today’s mass of accreted data is the work of many, from ornithologists to bankers to housewives, professors to paperboys. Despite the fact that data accumulation was a main objective of migration study in the early 20th century, the history of the discipline poses serious challenges to a monotonic view of scientific progress towards a unified goal. Here I consider three bird enthusiasts, Frank Chapman, Jack Miner, and
Frederick Lincoln, involved in migration study between 1880 and 1940. Each man engaged in some way with the central problem of migration study, namely, the collecting of facts concerning a phenomenon spread out across the entire continent. They drew their strikingly different philosophies of how migration study ought to be carried out from intense familiarity with their respective cultural surroundings. Each of these sensibilities is a necessary part of today’s migration study, having left a residue that speaks to the many influences, personal and societal, that bear on the creation of a discipline. Migration study became a communal science, involving and depending on a large network of participants, as a result of both the demands of the phenomenon itself and the historical specificity of these three management techniques.
Mark Barrow has sensitively and thoroughly chronicled the story of ornithology’s professionalization. My argument rests on Barrow’s characterization of the inevitable tension between amateurs and the AOU, owing much to his articulation of the “politics of vision” embedded in turn-of-the-
century ornithological disciplinarity. Introducing migration study into Barrow’s analysis adds geographical and pragmatic dimensions to the controversy over amateur participation. This thesis aims to use migration study in order to uncover the continuity between Barrow’s disciplinary history, which deals primarily with the 1890s and 1900s, and the more environmentally focused waterfowl management histories of Robert Wilson and Jared Orsi, both of which are centered in the 1930s.11
Though this thesis focuses on the creation of scientific community rather than the achievements of scientists in isolation, the communities concerned were very deliberately created by three bird migration enthusiasts bent on informing amateurs when and how to help out with data collection. Frank Chapman was an East Coast museum ornithologist, a curator at the American Museum of
Natural History, and an ardent proponent of birdwatching as a way to exercise the mind and soothe the soul. “We all have an inherent interest in bird-life which needs only to be aroused and developed in order to become a potent bond between us and nature, and an uplifting influence of inestimable value,”12 wrote
Chapman. Every man, so he said, had “a bird in his heart.” Chapman had migration studies to thank for his introduction into the AOU’s rarefied social circle. For him, the flocks of observers noting the movement of groups of birds
11 See Mark Barrow, A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology After Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Robert Wilson, “Directing the Flow: Migratory Waterfowl, Scale, and Mobility in Western North America.” Environmental History 7 (2002): 247-266; and Jared Orsi, “From Horicon to Hamburgers and Back Again: Ecology, Ideology, and Wildfowl Management, 1917-1935.” Environmental History Review 18 (Winter 1994), 19-40. 12 “Dr. Chapman Feted on 70th Birthday.” New York Times 13 June 1934: 27.
were as effective an outreach strategy as any to get more people involved in
science and conservation. The new and burgeoning field of migration study was
an ideal starting point for involving nonspecialists.
But could the “amateurs” take over migration study themselves?
Chapman’s much more isolated contemporary Jack Miner, living in Kingsville,
Ontario, studied goose migration outside the established ornithological framework. While Chapman and his colleagues were scrambling to develop
filing systems and organize incoming data, Miner scorned ornithology and its
organizational approach to bird study. His spirit of inquiry grew out of his faith,
and his distinctive Scripture-tagged geese made him a news sensation. An
individualist at a time of consolidation and increasing oversight, Miner pointed
up an intriguing alternative to institutionalization and effectively piqued the
interest of new constituencies, showing hunters and other non-scientists the
fascination and relevance of migration.
Finally, once Colorado-born Frederick Lincoln became involved with the
U.S. Biological Survey in the 1920s, migration data turned suddenly practical.
Lincoln connected birds and land, looking at the increasingly contested flyover country as an integral part of the migration route. Waterfowl numbers seemed to be declining precipitously, and governmental management seemed the only
solution; migration study was no longer a tool for spreading interest in
ornithology or an individual pastime, but a pragmatic professional discipline of
critical import.
Bird migration thus serves as a case study showing how the trajectory
towards professionalization is traced by a combination of scientific imperative
and historical moment. There are thousands upon thousands of banded birds
that have never been recovered and never will be. Their relevance rests solely on
the intention with which they were created as study objects, by whom, for
whom, and with what goals in mind. As these three managers of migration study
show, a series of stories drives this particular disciplinary history, giving us a
sense of “the flow and ebb of the feathered tide”13 and what it meant for the
ornithological community.
13 The phrase comes from English zoologist Alfred Newton, quoted in T.S. Palmer, “In Memoriam: Wells Woodbridge Cooke.” Auk 34.2 (Apr. 1917): 119-132.
1. “Everyone is born with a bird in his heart”: Frank Chapman, writer and
educator
As the air grew crisp and the winds brisk that October in 1925, the aerial highways of migration were thick with birds. Within the marble walls of the
American Museum of Natural History, though, the migrating flocks hung frozen
in mid-journey. Ducks, geese, and pelicans were suspended artfully from the
ceiling, arranged in groups that imitated their flight formations. “The dome of a gallery on the second floor has been painted to represent the heavens, the soft blue sky partially veiled with naturalistic clouds,” wrote the New York Times. In these “artificial heavens,” even the most urban of wildlife enthusiasts could observe migrating birds at close range. Even without life or motion, the exhibit, entitled “Birds in Flight,” must have been a beautiful sight. 14
The mastermind behind this exhibit was Frank Michler Chapman, the
AMNH’s first curator of birds and a fervent popularizer of ornithology.
Chapman’s dedication and contributions to science earned him the respect of his peers, while his museum displays, free lectures, field guides, textbooks, and editorials brought him wide popular recognition among the educated public. It was Chapman who created the museum’s famous hall of bird dioramas, of interest “almost as much for the skill and perseverance which formed the exhibit
14 “Museum to Open Novel Bird Exhibit.” New York Times 6 Nov. 1925: 21.
as for the exhibit itself,” the New York Times noted.15 Eight years of work and
sixty-five thousand miles of travel went into designing the scenes and collecting
the bird specimens. The resulting spectacle was a “remarkably realistic visit to
the most notable North American birds in their own homes when they are not
expecting company.”16 Despite the academic bent to his exhibits, Chapman was
“no museum pedant.”17 On the contrary, he devoted his life to delivering a
pleasant, enlightening brand of ornithology finely tuned to the appetites of the
reading public. His widely read magazine Bird-Lore, a bimonthly publication that
he called a “popular journal of ornithology,” held “all that the most ardent bird-
student could desire,” from natural history essays to whimsical bird
photographs.18 By 1933, as the New York Times wrote, “the name Chapman is
synonymous with birds to thousands of plodding bird lovers in this country.”19
Chapman is best known for helping educate and connect students of bird life; he reigned over the new community of American birdwatchers. What is less widely acknowledged is that Chapman saw migration as the most pragmatic subject with which to engage the public. He believed deeply in the usefulness of a corps of observers spread across the continent. The tradition of public involvement in migration study began with Chapman, who claimed famously that “everyone is born with a bird in his heart.” Chapman simply took it upon
15 “Birds of the Museum.” New York Times 8 Mar. 1909: 6. 16 Ibid. 17 Atkinson, Brooks. “An American Master of Bird Lore.” New York Times 19 Nov. 1933: BR6. 18 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.1 (Feb. 1899): 28. 19 Atkinson, BR6.
himself to match the heart’s birds with the world’s birds in order to capitalize on the energies of birdwatchers across the country. When later ornithologists looked back on the history of their own profession, they viewed Chapman’s encouragement and utilization of nonspecialists as a necessary step in the evolution of migration study.
Chapman’s scientific homecoming
Frank Chapman was born in 1864 in a New Jersey “country residence of charm and dignity.”20 He attended the Englewood Academy until age sixteen –
“my work at school was mediocre,” he admitted21 – at which point he elected to forego college in order to work at the American Exchange National Bank of New
York. He worked for six years as a banker, indulging his passion for birds in his spare time. But, as the New York Times put it, “his heart was in the woods, not at a teller’s window.”22 Throughout his twenties, Chapman began to cultivate friendships with bird enthusiasts. He chanced upon one Frederick Dixon on the train to work and was enchanted both by his “love of nature” and his well-used first editions of field guides. He later struck up an acquaintance with Dixon’s friend Clarence Riker, who dazzled young Chapman with his collection of rare
Amazonian wood-creepers. Riker awoke in Chapman a yearning for discovery
20 Murphy, Robert Cushman. “Frank Michler Chapman, 1864-1945.” Auk 67.3 (July 1950): 311. 21 Chapman, Autobiography, 6. 22 “Dr. Chapman Dies; Ornithologist, 81.” New York Times 17 Nov. 1945: 17.
and adventure. Chapman recalled “swinging in a Brazilian hammock with the
skin of a Hyacinthine Macaw in my hands, listening to Riker’s thrilling account
of how he had shot this rare bird,” and eagerly anticipating the days when he,
too, could travel the world in search of more exotic avian life.23
However, Chapman’s real epiphany came in January 1884, as he was
reading the sportsmen’s magazine Field and Stream. He came across a notice
written by Dr. C. Hart Merriam, chairman of the American Ornithologists’ Union
(AOU) Committee on Bird Migration, recruiting “volunteers to observe and
report upon the migration of birds.” Chapman responded and found himself
placed under the jurisdiction of A.K. Fisher, Superintendent of the Atlantic
Division. “For the first time I was brought into direct communication with a
professional ornithologist,” wrote Chapman.24 Fisher became Chapman’s first mentor and “ornithological godfather.”
Chapman had stumbled upon the first North American attempt at ornithology’s most ambitious challenge yet: the collection and analysis of
migration data. Merriam’s committee, in his words, aimed “to investigate in all
its bearings, and to the fullest extent possible, the subject of the migration of
birds in the United States and British North America.”25 The Committee on Bird
Migration was founded at the AOU’s inaugural meeting in 1883, and Merriam,
an enthusiastic 28-year-old doctor, was named chair. He divided North America
23 Chapman, Autobiography, 26. 24 Chapman, Autobiography, 32-33. 25 Rowan, 51.
into thirteen territories, each directed by a “competent Superintendent.”26 Each
Superintendent was to synthesize the data from his district, collected by observers such as Chapman, and send a report to Merriam. While holding down his increasingly detested banking job in New York City, Chapman managed to fit in two birdwatching expeditions each day. He took a circuitous route through the local woodlands to the train platform, changing clothes at the station and catching the 7:39 AM train into the city. After work, he squeezed in another observational outing before dinner, then spent the time between dinner and bedtime writing up the day’s notes. “I went through the motions of a bank clerk, but… I lived, thought and dreamed the life of a bird student,” wrote Chapman.27
The most ecstatic moments in Chapman’s early ornithological life were
those in which he was invited into the newly coalescing community of bird-
minded scientists. He was lucky to have found a ready-made network in the
newly founded AOU. The founding of the AOU in 1883 assembled and
organized America’s serious bird enthusiasts, effectively changing ornithology
from a hobby into a discipline. Two of the AOU’s founding members were
young newcomers to the discipline with a particular interest in migration. One
was Merriam, a consummate administrator and project leader who seemed “a
human dynamo of energy” in his capacity as chair of the Committee on
26 Merriam, C. Hart. “Bird Migration.” Auk 1.1 (Jan. 1884): 73. 27 Chapman, Autobiography, 33.
Migration.28 Merriam also busied himself with field expeditions around the
Americas and worked at the National Zoological Park in Washington looking
after exotic birds and mammals. Another young founding AOU member,
Merriam’s colleague Wells W. Cooke, who volunteered his time as
superintendent for Merriam’s study as superintendent for the Manitoba and
Mississippi Valley districts, focused his energies on migration in particular.
Cooke had moved to Wisconsin at age six, in 1864, from the East Coast and
became enamored of wild birds from an early age. After graduating from Ripon
College, he got a post teaching in the Indian secondary schools in the Mississippi
Valley. He taught for six years at various locations, from northerly Moorhead,
MN through Jefferson, WI and down into Oklahoma. The rhythm of the school
year and the constant relocation allowed Cooke to take extensive notes on the
winter arrivals and departures of birds in several places throughout the
Midwest. Armed with a dogged penchant for fact-gathering, Cooke “labored
patiently, persistently, and enthusiastically to raise the veil of mystery
enveloping the habits of some of our common birds.”29
Sponsored by Fisher, his district superintendent in Merriam’s migration
study, Chapman was inducted into the AOU as an Associate Member in 1885.
His first AOU meeting, held at the American Museum of Natural History
(AMNH) in November of that year, left him fascinated beyond words. The
28 Palmer, T.S. “In Memoriam: Clinton Hart Merriam.” Auk 71.2 (Apr. 1954): 130-136. 29 Palmer, “Wells W. Cooke,” 119.
famous Merriam, “a rosy-cheeked young man of twenty-nine,” spoke with
“fluent hesitancy on some phase of bird migration.”30 Being in the same room
with older ornithological luminaries Robert Ridgway and William Brewster left
Chapman “with a feeling almost of consternation.”31 After the meeting,
Chapman recognized he had no choice but to leave banking for the much less
remunerative life of an ornithologist: despite the financial disincentive, Chapman
wrote, he had “suddenly fallen heir to opportunities limited only by my ability to
take advantage of them.” 32 He had been hired as an assistant at the AMNH at
fifty dollars a week, less than half of his bank salary. The deciding influence was
the sense of belonging to a community of inquisitive, adventurous scientists
working on relevant, cutting-edge topics [Fig. 1]. Working at the museum felt
like a “homecoming.”33 “The study of birds was no longer thought of as the
work of men who had left this world before I entered it,” Chapman realized. “I
had met living bird students; ornithology was just as much a thing of the present
and future as of the past; to me much more so!”34
Chapman presumably spoke of “living bird students” as opposed to his boyhood heroes, the early 19th-century taxidermist John James Audubon with his
lavish colored plates and the avid specimen collector Louis Agassiz, who had
died in 1877. Yet the more remarkable aspect of Chapman’s first AOU meeting
30 Chapman, Autobiography, 41. 31 Chapman, Autobiography, 41. 32 Chapman, Autobiography, 59. 33 Chapman, Autobiography, 59. 34 Chapman, Autobiography, 41.
was that these men were the first “living bird students” in another sense: they
studied living birds along with, or instead of, museum specimens. Little did
Chapman know that he had caught ornithology in a moment of transition, one
which he would hasten as he worked his way towards the forefront of the field.
From shotguns to opera-glasses
“The field ornithologists of to-day are of two kinds: first, those who
collect; second, those who observe,” wrote Chapman in 1899.35 This uneasy turn-
of-the-century characterization was actually the intermediate stage of a major
disciplinary metamorphosis. Twenty years earlier, gathering bird skins had been
the defining practice of ornithology; twenty years later, most field ornithologists
would carry binoculars in place of guns. The 20th century saw the single greatest
sea change in the history of ornithology. Simply put, investigation into behavior,
distribution, and migration largely supplanted the study of classification.36
The men most instrumental in the creation of the AOU were ornithology’s sorters, labelers, and bookkeepers, relics from an earlier generation of naturalists.
Though only twenty years older than Merriam, Cooke, and Chapman, J. A. Allen
35 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.3 (June 1899): 99. 36 Mark Barrow analyzes and illuminates this transition in ornithology. See especially his chapter on “The Politics of Vision” for an investigation into the amateur ornithological community. For an example of a scientific paper that straddles both phases, see Glover M. Allen, “Pattern Development in Mammals and Birds, III.” American Naturalist 48.573 (Sep. 1914): 550-566, which deals with both the static classification and biogeographical derivation of cheek patches on the Canada goose.
typified the collector and classifier; in Allen’s time, a gun was a necessary tool for ornithological fieldwork. Despite the disciplinary distance between Allen and the younger cohort, it was Allen, along with his contemporaries Elliot Coues,
William Brewster, and Robert Ridgway who set up the organizational structure that would frame ornithology for years to come.
Allen came from, in his words, “early New England stock.”37 He grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, where he was “marked” as a “born naturalist” by his love of the outdoors. As an adolescent, he “developed a desire to know more of the animal and plant life, the soil and the rocks, and the ever changing phenomena of sky and air, than could be gained merely by association.”38 Like
Chapman, he dreamt of a scientific career, and needed only the invitation and encouragement of an ornithological mentor already established in natural history circles. In 1862, he headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts in order to study under
Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Allen accompanied
Agassiz on a voyage to the interior of Brazil in 1865, and, over the next ten years, his travels were frequent and varied. From the Rockies, Allen brought back a reported 1500 bird skins, 240 mammal skulls, and “a large number of birds’ nests and eggs, recent and fossil fishes, insects and crustaceans.”39 However, after all his travels, Allen’s health had so deteriorated that he was forced to redefine himself as a museum naturalist at the American Museum of Natural History,
37 Chapman, Frank M. “In Memoriam: Joel Asaph Allen.” Auk 39.1 (Jan. 1922): 1. 38 Quoted in Chapman, “Joel Asaph Allen,” 4. 39 Chapman, “Joel Asaph Allen,” 8.
developing collections instead of gathering specimens. He also turned his
energies towards formalizing the nascent organizations of nature-minded scientists and serious amateurs. “To Dr. Allen might well be applied the title
Father of the American Ornithologists’ Union,” wrote Chapman in 1922.40 Allen edited the Auk, the monthly journal of the AOU, for nearly thirty years.41 When
Chapman and Allen first met, Chapman was “an inexperienced assistant” at the
AMNH. He found in Allen “not only a friend but a teacher.” The two men worked together for 34 years.42 Under Allen, Chapman learned about
cataloguing and caring for the AMNH’s enormous bird collection. Chapman
enjoyed the “intimate and constant association with specimens.” He liked to
“closely note their color and examine the details of their structure while
recording the date and place of their capture… data that formed an object lesson in geographical distribution tinged with the romance of exploration.”43
After the initial flush of excitement at being part of the ornithological
community had worn off, though, Chapman became increasingly critical of the
practices of Allen and others. In 1890, Chapman complained in a letter of
…this miserable collecting. It is the curse of all higher feeling, it lowers a true love of nature through a desire for gain. I don’t mean a specimen here and there, but this shooting right and left, this boasting of how many skins have been made in a day or a season. We are becoming pot-hunters. We
40 Chapman, “Joel Asaph Allen,” 11. 41 Palmer, T.S. “A Brief History of the American Ornithologists’ Union.” Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology (Lancaster, PA: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1933), 7-27. 42 Chapman, “Joel Asaph Allen,” 12. 43 Chapman, Autobiography, 67.
proclaim how little we know of the habits of birds and then kill them at sight.44
Because most ornithologists were employed at museums, and museums
dealt in specimens, the professional structure perpetuated this emphasis on
collecting. Chapman set out to challenge this status quo by changing the public
image of ornithology as a science of musty museums and dead birds. He set out
to inform the public of what the migration studies had already made evident to
ornithologists: the live bird had become the primary study object. Seizing on the
growing popularity of birdwatching, Chapman chose as the motto for Bird-Lore,
his “popular journal of ornithology,” an inversion of an old adage: “a bird in the
bush is worth two in the hand.” Chapman encapsulated the new attitude for the benefit of Bird-Lore’s readers in 1899:
The future ornithologist is not to be a mere hoarder of birds’ skins, but a student of bird-life whose researches, we predict, will prove an invaluable aid in the solution of that most difficult and most important of all biologic problems, the relation of animals to their environment.45
Of course, bird specimen collection was hardly dead. Ornithologists had
not exactly run out of birds to classify, but their taxonomy was complete enough
that specimen collecting had become a delicate and esoteric pursuit best left to
specialists. Another sparrow skin was of little use to the ornithological
community. “It’s all very well to say that the man with the gun brings back
specimens, but the various species are pretty well known as to plumage and
44Quoted in Barrow, 173. 45 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.4 (Aug. 1899: 135.
structure,” said Chapman to the Linnaean Society of New York in a 1900 lecture entitled “Bird Studies with a Camera.” He pointed out to the readership of Bird-
Lore that prominent museums held collections so vast and comprehensive that further collecting was not necessary. “Only a thoroughly trained ornithologist or his personally directed assistants can make collections which will be of real scientific value,” warned Chapman. In case the needs of science failed to convince, Chapman brought out an appeal to human sympathy. One article, entitled “Home-Life in a Chimney,” was expressly meant to deter would-be egg collectors from wreaking havoc upon innocent bird families.46 Live bird study lent itself to sentiment in a way that specimen collecting could not.
Bird-Lore had a ready-made readership of newly fashioned birdwatchers.
“SOCIETY WOMEN STUDY BIRDS,” proclaimed the New York Times in 1897. “A number of New York’s fashionable women” had taken to this “opera-glass ornithology” and could be seen strolling in Central Park, binoculars in hand. “It is an altogether charming interest,” wrote the Times.47 The birdwatcher was to some degree a product of the new public fascination with nature. With the rise of cities came awareness of the value of wild space. The act of leaving civilization for wildness promised health and wholesome renewal, whether “wildness” meant one of the newly founded national parks or one of Frederick Law
Olmsted’s urban oases. More importantly, the conservation movement had just
46 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.3 (June 1899): 99. 47 “Opera-Glass Students.” New York Times 31 July 1898: 18.
begun to take hold in America. John Muir’s poetic call to action on nature’s
behalf mobilized both government and popular support for wilderness
protection. 48 Between 1892 and 1898, publishers in New York and Boston alone
sold over seventy thousand field guides and other books on bird life.49 Most importantly, state Audubon societies cropped up first across New England and then out towards the Midwest and West. Chapman founded Bird-Lore as a means of connecting these state Audubon societies and disseminating the reports of individual members.
In effect, Bird-Lore encouraged amateurs by initiating them into an appropriate community. Nothing compared to the amateur’s first sense of connection with others; Chapman opened a new world to bird enthusiasts across the country, much as Merriam had done for him barely fifteen years earlier. But
Chapman’s work in solidifying the amateur community had a more practical goal than allowing thousands to enjoy a favorite hobby on a new level. The work being done by AOU ornithologists, particularly on migration, demanded much more data than they could possibly gather themselves. Casual birdwatchers proved an important and complicated ingredient in migration studies.
48 For a fuller treatment of turn-of-the-century changes in American nature appreciation, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), particularly Ch. 9, “The Wilderness Cult.” 49 Orr, Oliver H., Jr. Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 73.
Measuring the “feathered tide”: early migration studies
“The birds cannot write books about themselves,” pointed out Chapman
in The Travels of Birds, a simple but inexplicably charming children’s book
published in 1916. “We cannot either go with [the birds] or read their own
accounts of their long journeys,” he told his young readers. “How shall we learn
anything about these great bird travelers? We must ask a naturalist who studies
birds… we will find him defined under the name ‘ornithologist.’”50
The ornithologists who first began to study migration attacked the issue
with confidence and optimism. Their studies look impossibly broad and
unfocused compared to later monographs on migration. Along with Merriam’s official migration data gathering on behalf of the AOU, another notable early inquiry was undertaken by his colleague W. W. Cooke. Cooke’s monograph on
bird migration in the Mississippi Valley is often called the first scholarly contribution to bird migration study. The report, over three hundred pages long, began with a look at the influences on flight speed and flight path, what Cooke
called “a general study of the subject of Bird Migration.”51 The bulk of his report
documents the migratory paths and dates of “the five hundred sixty species of
birds known to occur in the Mississippi Valley.”52 Any remark that pertained to
50 Chapman, The Travels of Birds, 4. 51 Quoted in J.A. Allen, “Cooke’s ‘Report on Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley.’” Auk 6.1 (Jan. 1889): 58. 52 Quoted in Allen, “Cooke’s ‘Report on Bird Migration,’” 59.
any one of the five hundred sixty species was useful data, from weather to other
observed flora and fauna in the vicinity. Merriam, likely advised by Cooke, also
solicited information on anything and everything from the observers he had
enlisted through magazine advertisements and ornithological circulars. He asked
his recruits to record a variety of phenomena, which he classified into
“ornithological,” “meteorological,” and “contemporary and correlative.”53 As part of this last category, Merriam asked for the “date at which the first tree-toad or ‘peeper’ is heard,” as well as the dates of the breaking-up of ice on lakes and rivers and the flowering dates of various plants and shrubs.54 Papers on
migration would later fall roughly into two categories. Some would theorize on
the origins of migratory instinct, asking why birds migrate when and where they
do. Others would take a more empirical tack, presenting and summarizing data
gathered. Cooke’s paper did both, beginning with theory but devoting the bulk
of its pages to empirical conclusions. Cooke combined bird sighting data with
meteorological observations and discussed primarily the influence of weather on
flight. He conceptualized migration as a series of “bird waves,” hastened by
warm weather and retarded by cold snaps. A writer for the Atlantic Monthly put
this concept especially poetically, writing that “the autumn wave rolls from the
Arctic tundras of Canada and Alaska to the torrid valley of the Amazon and the
great pampas of the La Plata, only to roll back again to the ice-bound northern
53 Merriam, C. Hart. “Bird Migration.” Auk 1.1 (Jan. 1884): 71-76. 54 Ibid.
ocean with the northward progression of the sun.”55 Cooke and his colleagues,
the other district superintendents, used empirical data largely to reach
qualitative conclusions about the earliness, tardiness, constancy, or varied speed
of migrations for different species. Put another way, early migration scientists
wanted data related to both space and time, the two components of motion.
In the empirical portions of these pioneer studies, the conflict between the
physical, analytical bent of plotting bird movement and the unfocused, widely
varying quality of data proved frustrating for the scientists. The varied and
sundry reports, including the young Chapman’s, that poured in during the first
two years of Merriam’s study proved difficult for him to interpret. When he
published the Committee’s first report in 1885, he included the few writeups he
had been able to procure. One of the sub-articles calculates the speed of “bird
waves” using the latitudes and dates of “first” bird sightings. However, most of
the reports are filled with raw data tables, which Merriam no doubt included in
the hope that some other ornithologist would take it upon himself to draw
conclusions.56 In these early years, Merriam and Cooke were bent on gathering
as many data points as possible, considering as a useful fact any observation of a
bird’s location coupled with a positive identification. In the 1885 edition of the circular inviting participation in the Committee’s activities, Merriam added a
telling postscript. “It must not be supposed, because the Committee asks for a
55 Lange, D. “The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life.” Atlantic Monthly 104 (Aug. 1909): 230. 56 Merriam, C. Hart. “Preliminary Report of the Committee on Bird Migration.” Auk 2.1 (Jan. 1885): 53-65.
large amount of information on a variety of subjects, that meager or isolated
records are not desired,” wrote Merriam. Any information is better than no
information, Merriam seemed to be saying.57 After two years due to his
“meagre” results, “it is impossible, at this time, to do more than call attention to
the extent of the work of the Committee,” wrote Merriam ruefully.58 He later
hinted that “considerable pecuniary assistance” would be required in order to
assimilate and analyze the data gathered. Clearly, despite his own protestations,
his data was neither too meager nor too abundant; it was, in some other way, not
easily usable. The problem was likely that, as Cooke put it, “some of these
reports are merely incidental notes taken while performing the daily routine
tasks,” while “others represent a large amount of time and frequent special trips
taken to fields and woods.”59
An army of observation
When the young Chapman sent his report in to the Biological Survey, he waited for a response with tremendous anxiety. The official evaluation of his work arrived in the mail – “had I succeeded or failed? I hesitated to learn,” wrote
Chapman – and, to Chapman’s delight, the Biological Survey had decreed his
57 This lack of specificity in data requests is in line with Kuhn’s point that, in times of scientific paradigm shift, “all the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant.” See Kuhn, 15. 58 Merriam, “Preliminary Report,” 53. 59 Cooke, Wells W. “Many Eyes Are Better Than One Pair.” Auk 24.3 (July 1907): 346.
report the “best one that had been received from the Atlantic District.”60
Chapman had caught the eye of his district superintendent, who was so impressed that he invited Chapman to join New York’s Linnaean Society.
However, not all observers were as ecstatically devoted as Chapman.
Directors of massive ornithological projects had to rely on networks of unproven amateurs, drawn from the ranks of Bird-Lore subscribers and other casual nature enthusiasts. From the very beginning, cooperation was a necessary ingredient in observing and tracking bird migration. It was not a field amenable to solitary effort; the synthesis and interpretation could be done by a single person, but the data collection had to be a community enterprise. In a questionnaire circulated to the observers engaged by the AOU in the early 1880s, Merriam acknowledged that “comparatively few of the observers are ornithologists, or even bird collectors, the great majority being intelligent farmers, tradesmen, and light- keepers.”61 Some ten years later, in 1900, the British ornithologist Richard
Barrington took the inspired route of seeking out Irish lighthouse-keepers and
asking them for help recording birds’ arrival times.62 Later in his career, Cooke
undertook to quantitatively justify the case for cooperation. In a 1907 article
entitled “Many Eyes are Better than One Pair,” Cooke analyzed his own sight
records of spring arrivals in the Washington, D.C. area in conjunction with the
60 Chapman, Autobiography, 35. 61 Merriam, C. Hart. “Committee on the Migration and Geographical Distribution of North American Birds, Circular for 1885.” Auk 2.1 (Jan. 1885): 120. 62 Tate, Peter. Birds, Men, and Books: A Literary History of Ornithology (London: Henry Sotheran Ltd., 1986), 113.
sight records of other birders. He concluded that a single observer would see
new arrivals on average one day later than the multi-observer conglomerate – a small difference, but nonetheless a significant indication of the usefulness of cooperative birdwatching.63
Migration study was an entirely new paradigm in ornithology, both for its
emphasis on the live bird and for its use of many observers.64 The children’s
magazine St. Nicholas marveled at the human machinery that migration studies
demanded, comparing it, for lack of another model of organized humanity, to an
army. “It is not a large army, this army of observation; but it is scattered all over
the possessions of Uncle Sam,” waxed the reporter.
The soldiers of the army wear no uniform, have no barracks and no drill, carry no arms; and most of them draw no pay. Their chief duties are to keep a sharp lookout for an army of invasion, to report promptly when the first scattering scouts of the invaders enter the United States, when the advance guard comes along, when the main body makes its appearance, and what progress they make throughout the country.65
Like the military, this corps of observers had a distinct hierarchy. Chapman,
Cooke, and Merriam ranked high; quite the opposite for Mrs. Myrtle Broley, of
Winnipeg, not that she seemed to mind. “Early in the morning we hurried out to a road that runs east and west,” recounted Broley in Bird-Lore. “We knew the birds would anxiously be awaiting a chance to get up…when the weather suddenly turned quite warm, with a strong south wind, we were sure there
63 Cooke, “Many Eyes Are Better Than One Pair,” 346-348. 64 I owe this interpretation and vocabulary to Thomas Kuhn; construed as part of a Kuhnian paradigm shift, migration study here “subverts the tradition-bound activity of normal science,” i.e. taxonomical and classificatory museum ornithology. See Kuhn, 6. 65 Bennett, Henry Holcomb. “An Army of Observation.” St. Nicholas 38.6 (Apr. 1911): 483-487.
would be a good migration.” Broley and her husband drove slowly along and recorded blackbirds, ducks, and hawks of various species that April morning.
“With this our day was quite complete,” she concluded.66 Birdwatchers like
Myrtle Broley both pleased and unsettled the professional ornithologists; the
usual response from scientists was that amateurs required careful direction in
order to be useful. “There is to-day, most unhappily, too often a gap between the
amateur naturalists and the pure field-workers on the one side, and the trained
biologists on the other,” wrote biologist Julian Huxley in 1916. According to
Huxley, the enthusiasm of the “vast army” of amateurs “needs only to be properly directed to lead them into most absorbing fields, and at the same time to provide all-important material for fundamental problems of biology.”67
Ornithologist Percy Taverner was even more blunt with his commentary on the problem of amateur participation. “The great mass of data-gathering must fall upon the lower rank and file,” he wrote in 1905, “leaving the greater intellects free of the drudgery.”68
Chapman’s solution was to set apart a separate world for the amateurs,
many of them avid Bird-Lore readers. The magazine provided a forum for them
to share their bird-related anecdotes and personal studies. But Chapman’s most
influential innovation was the Christmas Bird Count, which mobilized amateurs
and involved them in fieldwork while keeping them separate from AOU
66 Broley, Myrtle. “A Morning’s Migration.” Bird-Lore 36.1 (Jan. 1934): 95-97. 67 Huxley, Julian S. “Bird-Watching and Biological Science [part 1].”Auk 33.2 (Apr. 1916): 142. 68 Taverner, Percy. “Ornithology a Science.” Wilson Bulletin 17.4 (Dec. 1905): 123-124.
ornithology and awakening a certain competitive zeal. “As you read these
words, bird lovers, armed with binoculars, telescopes, and notebooks, are
exploring windswept prairies, surf-washed dunes, mountain forests, desert valleys, and swamplands,” reported the New York Times. “The objective is a high score; your opponents are all your colleagues from coast to coast.”69 The
Christmas Bird Count became, and has remained, a birdwatching tradition.70
Chapman noted that sportsmen’s magazines often published lists of birds killed during Christmas day hunts; he thought to turn this competitive enthusiasm towards birdwatching by using Bird-Lore to publish lists of birds sighted.71 “Here was a game for outdoor enthusiasts which would provide zestful physical exercise and a spirit of rivalry,” wrote George Greenfield in the New York Times column “Wood, Field, and Stream,” “with the field glass replacing shotgun or rifle.”72 The first Christmas Bird Count, held in 1900, attracted only twenty-seven birdwatchers, but participation had climbed to 200 ten years later.73 The group of
which the Times reporter was a part also included “a young hospital interne, a
history professor, a pair of business men, several high school lads, a book
publisher, and a poultry farmer.”74 An eager birdwatcher like Myrtle Broley
69 Arbib, Robert. “Bird Census to Begin.” New York Times 22 Dec. 1940: 113. 70 Nearly eight hundred separate censuses were carried out by groups of birdwatchers over Christmas 2005. See “Christmas Bird Count.” National Audubon Society. n.d. 15 Jan. 2006.
would undoubtedly have been a welcome participant. “Among all the activities
of the amateurs,” wrote Chapman, “none is a greater contribution to science than
the taking of the Christmas census.”
Nevertheless, historian of ornithology Mark Barrow points out that, for all
the attention Chapman’s Christmas censuses received and for all the positive
press, by 1934 only two articles had been published using the data from the
census. The Christmas Bird Count was a primarily social activity, with counts
sponsored by birdwatching clubs and local Audubon societies.75 Even Chapman himself questioned the credibility of the Christmas Bird Count in Bird-Lore, developing an informal rubric in order to make sense of this public exercise in data collection. His criteria for determining the validity of any given sight record included how easily confused the species was with other species, the bird’s rarity in the area, how long the bird was seen and at what distance, and, of course, the reputation of the observer.76
Thus the supervising ornithologists created, as best they could, observers
who were extensions of themselves, asking the same questions and taking down
the same data as they themselves would. Professional ornithologists often
proposed high-involvement schemes for field observers to adopt. “The best
method for keeping the actual field notes is to file them in folders,” advised
Huxley. “Each folder has a number corresponding to the number of the species
75 Barrow, 169. 76 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 13.1 (Feb. 1911): 48.
in the card-index. The numbers listed in the A.O.U. checklist may be used with
advantage.”77 A recommendation like Huxley’s was a thinly veiled description
of the sort of amateurs the ornithological community sought: serious hobbyists,
amateurs in name only. Huxley was even more technical with his equipment
advice. “In many ways the old pattern Goerz-Trieder longitudinally-moving
focusing-head was preferable to the transversely-moving heads now in general
use,” he pontificated blithely, discussing appropriate binoculars for the amateur.
He may have meant to confuse the unworthy, or he may have merely been
impressing potential birders with the seriousness of his enterprise; either way,
one might imagine that only the relatively educated would dare become
involved in birding after reading Huxley’s article, despite its encouraging intent.
“The popularity of bird-study in this country to-day is due more to the aid
and encouragement given students by the members of the American
Ornithologists’ Union’s Committee on Migration than to any other influence,”
wrote Chapman.78 Chapman himself was, according to the New York Times, “the
most influential man since Audubon in getting people interested in birds.”79
With Bird-Lore and his other writings, Chapman tapped into the social resonance of ornithology and helped set a potent precedent for involving nonspecialists in the scientific enterprise of migration. Yet migration studies emerged tinged with a discriminating wariness towards the many observers it required. It was against
77 Huxley, Julian S. “Bird-Watching and Biological Science [part 2].”Auk 33.2 (Sept. 1916): 263. 78 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.5 (Oct. 1899): 169. 79 “Dr. Chapman Dies,” 17.
this backdrop of imminent professionalization of observation networks that
North America’s most colorful bird migration enthusiast began his
unconventional mission.
Fig. 1. The American Ornithologists’ Union in 1883. J.A. Allen and C. Hart Merriam were among the founding members; this gathering of luminaries was soon to include Frank Chapman and W.W. Cooke.80
80 Chapman, Autobiography, 31.
2. Honk if you love Jesus: Jack Miner, evangelist and popularizer
“Dear Sir,” began a letter from one C.S. Boomer of Swan Quarter, North
Carolina: “I killed a goose yesterday, the 14th of Nov [1917]… with a band on his
left leg with your address on it. It said ‘Write to Box 48, Kingsville, Ont.’ So at
your request I am taking pleasure in doing so. Inside of metal band was a Bible verse; it said: ‘Keep yourselves in the love of God. Jude 1:21.’ You will please write me and tell me how you caught the goose, and when you put same on him and all about the geese in Canada, and their raising there.”81
From the farmstead he called the Jack Miner Bird Sanctuary, Jack Miner
devoted his life to evangelism, spreading the twin gospels of bird protection and
Christianity. He made “missionaries of the air” of the ducks and geese he caught
en route to the Carolinas or Hudson’s Bay by tagging their legs with his address
and with a brief passage from the Bible. “With God all things are possible, Mark
10:27,” read one band. “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain, Philippians
1:21,” read another. “Write Kingsville, Ontario, Box 48.”
The letters poured in from sportspeople from Hudson’s Bay to the
Carolinas. Moved by the Bible verses, finders often wrote Miner long epistles,
inquiring about his projects or relating the strange experience of finding the
word of the Lord wrapped around the leg of a goose. A “darky preacher” from
81 Quoted in Miner, Jack. Jack Miner and the Birds (Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1923), 139.
Alabama “thought the message came down from heaven,” reported one woman.
“I heard him [the preacher] one night, and he said: ‘This am the message of the
Lord. I saw him descending with this fowl in his arms, and it flew right at me.
And now am the Judgment coming, and we are the elected, and am going straight to His arms.’”82
Miner painted his farm as a refuge for threatened birds and a center for migration studies. He was an evangelist in more ways than he thought: his work, conceptually accessible and pitched towards a wide audience, was an advertisement for the technique of bird banding as well as the capacity of ordinary people to contribute to science. At the same time as Chapman worked hard to welcome public participation while keeping the participants at a distance, Miner was busily subverting this delicate system of which he was largely unaware. He emphasized his independence from all formal networks of study, including universities, governments, and scientific societies.
Paradoxically, Miner’s self-sufficiency, which his contemporaries might have called stubborn and scientifically counterproductive, actually drew people to the enterprise of migration study. Because of his background, he appealed particularly to hunters and to blue-collar North Americans who otherwise might not have cared about bird banding. By eschewing the established networks of observation, Miner expanded migration study beyond its originally intended audience. Thanks to him, more people than ever gained a basic familiarity with
82 Quoted in Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 82.
the causes, routes, and consequences of bird migration; he reached a rural
population for whom wildlife was particularly relevant.
A young hunter’s transformation
Born in the small town of Dover Center, Ohio, on April 10, 1865 to English
immigrant parents, Miner and his family of twelve moved, or, as he put it,
“migrated,” to Canada when he was thirteen. His childhood, to hear him tell it,
was a hearty, God-fearing experience of hard work, tough love, and simple
virtue. “We were very poor financially,” wrote Miner. “The result is I was
educated for ditching, cutting cord-wood, and splitting rails.”83 He told of his
“annual” haircut at the mercy of his mother’s dull scissors, and of the six straight
days he spent digging out what he called “malaria swamps” to save his dying
baby sister. Unlike Chapman, who wrote countless field guides and educational pamphlets, all Miner’s books were largely autobiographical, discussing his rags- to-riches ascent to fame along with his banding activities. His three books, Jack
Miner and the Birds (1923), Jack Miner on Current Topics (1929), and Wild Goose Jack:
The Autobiography of Jack Miner (published posthumously in 1969) are each an
exuberant, if repetitive, mélange of natural history, conservation, Christian
ethics, and folksy anecdote. As one reviewer said of Jack Miner and the Birds, “this
83 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 2.
little volume makes no pretense to literary style but tells the story of the author’s
work in his own way and words.”84 Miner delighted in telling his life story,
which he recounted with a balance of unaffected familiarity and personal legend.
He situated himself solidly within blue-collar America; he described himself as a
“crude, red-headed, bare-footed, fiery-dispositioned, little, sunburnt boy, with
just about enough clothes to flag a hand-car.”85 If Miner and his contemporary
Frank Chapman had met, Chapman might have been reminded of a childhood
friend and hunting companion, a “neighboring farmer’s son.” “He was in no
sense an ornithologist, he had no bird books, and his interest in birds was limited
to those we hunted,” remembered Chapman of his friend. Yet, despite the other
boy’s lack of scientific proclivity, a shared interest in birds was enough to draw
the two of them together. “He was more nearly in sympathy with my tastes than
any other person I knew, and I was always happy when with him,” wrote
Chapman.86 Miner too fell into this enigmatic category. He loved the outdoors
with the energy of the future scientist, but his curiosity lacked the educational
aspirations and refinement of the young Chapman’s. Like a great many rural
boys, his interest in nature led him primarily towards the hunt.
Miner and his brothers hunted partly to help the family survive, as “quail and grouse were so very plentiful and good warm clothes were scarce.”87 But for
84 W.S. “Jack Miner and the Birds [review].” Auk 42.3 (Sept. 1925): 454. 85 Miner, Jack. Wild Goose Jack (Kingston, Ontario: Jack Miner Migratory Bird Foundation, 1969), 47. 86 Chapman, Autobiography, 19. 87 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 6.
Miner, as for many rural boys, hunting was as enjoyable as it was necessary. The
Miner boys hunted avidly and enthusiastically, using shotguns that “spread bullets like a fan and hit everything but the shooter.”88 Miner often snuck out of the house on Sunday to hunt in nearby woods, until one fateful morning he was struck by a change of heart. “You know it is against the law to hunt on Sunday.
Then why do you do it?” said Miner to himself. Not only was his habit illegal,
Miner realized, but his entire attitude towards wildlife was irresponsible and wasteful. “And, readers, by that time a lump had come up in my throat and tears trickled down my wicked cheeks… all hatefulness and fear had gone.” Miner took this change of heart as proof of God’s goodness. “Bless His holy name, He does care for the uneducated,” wrote Miner. “He does care for the barefoot, underprivileged boy.”89
This epiphany did not stop Miner from hunting; he saw his conversion as a call to spread the message of responsible sportsmanship. “The desire to go shooting takes hundreds of thousands of men away from the grind of life,” wrote
Miner, and makes them “better husbands and fathers in their homes… what reasonable man can oppose it?” Yet, he cautioned, many hunters were guilty of
“pure unadulterated selfishness,” and “selfishness will not take us in the direction Jesus Christ went.” Thus, concluded Miner, hunters must recognize
88 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 16. 89 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 85-86.
that “good sensible bird protection pays over two hundred percent dividends.”90
Thus began his lifelong campaign to help Americans and Canadians appreciate birds without forsaking their beloved hobby of wildfowling. Like Chapman,
Miner believed that an innate sympathy for bird life could and should guide human conduct. However, the down-home practicality of Miner’s ethos soon brought him unexpected fame, particularly when he began to combine it with a rudimentary migration study.
Winged missionaries
Forty years later, Miner had become the darling of magazines and
newspapers all over the country. By 1933, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that
he had tagged over nine thousand geese, an impressive achievement indeed for a
single individual.91 He had officially incorporated the Jack Miner Bird Sanctuary
in 1904, after his family turned to the business of brickmaking, digging clay from
the ground and leaving pits that filled with water. Mallard ducks and Canada
geese began to stop at the ponds during their annual migrations, and Miner
became preoccupied with attracting more migratory birds to the farmstead. In
1909, Miner captured an American black duck which he called Katie and taught
to eat from a long-handled spoon; Katie grew attached to Miner, following him
90 Miner, Jack. Jack Miner on Current Topics (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), 21-22. 91 Becker, Bob. “Canada Geese Visit Farm and Get Tag.” Chicago Daily Tribune 8 May 1933: 20.
around the farm, and Miner decided to scratch his name and address into a piece
of scrap metal which he fastened around Katie’s leg. Miner’s banding scheme
took shape over the next fifteen years. He used pinioned geese as decoys to lure
passing birds into large homemade traps placed over his artificial ponds, picking
the geese out of the trap one by one and attaching the bands he had hammered
out in his basement workshop. He claimed to have tagged more than two hundred geese in a single day.92 As for the Bible verses, Miner describes the idea
of banding birds with scripture as nothing short of a revelation. He was walking
outside at night when, as he writes, “just then I heard the swish of wings of a
flock of ducks… like a star shooting across the heavens, [God] said: ‘Stamp those
verses on what is now the blank side of your duck and goose tags.’”93 Miner hoped to fill the world with “heavenly bread right from God’s own oven of love.”94 As he told the Saturday Evening Post, “I got to thinking about… the
missionaries all around the world, and then of my birds and the strange places they fly to. I decided that between us they could become winged missionaries and provide food for both the body and the soul.”95
Miner’s practices were unorthodox enough to catch the eye of a public not
necessarily interested in ornithology. Newspapers latched onto him as a perfect
subject for “human interest” stories, often treating him in a gently tongue-in-
92 “Jack Miner Dead; Bird Protector, 79.” New York Times 4 Nov. 1944: 15. 93 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 267. 94 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 266. 95 Tigrett, John Burton. “A Duck’s Best Friend is Jack Miner.” Saturday Evening Post 216 (18 Mar. 1944): 26-27.
cheek way. “If any hunter shoots down a duck with a leg band carrying the
message ‘Thou shalt not kill’ don’t be too shaken. It won’t be a warning from on
high, but simply a warning intended for the Eskimos… that is, if the Eskimo who
retrieves the band happens to be able to read,” quipped the Los Angeles Times.96
Miner later took to mailing fur traders brightly colored illustrations of Biblical scenes, with the instructions that the traders give pictures to each Eskimo who found and returned one of Miner’s bands.
Whether or not Miner actually converted any Eskimos, he certainly exercised a powerful sway over the less exotic, but easier to reach, North
American public. He commanded a passionate, if not particularly poetically gifted, crowd of devotees. As Mrs. Minnie Smith of Blenheim, Ontario, wrote,
“Fowls of all descriptions / Come from near and come from far / To this God- given haven / To his agents (sic), Jack Mi-nar.” “He’s not a member of the bar /
Or of the legislature, / But he’s conversant with each star / And with the book of nature,” penned Cornelius Parkinson of Michigan. Edgar A. Guest composed the following verse in Miner’s honor:
Some men among their fellows are known for what they do, Their names are in the papers; their pictures printed, too. But Miner’s fame is different – ‘tis seldom told in words; He’s one among the millions who’s honored by the birds.97
The Saturday Evening Post ran a full-color spread on Miner in 1944. A craggy-
faced gentleman of 79, Miner wears a bright red bowler, suspenders over a plaid
96 “Canadian Duck Banding Serves Dual Purpose.” Los Angeles Times 22 Mar. 1958: 10. 97 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 26.
flannel shirt, hip waders, and a garishly mismatched plaid tie. In one photo, he
holds a goose in his lap while his wife gently ties a splint on its leg. In another, he
bends over a Bible, again with his wife, and in a third, he holds a straining goose
against the sky, an instant before he lets it fly free – an image to touch even the
most critical historian [Fig. 2].98
The press was quick to remark upon the pious fervor that ran through all
Miner’s work and writing. Whether consciously or not, sometimes tongue-in-
cheek but more often in earnest, reporters and admirers described Miner in the
language of devotions. “He is laboring with the fervor of a missionary to convert
the people of North America to his view,” wrote the New York Times.99 “Up in
Kingsville, Ontario… lives a man who has recovered the forgotten secret of
Eden,” waxed the weekly circular Collier’s Magazine. “Other men have had the
secret, and used it – Francis of Assisi, for instance.”100 Miner’s land was as important a character as his person. The sanctuary was often painted as a sort of
Midwestern Eden. “What had been an ordinary farm without any attractive features was gradually transformed into a rural paradise,” wrote the New York
Times. “He surrounded the home itself with lilacs and roses,” put in geographer
Harry MacDougall.101
98 Tigrett, 26-27. 99 “Wild Birds Find a Good Friend.” New York Times 29 May 1927: X12 100 Kennedy, John. “Jack Miner, Who Has Studied Birds and Beasts For Years, Tells How to Win the Friendship of the Shy Creatures of the Woods.” Collier’s Magazine 3 Dec. 1927. Quoted in Miner, Wild Goose Jack, introduction. 101 McDougall, Harry. “Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary.” Canadian Geographical Journal 83:3 (1971): 105.
Miner became something of a moral hero and an inspirational figure to the reading public. Norman Rankin wrote in Canadian Magazine: “It was a great day that visit to Jack Miner’s, and I think we all left there feeling better in mind and body for contact with such a man. We were uplifted, exhilarated – fired with his spirit and enthusiasm. And, so they tell me, it is with all who meet him – they want to see him and talk with him again. Simple, self-sacrificing, religious, honest, straightforward, and sympathetic – practising what he preaches – he is setting an example in that community which is spreading far and wide.”102 On
“Aunt Dolly’s Page for Junior Club Members” in the Los Angeles Times, “Aunt
Dolly” held up Miner as an exemplar of common sense and “straight thinking,” emphasizing that success came from “merely applying old fashioned horse sense to whatever problem confronts you.”103 Miner felt justified in his boast that “I doubt if any individual outside of an organizer has attended, and spoken to, more Service Club luncheons such as those of the Kiwanis, Lions, and Rotary, than I have.”104
102 Rankin, Norman S. “Jack Miner, Philosopher and Bird-Lover.” Canadian Magazine 59 (Oct. 1922): 486. 103 “Aunt Dolly’s Page for ‘Times’ Junior Club Members.” Los Angeles Times 27 June 1926: L3. 104 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 301.
From banded bird to data point
Harry MacDougall, writing about Miner in the Canadian Geographical
Journal, stated that Katie the black duck represented “possibly the first time any bird had been tagged.”105 “In 1910, a hunter killed Katie near Anderson, South
Carolina, and established Miner as the pioneer bird bander of the North
American continent,” reported the Saturday Evening Post.106 The Canadian goes still further, giving Miner credit for inventing the idea of a systematic bird banding program. “Jack Miner was the man who demonstrated that, impossible as it seemed, the thing could be done,” gushed the reporter.107 The Minneapolis
Journal even called Miner “the father of the conservation movement on the continent.”108 Evidently, Miner’s own penchant for exaggeration was contagious.
Peter Unwin, a historian writing in Canada’s popular history magazine Beaver, points out acidly that “in the Jack Miner story, the myth and the man refuse to occupy the same space.”109
Well before Miner, AOU ornithologists had picked up on banding as a satisfyingly concrete mechanism for gathering data points. In 1901, ornithologist
Leon J. Cole first proposed a nationwide system of bird tagging. Cole had noticed the marking system used by the U.S. Fish Commission, speculating that
105 McDougall, 103. 106 Tigrett, 27. 107 Wade, Margaret. “Bird Life a National Asset.” Canadian Magazine 85 (May 1936): 51. 108 Quoted in Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 29. 109 Unwin, Peter. “The Man Who Would Have Dominion.” Beaver 81.5 (2001): 30.
“such a plan might be used in following the movements of individual birds, if some way could be devised of numbering them which would not interfere with the bird in any way and would still be conspicuous enough to attract the attention of any person who might chance to shoot or capture it.”110 He set out to “outline a plan by which it is hoped that much data of a definite kind can be secured, not only as to the great migrations of birds, but regarding their minor movements as well.”111
Observation could only provide information on mass movements.
“Scarcely anything is known of what becomes of an individual bird,” pointed out
Cole.112 Bird banding combined the epistemological strengths of specimen collecting and birdwatching; neither knowledge of the individual nor knowledge of its behavior had to be sacrificed. “Occupying a position with the shotgun, the field glass, and the scalpel, [banding] bids fair to become the court of last appeal in the determination of many facts concerned with the migration and life histories of birds,” wrote Frederick Lincoln in 1926.113 Ten years later, Lincoln upgraded his assessment, calling banding “easily the most valuable means for the study of living birds in a state of nature.”114
The history of mainstream bird banding in America begins with Percy
Taverner, a Michigan birdwatcher who, though initially an individual bander
110 Quoted in Harold B. Wood, “The History of Bird Banding.” Auk 62.2 (Apr. 1945): 260. 111 Cole, 138. 112 Ibid. 113 Lincoln, Frederick C. “Bird Banding – In Progress and Prospect.” Auk 43.2 (Apr. 1926): 153. 114 Lincoln, Frederick C. “The Future of Bird Banding in the Americas.” Journal of Field Ornithology 7.2 (Apr. 1936): 81.
like Miner, quickly moved to organize and standardize his activities. Taverner procured his own embossed strips of metal, but rather than writing his own name and address on them as Miner did, he simply put “Notify the Auk, N.Y.,”
the Auk being the journal of the AOU.115 Taverner’s concept of migration study had organization at its core from the outset. Taverner made bands that were universally legible so that any finder could understand and act on their recovery, but so did Miner, who went farther and printed his whole address on the metal strips.116 What Taverner did was to cede personal control of his banding experiment to the AOU, established, reputable, and better equipped than
Taverner alone to deal with incoming data.117 Eventually the AOU handed off the bird banding to the newly founded American Bird Banding Association
(ABBA).
The inscriptions on the bands both signified and perpetuated the consolidation of banding activity. “To avoid confusion of having several tags in
115 Lincoln, Frederick C. “Bird Banding.” Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology (New York: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1933), 67. 116 The legibility of bird bands was a pressing concern; many early efforts at “banding” were, in fact, only meant for the edification of the bander. The most famous precedent cited is John James Audubon’s tying of silver wires around the legs of phoebe nestlings in 1803. Yet this is not true banding; I define “banding” as an epistemic system involving both banders and recoverers; in order to be considered a band, a strip of metal must be intended to be as universally understandable as possible. 117 Curiously, Taverner had not even bothered to consult, or even to ask permission of, the AOU when he first handed out these bands at the April 1904 meeting of the Michigan Ornithological Club. He simply took for granted that banding needed an institutional hub and took the liberty of involving the AOU. Taverner’s activities, and use of the AOU name and address, was not officially brought to the union’s attention until 1908. See Frederick C. Lincoln, “Bird Banding,” 67, and Percy Taverner, “Tagging Migrants.” Auk 23.2 (Apr. 1906): 232.
use at once,” wrote Taverner, “it is advisable for one person to issue them.”118
More precisely, Taverner meant that all bands should bear the same writing in order that all data be returned to a single central group or location. By virtue of its small size and its proprietor’s independent streak, the Jack Miner Bird
Sanctuary fulfilled many criteria of what Taverner and Cole would have called a successful banding center. Miner’s bands were clear and consistent, and the evangelical twist boosted the band recovery rate. But unlike Cole and Taverner,
Miner had no intention of forming a larger network of banders. He controlled the entire operation, and he liked it that way. When Taverner wrote in the Wilson
Bulletin that “the mass of… material requisite for even a superficial understanding of the laws and conditions governing bird life is… too enormous to be covered by one man,” he was stating what, for most ornithologists, was too obvious to question.
Miner, an ornithological outsider, did not agree with Taverner’s view. He saw no reason why an individual with sufficient time and energy could not carry out a study of his own. Miner’s world centered around his own activities and acreage because, in his view, so did the world of his twice-yearly visitors.
“Kingsville, Ontario is the hub of America”
118 Taverner, “Tagging Migrants,” 232.
“I don’t hesitate to say that I have the most accurate and the most
fascinating bird tagging system of any man or combination of men standing on
our lovely North American continent,” gloated Miner in 1929.119 Simple and
autonomous, Miner’s banding system engaged the non-ornithological public
with an established scientific practice. He became North America’s bird banding
poster child. The idea of one man banding geese was easier to understand than a
nationwide study. As Miner said of his single-minded pursuit of goose banding,
“if a man concentrates on one line he is more apt to catch something on that
hook.”120
His maps are telling examples of his perceived self-sufficiency. He
illustrated his data with a hand-drawn map in Jack Miner and the Birds. Forty or
fifty dots show, presumably, the locations of recovered bands. A thin, straight
line connects each dot to a central hub in southern Ontario, emphasizing the link
to Miner’s refuge. As migration routes are hardly straight lines, Miner’s
connecting lines serve to visually draw the eye to his refuge rather than to
accurately describe migration routes. “The straight line leading from Kingsville to each of these dots does not prove that the duck followed that course,”
explained Miner. “The lines are drawn simply to help you out; also to prove to
your entire satisfaction that Kingsville, Ontario is the hub of America.”121 Here,
Miner wonders at and revels in the distribution of his geese, much as a small-
119 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 4-5. 120 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 37. 121 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 87.
town tourist office might put pushpins on a map to show the origins of its
visitors. The map includes only data points from Miner’s own banding station;
no mention is made of data collected by anybody else [Fig. 3].
Yet, though he needed to remain at the center of his operation, Miner reached out assiduously, recognizing that banding needed both banders and finders. He would likely have agreed with Lincoln’s dictum that “comprehensive reports on the migration of birds cannot ordinarily be prepared by the isolated worker, who at best is able to gather but a small quantity of original data.”122
Miner hardly saw himself as an “isolated worker.” he attempted to create a parallel community of enthusiasts linked by his avian messengers, many of whom were no doubt members of the Jack Miner League, the organization he formed to advance his views on migratory bird policy. In his books, he listed, by state and town, every name of every single person who ever returned a band. He actively encouraged these people to get in touch with one another. “In case you call one of these men up, or write him, and get no reply, do not give up, but get after the other fellow,” instructed Miner.123
The scripture-inscribed tags were unusual enough that many who found
them did indeed write to Miner. By stepping outside the realm of the usual,
Miner ended up with an unusually high rate of band return. Just as importantly,
the finders of Miner’s goose bands were often intrigued enough to pursue
122 Lincoln, “Bird Banding,” 76. 123 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 87.
correspondence with him. “Wishing to hear from you,” closed one letter
addressed to “Dear Unseen Friend.” “More to come,” promised one Dr. J. L.
Axby. And, from an unknown woman, simply, “My boy shot the duck. Thank
you for the message; it makes us friends.”124
However, all the characteristics that helped Miner win over the American
and Canadian public served to dampen his credibility with all the other actors
engaged in migration studies and refuge policy. Miner ran up against a common
problem of scientific popularization, namely, in making an endeavor accessible
to the public, one often loses the attention of experts. He likely meant his artless
pitch to popular taste to distance him from mainstream science. Very little of his
writing was meant for scientists, who generally viewed him with benign
bemusement. Henri Seibert, a biologist at the University of Ohio, reviewed Jack
Miner and the Birds in The Quarterly Review of Biology with a tone very different from that of one scientist addressing another. Seibert issued a warning against taking Miner’s work too seriously. “It must be pointed out,” wrote Seibert, “that
Jack Miner was not a trained scientific observer nor imbued with the philosophy of objectivity.” Seibert opined that Miner’s “intimate knowledge of birds caused subjective interpretations of their behavior.”125 Seibert went on to call Miner’s style “simple, vivid, amusing, though often repetitious.” Also “amusing” were the letters Miner received from the men who recovered his banded geese. Seibert
124 Quoted in Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 82. 125 Seibert, Henri C. “Jack Miner and the Birds” [review]. Quarterly Review of Biology 26.1 (Mar. 1951): 45.
concluded that Jack Miner and the Birds was a somewhat useful scientific
document buried under layers of unscientific and uneducated anecdote and
pontification.
The reason Miner’s following had grown so large was the essential
accessibility of his practice and philosophy. He used the same technique as the
AOU ornithologists who went on to found the American Bird Banding
Association, but his banding created a kind of community absent in the more
formal ornithological circles. Miner’s encouragement of the individual bander
and his treatment of science as an unrestrictedly available endeavor gave his
work an unreservedly populist tone. Despite his avowed lack of education,
Miner felt privileged to comment on nearly any issue relating to conservation or
science. “I am justified because of my birthright and qualified by personal
knowledge and experience,” Miner wrote in defense of his second book, Jack
Miner on Current Topics, in which he philosophized exuberantly about everything
from science to politics to theology. Miner’s theory of the causes of migration is
as follows:
“I know you educated people call it nature, or instinct; and really I have heard such a variety of names for this goose-knowledge that I don’t try to look up all the meaning of these artificial words; for I am sure if all their meanings were boiled down… the real interpretation would be – G O D.”126
126 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 128. Writing around the same time as the famous Scopes Trial, Miner rode a surge of evangelical revival following the growing sense that Protestantism was losing the hold it had enjoyed on American intellectual life throughout the 19th century. See Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 915.
“Why,” Miner asked rhetorically in reference to one of his many speaking engagements, “did those eleven hundred most distinguished ladies and gentlemen sit in that beautifully illuminated banquet hall… and listen to me, an uneducated man of the woods?”127 The answer, as Miner well knew, was his dictum that “education isn’t all gathered with one’s nose between book covers”128 and that everyday human inquisitiveness was more than a replacement for elaborate systems and networks of observation. Miner connected birds and people, even in the absence of the mediating force of formal observation networks. The accessibility Miner had conferred upon migration study was soon to become a key part of the timely and urgent field of waterfowl management.
127 Miner, Wild Goose Jack, 41. 128 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 76.
Fig. 2. Jack Miner, as photographed in the Saturday Evening Post.129
129 Tigrett, 27.
Fig. 3. Goose migration routes, according to Jack Miner, with his sanctuary as the “hub of America.”130
130 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 131.
3. “A duck for every puddle”: Frederick Lincoln, accountant and surveyor
An unfortunate typo at the Biological Survey led to a series of bands on
which the “o” and the “i” were mixed up, resulting in a band that read “Boil.
Surv. Wash., D.C.” One hunter allegedly took the band as a sort of recipe for
cooking his goose – wash, boil, and serve – and went so far as to write the
Biological Survey correcting the order of the instructions.131 In thinking about
waterfowl as study object, it is easy to overlook a fact obvious to anyone familiar with hunting: ducks and geese have a much more layered and contested relationship with humans than nearly any other birds. They are a natural resource to be farmed, harvested, and yes, cooked; they are a sport; they have taken on an almost spiritual dimension as symbols of a human-created predator- prey system. “There is a peculiar aura that surrounds in my mind anything and everything to do with wild geese,” wrote one wildfowler.132 Or, as historian
Louis Warren writes, “wildlife was and is as much symbol as substance.”133
By the time the meticulous Frederick Lincoln began work as a migration
study administrator at the United States Biological Survey, migration was of
131 Flyways: Pioneering Waterfowl Management in North America. A.S. Hawkins, R.C. Hanson, H.K. Nelson, and H.M. Reeves, eds. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1984), 74. 132 Scott, Peter. Morning Flight: A Book of Wildfowl (New York: Scribner, 1935), 30. 133 Warren, Louis S. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 4. The studies that had already taken place at this point made people more conscious of birds’ numbers and movements. Sarah Jansen discusses how the scientific visibility of an organism enables control strategies in her paper on phylloxera infestation in 1870s Germany.
much more than academic interest. In Chapman’s time, the migration of all bird
species was treated as a single area of investigation, but by the 1920s, practical
concerns had driven apart the worlds of nongame bird study and waterfowl
management in order to separate out the pressing concern of monitoring the
natural resource of ducks and geese. The economic depression and the ensuing
environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl had led to what policymakers referred to
as a “duck depression,” a sense that some combination of factors had made
waterfowl much more scarce than they had been in recent memory.134 Several important pieces of legislation prompted by concerns over waterfowl protection had been passed, most notably the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It was in this unhesitatingly pragmatic milieu that a relatively professionalized and utilitarian science of waterfowl migration study took hold.
A movable feast: waterfowl as natural resource
A new way of thinking about birds in general was developing, one that
better reflected American attitudes than the prim protectionism of early Bird-
Lore. Ornithologist Joseph Grinnell captured the more realistic spirit when he
134 Jared Orsi argues that the rhetoric of crisis was vague and hazy with little basis in fact. The waterfowl census did not begin until 1935, and earlier estimates of population are difficult to credit because waterfowl tend to flock thickly around certain areas, giving a false sense of population density. I have not taken up a critique of the “crisis” because, like Orsi, I believe what matters for the historian is the perception of threat that led to migration studies being taken seriously by the government.
articulated the uses of birds in a 1918 Scientific Monthly article. Birds, wrote
Grinnell, give humans a quarry to hunt, a helping hand with insect nuisances, a
carrier of seeds useful in reforestation, a source of food, and an object of aesthetic
pleasure. “It would seem scarcely necessary here to argue the value to any
community of its native bird life,” wrote Grinnell.135 Of course, the question was
how to balance the harvesting of all these positive qualities. Birds were becoming a multifaceted resource, and a frustratingly peripatetic one. “Of all natural assets bird-life is least localized,” pointed out Grinnell.136
Hunters had learned to take advantage of migratory patterns and the
widely varying hunting seasons in different states, bagging birds, legally or
illegally, in one state and selling them out of season and at high profit across the
border. The government’s response was the 1900 Lacey Act, backed by Frank
Chapman, which made the transportation and sale of illegally taken birds a
separate offense. However, weak enforcement combined with high financial stakes rendered the act ineffective. More adequate protection arrived when the
Migratory Bird Treaty was signed by the governments of the U.S. and Great
Britain, on behalf of Canada, in 1916, coming into effect in the U.S. when the government ratified the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. It granted uniform protection to all birds defined as migratory, forbidding any hunting of or transacting in migratory birds except as expressly permitted. As for these
135 Grinnell, Joseph. “Bird Migration in its International Bearing.” Scientific Monthly 7.2 (Aug. 1918): 166. 136 Ibid.
permissions, the Department of Agriculture was charged with researching and enforcing appropriate hunting seasons and regulations. The waterfowl hunting season was among the most thoroughly treated in the legislation; the DOA divided the U.S. into four roughly horizontal zones, each with hunting seasons overlapping by about eight weeks.137 No matter their location, each hunter could legally bag eight geese and twenty-five ducks a day.138 Up to this point, hunting had been erratically regulated by state. In 1911, for example, Georgia opened season on quail a month later than all other states, and hunters could shoot turkey in Arkansas, Arizona, and Maryland a full month before it was legal anywhere else.139 The Migratory Bird Treaty Act organized and standardized hunting seasons, officially making game birds a federally controlled natural resource.
The activities of the Biological Survey were suddenly of much more interest to America’s sportsmen. Each year, hunting regulations were revised based on the “sane, unbiased reports” of Frederick Lincoln, chief of the Section of
Distribution and Migration of Birds at the Biological Survey.140 On a 1919
137 Quoted in “The Migratory Bird Treaty Act.” Reprinted in Bird-Lore 20.5 (Sept. 1918): 390. 138 Ibid. Since the Mexico treaty, the U.S. has signed three other migratory bird treaties: one with Mexico, approved 1936, one with Japan, approved 1974, and one with the Soviet Union, approved in 1978. 139 “The Shooting Season.” New York Times 4 Nov. 1911: 12. 140 Terres, John K. “Big Brother to the Waterfowl.” Audubon Magazine 49 (1947): 151. Lincoln’s first ornithological mentor was L. J. Hersey, curator of birds at the Colorado Museum of Natural history and “an indefatigable duck-hunter.” When Lincoln graduated from high school and expressed interest in enrolling in natural history at the University of Kansas, Hersey pulled him back to Denver with a job offer at the museum. Lincoln completed some coursework in biology after he started work at the museum, but most of his time he filled with practical projects, such as a thorough, three-year biological survey of the entire state, carried out by wagon and pack train.
collecting trip in Louisiana, Lincoln, a 27-year-old museum assistant from
Colorado, had met Edwin Kalmbach, an assistant biologist for the Biological
Survey. Short-staffed, inundated with data, and nearly bankrupt, the American
Bird Banding Association had asked the Biological Survey to continue its
oversight of the nation’s banding programs. When Kalmbach returned to
Washington and heard of the imminent federal takeover of banding work, he
remembered the quiet, painstaking young man he had encountered earlier that
year. Kalmbach recommended Lincoln to oversee bird banding at the Biological
Survey, and Lincoln moved to Washington early in 1920.141
Upon starting his new job at the Biological Survey, Lincoln was faced with the ABBA’s backlog of nearly 100,000 unsorted records. He set about devising a filing system to accommodate these records and the many others he hoped to soon collect. As of June 30, 1933, Lincoln reported that the Biological Survey had banded 1,381,609 birds to date. Around 2,000 individuals held federal bird banding licenses, but Lincoln estimated that, had he the clerical support to process all their data, he would have had no problem increasing the number of licensed banders to 5,000.142 The office work going on at the Biological Survey
was no small task. The outgoing secretary of the ABBA had, as Lincoln said,
“acted as packer, file clerk, recorder, and stenographer, handling with
When Lincoln joined the army, his commanding officer heard that he “knew something about birds” and gave him responsibility for a loft of homing pigeons used as couriers. This practical activity around bird flight and behavior could very well have sparked his desire to move away from museum work and towards the more pragmatic milieu of the Biological Survey. 141 Terres, 156. 142 Lincoln, “Bird Banding,” 71.
meticulous care the thousand and one details essential in any program of research in which numbers play a vital part.”143 Lincoln, for his part, took over the data analysis admirably. Later in his career, an article in Audubon magazine described Lincoln’s job as a sort of wildlife accountant [Fig. 4].
He wrestles with voluminous reports flowing in from bird observers all over the United States, telling of the changing fortunes of North American ducks and geese. Under Lincoln’s experienced eye, the rise and decline of the nation’s waterfowl are scanned with sympathy, understanding, and the perception of a financial wizard reading a stock-market ticker tape.144
Lincoln worked for the government until his death in 1960, though the name changes and bureaucratic divisions and consolidations meant that his official title changed more often than his actual duties. In 1934, the Biological Survey itself was reconfigured; the new Division of Migratory Waterfowl was meant to “plan for careful and thorough wildlife-refuge administration in the interests of the birds, the public and the sportsmen.”145 In 1939, the Biological Survey was moved to the Department of the Interior; a year later, it was combined with the
Bureau of Fisheries to form the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Lincoln’s Fish and Wildlife Service was a grandchild of the Department of
Agriculture (DOA), established in 1862. The legislation forming the DOA mentioned the “introduction and protection of insectivorous birds,” an early indication that the government recognized the economic value of bird life. When
C. Hart Merriam had realized in 1885 that the AOU did not have the resources to
143 Lincoln, “Bird Banding,” 70. 144 Terres, 150. 145 “Reorganization of the U.S. Biological Survey.” Science, New Series 80:2064 (20 July 1934), 65.
continue administrating migration studies, he had turned to the government
with an economic argument: migratory birds’ importance to agriculture justified
the creation of a Division of Economic Ornithology within the DOA. As one of
Merriam’s employees said, economic ornithology was “the practical application of the knowledge of birds in everyday life.”146 The House Committee on
Agriculture approved the new division, with Merriam as head, but only as a
subdivision of the extant Division of Entomology – the logic behind this decision
was that birds and insects were two related dynamic biological factors affecting
crops.147 The Division of Economic Ornithology remained affiliated with the
AOU Committee on Bird Migration until 1890, when Merriam asked that the
AOU Committee be disbanded, as, in his view, the government had effectively
taken over large-scale migration studies.148 The Biological Survey was nearly
voted out of existence in 1907. A representative from New York had insisted that
the Biological Survey’s work could just as easily be reassigned to other authorities – the Smithsonian Institution could take over the ornithology and the food and drug authorities could regulate trade in migratory birds.149 However,
thanks in part to Chapman’s vigorous lobbying of citizens’ nonprofit groups
146 Quoted in Orr, Oliver H., Jr. Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 52. 147 McAtee, W.L. “Economic Ornithology.” Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology (New York: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1933), 115. 148 Rowan, 52. The government had not taken over all cooperative migration studies; of particular note is the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, founded in 1890, which distributed forms for recording migration data among its members until 1921. Cassinia, the club’s journal, contains their annual migration reports, written by Witmer Stone. 149 Orr, 167.
such as the Audubon Society and the League of American Sportsmen, the
Biological Survey again received appropriations in 1908. According to J.A. Allen, the “bitter attack” against the Survey actually strengthened it; the “popular uprising throughout the country in its defense” showed that “while the country at large was keenly alive to its economic importance, many of the lawmakers of the nation were in blissful ignorance.”150 To the delight of Allen, Chapman, and others, it had been decided without a doubt that tracking the migration of birds was a legitimate concern of the U.S. government. The job into which Lincoln was placed in 1920 was thus based solidly in quantification, analysis, and management of the important international resource of North American ducks and geese.
Fair game: hunting regulation
Hunters across the country waited anxiously for the year’s new seasons and bag limits, which officially appeared in the summer preceding the fall shooting season. Sportsmen’s magazines printed rumors and hearsay in anticipation, and much of the comment was far from supportive of regulatory activity. One former federal game warden remembers “much defiance and apathy” as he tried to enforce the waterfowl hunting season in the early 1920s.
150 Allen, J.A. “The Work of the Biological Survey.” Auk 25.2 (Apr. 1908): 246.
Wardens “were often taunted and reviled by ignorant and strongly prejudiced
persons with no conception of wildlife conservation principles.”151
Conflicts such as this set the precedent for an evolving relationship
between hunting and conservation that has left us with an unhelpfully polarized
landscape of environmental commentary on gunsports. “Twelve thousand
sandhill cranes are killed each year,” intones the narrator of “Flight School,” a
2003 television documentary about Operation Migration, a study of the
migration of sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis). A menacing silhouette guns down
a crane, and it silently tumbles in slow motion.152 Here, hunters are painted as
irresponsible annihilators. The opposite point of view is espoused by historians
like John Reiger, writing in 1975, who want to rescue the hunter’s reputation of
bloodthirsty destroyer. In American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, he
points up the vocal role of hunters in wilderness preservation. Sport hunting,
argues Reiger, was an integral part of American boyhood and served to bring
humans into a close, often deeply respectful relationship with nature. From
Audubon to Thoreau and Frederick Law Olmsted, up through Allen, Merriam,
and Chapman, the figures we now call “nature lovers” indulged in the hunt.153
“A… satisfactory outlet to my always strong hunting instinct was found in going
‘gunning’ with older boys,” remembered Chapman.154 When Reiger writes that
151 Flyways, 28-30. 152 “Flight School.” Nature. PBS. WNET, New York. Rebroadcast 25 Dec. 2005. 153 Reiger, John F. American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 45. 154 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 19.
naturalists “had to camouflage their… love for the pursuit and capture of
wildlife by calling it ‘scientific collecting,’”155 his defense of earnest hunters
forced to reframe their passions in a more politically correct way is harder to take
seriously.
The overlap and interplay between people who considered themselves
hunters and those who called themselves nature-lovers was originally much
more nuanced than these opposing viewpoints would suggest. By the early 20th century, hunting in North America was undergoing a demographic change, one that brought the sport’s composition and reputation closer to the hunting we know today. Hunting had always held deep cultural import in America; at first, it was the province of the hardy frontiersman. Daniel Boone, the backwoods folk hero, exemplified the hunter’s virtues of manly resourcefulness and independence. In Britain, the hunt had a long and ritualized association with nobility, as game had been seen since the Middle Ages as a resource to be preserved for the pleasure of the aristocracy.156 In North America, on the other
hand, wild land and wildlife were plentiful enough as to be available to any
settler hardy enough to venture out. In one sense, hunting was a popular
recreation for Americans from all walks of life. Yet late 19th century hunting still
looks like an oddly upper-crust pastime compared to hunting today, thanks to its
extensive and rather flowery literature. “The love of wildfowling is no
155 Reiger, 43. 156 Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 201.
commonplace sentiment, nor an everyday enthusiasm such as the keenness that field sports are wont to excite in the youthful breast,” wrote one hunter. “It is a thing beyond all that – an overmastering passion that neither difficulties nor obstacles can resist, nor even age and disability wholly quench.”157 Sport hunters defined themselves as the moral superiors of market hunters; in practice, they were often their economic superiors as well. J.A. Allen’s well-financed collecting trips and Theodore Roosevelt’s famous Wild West safaris all reinforced a tacit monopoly: the only hunters who had the right to be proud of their hobby were those for whom it was no more than a hobby.
The newly minted federal regulations brought the beginning of a more widespread American sporting ethic that applied to a wider swath of the population. Officially, the government had all but eliminated the market hunter, making out of every hunter a sportsman; this rhetoric leveled the distinctions between those who hunted for leisure and those who hunted for a livelihood.
Whatever the effect on actual hunting practice, this change in notation created an enlarged discursive constituency of sport hunters, now drawn heavily from the lower classes as well as the leisure class.158 Besides the federal declarations of hunting seasons and bag limits, more material factors also prompted the inclusion of blue-collar America in the sporting family. Arms manufacturers marketed their wares aggressively in rural areas during the 1910s and 1920s, and
157 Chapman, Abel. First Lessons in the Art of Wildfowling (London: Horace Cox, 1896), 1. Abel Chapman is no relation to Frank Chapman. 158 Herman, Daniel Justin. Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001), 271.
in the ten years after World War I, guns cost half what they had a decade
earlier.159 The advent of the automobile also made wild lands easier and cheaper
for sportsmen to access.160 Jack Miner, the converted market hunter of very
modest means, wrote of the moral power of hunting in a concrete, collegial tone
far from Romantic panegyrics or even Rooseveltian machismo. After a long day
of hunting, Miner recalled “returning home with an appetite for anything and
stomachs that would almost digest railroad iron; then about nine p.m. we would
roll in and sleep a hole right down through the bed. Next morning when you
awake after such an experience, you will usually find your eyes are open, and more in focus.”161
As hunting became ideologically and practically available to a larger
constituency, frontier individualism faded to make room for a relentlessly
organizational spirit. “The word Sportsman spells a great many great words; first
of all it spells others and self-sacrifice; for to be a real sportsman one cannot stand alone,” wrote Miner.162 The number of hunting licenses issued doubled between
1910 and 1920.163 2.5 million hunting licenses were issued in 1925 alone.164
Sportsmen were becoming an increasingly numerous and powerful interest group. The More Game Birds Foundation, which would later become Ducks
Unlimited, was founded in 1930 by sportsmen eager to involve themselves in
159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. 161 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 7. 162 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 172. 163 Herman, 271. 164 Lincoln, “Bird Banding – In Progress and Prospect,” 154.
hunting policy. Only ten years after its founding, Ducks Unlimited had over
25,000 members, each of whom was ready to stand up for the rights of hunters to a conscientious, pleasurable, and bounteous season of hunting.
These organizations became particularly important as a general sense that the continent’s wealth of waterfowl was running low began to work its way into the public consciousness through newspapers, magazines, and word of mouth.
“Forty-five years ago, I am absolutely sure, there were five ducks migrating through Ontario where there is one today,” observed Miner in 1929.165 Any bird enthusiast, ornithologist, or hunter would have agreed; by all accounts,
America’s waterfowl population looked to be growing sparser in the years following World War I. Lincoln estimated in 1937 that the ducks and geese of
North America had been growing steadily fewer for as long as fifty years.166 The blame for the decline in waterfowl was initially laid before hunters. Creating the rules governing game depended on which factors were seen as the direst threats to wildlife. In Chapman’s time, the human activity that most endangered birds was thought to be market hunting, and the laws passed dealt accordingly with quashing the cash-for-game system. Market hunters made a tidy profit by selling ducks, grouse, geese, and quail on the black market, even after the 1900 Lacey
Act that forbade the sale of game taken illegally.167 Throughout the 1910s and
165 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 12. 166 Ambler, Laura. “Our Wild Game Counted.” New York Times 18 Apr. 1937: 184. 167 For a case study set in Pennsylvania, see Warren, 55.
1920s, the government continued to fasten on hunting and its surrounding
economies and practices with legislation such as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
However, around the time Lincoln became active in the Biological Survey,
the concept of habitat destruction started to appear in policy debates. Miner
weighed in as usual, dismissing this new emphasis as a nod to pressure from
hunters. “Another trigger-finger excuse advanced by the thoughtless shooter is
that the southern marsh lands are drained and the ducks’ food supply is destroyed,” wrote Miner, “but who hasn’t been duck hunting the last ten years and seen thousands of acres of green marsh with more guns than ducks?”168 For
once, though, Miner was in the minority. Scientists and policymakers alike began
to see land and migratory birds as inextricably linked.
Flyways, refuges, and bringing migration down to earth
Migration routes and the country underneath had heretofore been
curiously dissociated. Scientists referred to place names in their papers, but only as reference points; the tacit assumption was that birds of passage inhabited a higher world. They stopped in marshes, fields, and forests, but their motion, not their rest, was their most intriguing activity. In his seminal Bulletin discussed
earlier, Cooke discussed “waves” of weather, birds, and temperature, all
168 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 12.
horizontal concepts overlaid across a diverse set of biomes. This paradigm set the
stage for future discussion in the same vein.169 Throughout the early 1900s, papers on migration continued to fall into two categories. First was the individual species or location study (“Spring Migration Notes of the Chicago
Area,” “Labrador Chickadee in its Return Flight from the Fall Migration of
1916”); no less common was the general treatise on the mechanisms of migration
(“Migration and Physical Proportions,” “Some Aspects of Migration”).170
Progressive-era conservation in general isolated all ecosystem elements from one another, which Jared Orsi sees as symptomatic of the mechanistic worldview that accompanied America’s early scientific resource management.171 This view
separated each species from each other and from its habitat, viewing populations
in isolation.
The flyway, often called the single most transformative concept in the
history of migration study, formally joined waterfowl and habitat; the word was
coined by Lincoln, “generally regarded as the father of waterfowl flyways in
North America.”172 A flyway is not a single migration route, but a superposition
of many routes, encompassing the overlapping breeding and wintering grounds
of many species [Fig. 5]. “Were it possible for us to see bird flights… at the height
of migration,” wrote Lincoln, “the flight lines would seem to be intricately
169 Allen, “Cooke’s ‘Report on Bird Migration,’” 59-61. 170 Examples are from Auk, 1916-1920. 171 Orsi, 23. 172 Flyways, 72.
interlaced, some even for the same species crossing at right angles.”173 The four
flyways, Pacific, Central, Mississippi, and Atlantic, divide the United States into
generally vertical stripes. Flyways, said Lincoln, “may well be conceived as those
broader areas in which related migration routes are associated or blended in a
definite geographic region.”174 Though band recovery points and zones of
migration had certainly been plotted on maps before Lincoln, what Lincoln’s
flyway concept did was to link mobile and immobile resources, birds and the
land they flew over.175 “The valley of every little stream is, in fact, a migration
route of some importance to individual birds of that watershed,” said Lincoln.176
Put more generally, according to a 1936 ecology text, “we cannot say exactly where the animal ends and the environment begins.”177
Naming and placing the flyways was an important step towards the
administration of their inhabitants. The flyway was as much a new management
concept as an advancement in migration theory. “The flyway concept has come
to have an administrative significance, chiefly in connection with the continental
resource of migratory waterfowl,” wrote Lincoln. Recognizing the relative
permanence of migration routes both legitimized further study and gave new
urgency to the creation of refuges. Miner had been known for his insistence on
173 Lincoln, Frederick C. The Migration of American Birds (New York: Doubleday, 1939), 149. 174 Ibid, 150. North of the 45th parallel, the four flyways overlapped significantly; Lincoln postulated that this was because more birds were hunted in the South. 175 My analysis of the place of wildlife in Progressive-era legislation is inspired by Orsi. See especially 21-22. 176 Lincoln, The Migration of American Birds, 151. 177 Elton, Charles. Animal Ecology (New York: Macmillan, 1936). Quoted in Warren, 4.
changing migration routes, scoffing at accusations that “nature knows best.” “If
man will take God at His word in harmony with Him, that man can change the
migrating route of the fowls of the air,” maintained Miner staunchly. “Any bird
that is intelligent enough to fly one-half mile from humanity for self-preservation
will fly clear across the continent back and forth to us for food and protection.”178
But in 1935, Lincoln decried the disregard of independent refuge managers like
Miner for the natural ranges of birds. Miner believed that geese would change their migration pattern in order to come to his haven; Lincoln countered that
“makers of new ‘homes’ for migratory waterfowl do not give sufficient consideration to the birds’ own idea of where home is,” according to the sporting column “Wood, Field, and Stream.”179 Using the administrative framework of
the flyway, the Biological Survey began to plan a network of appropriately
placed refuges along the four flyways. “How could the refuge system be
expanded to secure the greatest benefits in the shortest time?” asked Lincoln,
living up to his reputation as “financial wizard” to the waterfowl. “What were
the most strategic locations? Which areas were to be marked for priority of
purchase and development?”180
178 Miner, Jack Miner on Current Topics, 14. 179 Greenfield, George. “Wood, Field, and Stream [migration and homing instinct].” New York Times 21 Apr. 1935: S7. 180 Lincoln, Frederick C. “Keeping Up With the Waterfowl.” Audubon Magazine 46 (July 1946): 202- 203.
Lincoln concluded that “the magnitude of this problem is such that it
cannot be handled by local governments.”181 “A duck for every puddle” was the
committee’s catchphrase.182 As The Nation put it, “the report bristles with phrases about national planning.” One main proposal involved the conversion of five million acres of “submarginal lands” from unprofitable farms to wildlife refuges.
The Committee’s report was practical and sweeping enough that The Nation
ventured to hope that “whooping cranes, white pelicans, wild turkeys, and all
the other fancy American birds and beasts that Davy Crockett knew may strut
once more in their former glory and abundance.”183
Americans were eager to help with this project to restore the continent’s
symbolic bird species, but the efforts of popularizers like Frank Chapman and
Jack Miner had been almost too successful, and amateurs were no longer the
easily controllable, self-selecting group of Chapman’s era. Bird study had
become something of a mania, dragging into public life a more general
fascination with natural history and wildlife conservation. The amateur
ornithology market, partly thanks to Bird-Lore, was becoming glutted with
repetitive writings on nature appreciation. The 20th century saw a change in
popular literature that mirrored the shift in scientific migration studies towards
the specific and away from the speculative. Amateurs were urged to contribute
more focused writings, part essay, part data point. A Mr. E. F. Bigelow,
181 Lincoln, The Migration of American Birds, 183. 182 “Duck for Every Puddle Goal in Game Restoration.” New York Times 7 Jan. 1934: N2. 183 “In the Driftway.” The Nation 138.3583 (7 Mar. 1934): 276.
attempting to start a magazine called The Guide to Nature, expressed as early as
1908 his frustration with the many articles he received on “The Beauty and
Interest to be Observed in Insects,” “The Fascinations of Ornithology,” or
“Wonders of the Plant World.” He wanted concrete anecdotes coming from observers’ personal experiences, not preachy generalities.184 Parallel criticisms
came from scientists attempting to deal with well-meaning helpers. Migration
study no longer needed poetic publicists like Frank Chapman; the stakes were
higher now. Under Lincoln, migration studies had a serious and imminent goal.
No longer were migrations a curiosity to be wondered at; the migration mapper
was as crucial to the nation’s well-being as the oil prospector or the forester. This
translated into fewer opportunities for amateur involvement.
Lincoln initially worked hard to promote migration study as a cooperative
research opportunity generously made available to the public, “offering to bird
students a thoroughly scientific method by which they might advance their
studies and procure new and important information.”185 He need not have tried
so hard to convince the bird-loving masses; by 1933, the Biological Survey was
turning away banding permit applications every week. Lincoln ascribed the
“wave of interest and enthusiasm” to “the charm of intimate acquaintance with
birds, brought about by the repeated handling of the same individuals.”186
Audubon Magazine reported that “hundreds of applicants for bird-banding
184 Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 20.3 (June 1918): 238. 185 Lincoln, “Bird Banding,” 73. 186 Ibid.
permits have been refused by the Service because they were insufficiently
qualified. The operators of banding stations must know birds, be vouched for by
well-known ornithologists, and must furnish live traps, bait, and time.” Also, as
Lincoln remarked, “it is an expensive way to study birds.”187
These reasons given are somewhat misleading. Banding was not an intrinsincally expensive pursuit, and people with much less expertise than the
Biological Survey had come to require would certainly have been able to band birds in a pinch. The truth was that migration study no longer needed or wanted much amateur help. The transfer of banding operations to the U.S. government meant that Lincoln had significant amounts of money and expertise at his disposal. A man who had the ear of the President hardly needed to rely on a motley crew of volunteers. In 1934, the President’s Committee on Wild Life called for an end to the “random efforts of our disordered progress toward an undefined goal.”188 In short, government biologists were realizing that the knowledge migration study needed was best pursued by professionals.
The most obvious reason was that many of the most well-traveled areas
and most common species had been thoroughly documented by the mid-1930s.
Flyway biologists were sent north to Hudson’s Bay or into the remote Arizona
desert because the birds of New England and the Upper Midwest had been
under constant scrutiny since the time of Cooke, Merriam, and Chapman. The
187 Terres, 156. 188 Quoted in “In the Driftway,” 277.
migration behavior of the more abundant swallows and warblers had attracted
the attention of ornithologists early on, and, though more banding data would
have been interesting, it was hardly a priority.
Though mallards, Canada geese, and other game species had already been
extensively studied, they were still of critical concern. The drastic effects of the yearly hunting season laid on scientists a responsibility to continuously monitor, track, and evaluate populations in order to optimize hunting regulations. The banding records in existence came from the “more or less limited observation of state and federal wildlife officials, numerous citizen volunteers, and on the newly initiated winter inventory.”189 Effective game management demanded a
more organized and comprehensive snapshot than these accumulated banding
records furnished. In order to understand the perceived changes in waterfowl
numbers, the Biological Survey began a census, carried out in January, winter
being the time during which birds were least likely to move.190 In 1935, the year
of the first waterfowl census, the Biological Survey appropriated blimps and
planes from the military to conduct a grand flyover along four north-south paths,
189 Gabrielson, I.N. “Obituary (Frederick C. Lincoln).” Auk 79.3 (July 1962): 495. 190 Rendel, John. “Wood, Field, and Stream [waterfowl census].” New York Times 19 Jan. 1944: 17. The increasing use of multiple and new forms of transport not only helped gather more information about birds but also expanded the descriptive and conceptual space available to people explaining bird migration. Birds of passage were variously represented as travelers, tourists, globetrotters, jet-setters, and wayfarers. As humans quantified and increased their own speed, they became interested in quantifying the speed of passing birds as well. A simple automobile speedometer could be used to actually quantify the speed of a flying bird, provided the bird kept loosely to the road and the driver was able to watch both the needle and the heron or hawk being chased. Notes from airplane and airship pilots, such as one pilot who reported flying alongside swifts while clocking sixty-eight miles per hour, provided information much more precise than Merriam and Cooke’s rough speed calculations based on arrival dates several states apart.
effectively participating for the first time in the birds’ flyways that Lincoln had
defined.191 This first annual survey found only thirty million waterfowl, “the low
point of the ‘duck depression.’”192 The Biological Survey did use some citizen
observers, like Merriam’s nationwide migration study and Chapman’s Christmas
Bird Count, but this waterfowl census engaged a battery of government
departments, including the National Park Service, the Civil Air Service, the Coast
Guard, the Forest Service, and local game and fish departments.193 In addition to
airplanes, the census takers used “saddle horses, sleds, snow shoes, boats, and
automobiles.”194 Comprehensive data collection was the primary goal; this census, unlike the Christmas Bird Count, was not intended to serve as a social or
educational activity for the public.195
Since migration study no longer needed amateurs, Lincoln and the
Biological Survey set out to retool Jack Miner’s public legacy. He became an
example not of public participation in migration study, but of the necessary
sublimation of private property to the public good. The More Game Birds
Foundation offered “$500 in cash, twenty silver cups, and certificates of merit” as
prizes in a contest for “the best refuges established in 1935.”196 The foundation
191 Ambler, Laura. “Our Wild Game Counted.” New York Times 18 Apr. 1937: 184. 192 Rendel, 17. 193 Ibid. 194 Ambler, 184. 195 This policy of surveying and management rankled with Chapman, who still saw birds as a primarily aesthetic resource. He wrote that Bird-Lore did not think it right to “give a large share of its efforts to increasing the number of certain kinds of birds for a certain number of months each year in order that there would be just that many more to kill during the remaining months of the year.” See Frank M. Chapman, “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 13.4 (Aug. 1911): 212. 196 Greenfield, George. “Wood, Field, and Stream.” New York Times 28 Feb. 1935: 27.
distributed free booklets “describing methods of establishing a refuge.”197 Miner was often held up as an exemplar, not for his work in banding, but for his initiative in using his own land to take care of a national natural resource. The
Biological Survey, in concert with a host of cooperators from More Game Birds in
America to the Federation of Women’s Clubs, launched a nationwide program in
1935 to encourage “voluntary establishment of chains of miniature sanctuaries, patterned after the famous Jack Miner refuge near Detroit.”198 These “miniature
refuges” were not meant to replace the officially sanctioned refuges; they
represented a way for people to safely and productively participate in wildlife
conservation. The U.S. government did not beg for more financial resources and
person-hours in the field as the AOU had; the most scarce commodity was fast
becoming the land itself.
Lincoln’s flyways had anchored both migrating birds and the people they
interested to specific pieces of land, and the growing resources that the
government had built into migration study made reaching out to unknown
amateurs less crucial. Pragmatic concerns associated with the link between birds and land had closed down the loose community responsible for migration study, replacing it with an official body of mappers, surveyors, and wildlife accountants.
197 Ibid. 198 Ibid. Not surprisingly, Miner was “enthusiastic over the possibilities of the plan… giving it hearty support.”
Fig. 4. Frederick Lincoln, wildlife accountant, as portrayed in Audubon Magazine.199
199 Terres, 150.
Fig. 5. The Mississippi Flyway, formed by many superimposed migration routes.200
200 Lincoln, “Keeping Up With the Waterfowl,” 200.
Conclusion: “We have learnt from the birds and continue to learn”
A true bird’s-eye view of migration would have to compensate for birds’ lack of depth perception. Their eyes are located laterally to increase their field of vision, but at the cost of the two overlapping images that humans use to understand depth and distance. “The appreciation of distance has to be built up by a succession of glances from different points toward the same point of the field,” wrote ornithologist R.J. Pumphrey in an oft-cited 1948 paper entitled “The
Sense Organs of Birds.”201
Our own appreciation of the distances and spaces through which birds travel has likewise come from innumerable glances and observations superimposed, organized, and analyzed over the last hundred years. Some come from a young man taking notes on his way to the railway station in 1885. One cluster of data points comes from a lone brickmaker’s son with an evangelical mission in the years following World War I. A larger set of facts and figures is the contribution of a government scientist trying to analyze and reverse the decline in waterfowl populations during the Dust Bowl. Chapman, Miner, and
Lincoln expended all the time and passion they had in studying bird migration, but their contributions form only a tiny part of the vast mass of knowledge accumulated over the years. Even taking into account the work of their colleagues mentioned here – Merriam, Cooke, Taverner, Cole, and others – the
201 Quoted in Myrfyn Owen, Wild Geese of the World: Their Life History and Ecology (London: Batsford, 1980), 32.
actual advancement of migration science depends on contributions from an
uncountable crowd, none of whose observations would have made sense
without a framework of interpretation.
Many disciplines follow a similar trajectory of professionalization and
consolidation. As more knowledge is accumulated, further advancement
demands increasing specialization, leaving little space for the interested dabbler.
Yet ornithology in general, and migration studies in particular, are unique in that they still do have room for dedicated hobbyists. “There are a lot more
birdwatchers than there are ornithologists,” points out Jeremiah Trimble, an
ornithologist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The paradox of
migration study is that, despite the increasing formalization of ornithology, it has
always been and still remains resolutely and necessarily open to, and grateful
for, the contributions of nonspecialists. Though amateurs might seem like a
problematic element of science, the ways in which they contribute have become
streamlined and codified in order to make them as useful as possible to the
managing scientists.
The system in place today most resembles the vision of Frederick Lincoln:
amateur banders are used to fill gaps of a certain kind, with the inquiring
government and academic bodies providing their own instruction, direction, and
epistemological framework. Anyone who finds a banded bird can now report it
on the Patuxent website. The online form makes it much easier for the
supervising biologists to obtain exactly, and only, the data they want. Instead of
trying to follow Merriam’s complicated instructions for observing wind, weather,
phenology, behavior, and flight speed, band finders have only to pull down a
few menus, check some boxes, and enter their mailing addresses so they can
receive a USGS Certificate of Appreciation in exchange for their data.
Chapman would be pleased with the way bird banding remains available
to any interested participant, but he would also approve of the training caveat
that currently modifies the invitation to take part in North America’s banding and observation community. Today, an aspiring bander needs more than a desire to contribute to the store of knowledge; he or she must decide on a “well- developed study plan showing a valid need for a banding permit” that meets with the approval of three sponsors, usually professors, ornithologists, or other licensed banders. Subpermits require only two sponsors and are designed to allow younger, less qualified research assistants to help out with banding projects, but subpermit holders cannot endorse new applicants.202 This policy
protects banding with a substantial but eminently surmountable barrier of
requirements and paperwork. It also allows for the use of migration study as a
way to draw would-be ornithologists into the field, a more formalized echo of
Chapman’s own initiation into ornithology.
Parts of migration study today also resonate with the sort of grassroots
investigation championed by Jack Miner. Upon receipt of a band recovery, the
202 Gustafson, M. E., J. Hildenbrand, and L. Metras. “North American Bird Banding Manual.” United States Geological Survey. 1997. 12 Feb. 2006.
USGS notifies the bander of the find and, no less interestingly, notifies the finder
of the bander’s name and address. The person who recovered the band can thus
contact the bander to learn more about a particular bird’s history or to find out
about banding in general.203 This practice recalls the informal network of curiosity Miner attempted to create by printing the names of band finders in his books.
Other than this, though, few concrete vestiges of Miner’s philosophy remain in migration study today. He was a household name in the 1930s, but he has since drifted into relative obscurity, though his refuge remains operational and his descendants still affix Bible quotations to each year’s passing geese.
Miner has not been as reverentially cited in ornithological histories because, according to the observational paradigm in use today, he was just one more data collector – albeit a particularly loquacious one – in a network of thousands.
Though Miner would likely be surprised and dismayed by the assertion, the singularity for which he deserves to be remembered is discursive rather than practical. He distilled the relationship between bird migration and its observers into its simplest form. “One of the common questions asked round [sic] my home is: ‘How do you understand the birds so well?’” wrote Miner. “Really, the birds are an open book. The question is how to understand humanity.”204
203 Ibid. 204 Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds, 154.
It is not too grandiose a pronouncement to say that bird migration is
indeed a lens through which historians can better understand humanity, or,
more specifically, the human processes of creating an object of study and an
observation system to match. Both the elfin boy Nils and the adventurer
Domingo Gonsales tell of having their lives turned upside down, both viscerally
and epistemologically, by the experience of bird migration. More than two
thousand years earlier, the migratory birds tell their side of the story in
Aristophanes’ The Birds. “You have learnt from the birds and continue to learn,”
recites the chorus of birds. “Your best benefactors and early instructors, /We
give you the warning of seasons returning.”205
All the earthbound human machinations of early waterfowl migration
study have worked in concert with factors specific to the discipline: the
combination of visual clarity and epistemological obscurity as well as the
disparity between free-roaming study object and anchored observer. The birds in
their travels specify a set of conditions to which scientists have reacted. Our
attempts to catalog, follow, and understand them have created an unusually
communal discipline that has taught us as much about ourselves and the way we
investigate as it has about breeding and wintering zones. We can only hope that
the birds themselves respond as readily to changes in the physical and cultural
environment as their networks of observers have.
205 Aristophanes, “Chorus of Birds” from The Birds. ll. 29-31. Trans. John Frere. Greek Poets in English Verse (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1893).
It is mid-March now. In a few weeks, the geese will gather on the riverbank as they come north; to some they are a dinner, to others a nuisance, to others an environmental indicator or simply a reminder of changing seasons. But with a thoughtful view to history, the geese come to mean something more: objects made scientifically visible through years of grappling with geography, management, and organization. The alighting of these migratory visitors brings
Chapman, Miner, Lincoln, and all the goose-chasers of years past back from their archival wintering grounds. The spring birds are less mysterious now but no less welcome.
WORKS CITED
I. PRIMARY SOURCES
a. Writings on ornithology by ornithologists
Lincoln, Frederick C. “Bird Banding.” McAtee, W.L. “Economic Ornithology.” Palmer, T.S. “A Brief History of the American Ornithologists’ Union.” Rowan, William. “Fifty Years of Bird Migration.” Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology (New York: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1933). The organization of the AOU in 1883 gave ornithology a disciplinary identity, one which ornithologists frequently reiterated in the following fifty years. This book, published on the occasion of the AOU’s 50th anniversary, celebrates the organization’s accomplishments and further polishes the scientific reputations of its heroes.
Chapman, Frank M. The Travels of Birds (New York: Appleton, 1916). Chapman meant this whimsical text to introduce young people to the behavioral principles behind bird migration. It shows his passion for educating as well as his mastery of a conversational yet scientific tone in his writing. Harvard’s Ernst Mayr Library has a copy inscribed by Chapman to William Brewster, a founding member of the AOU.
Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.1 (Feb. 1899): 28. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.3 (June 1899): 99. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.4 (Aug. 1899): 135. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 1.5 (Oct. 1899): 169. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 13.1 (Feb. 1911): 48. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 13.4 (Aug. 1911): 212. Chapman, Frank M. “Editorial.” Bird-Lore 20.3 (June 1918): 238. As editor of Bird-Lore, Chapman had ample opportunity to sound off on various aspects of ornithology. He wrote over seventy such editorials, one in each issue until 1935. The editorials cited here cover topics from AOU finances to bird protection.
Cole, Leon J. “The Tagging of Wild Birds as a Means for Studying Their Movements.” Auk 26.2 (Apr. 1909): 137-143. Leon Cole’s article in the Auk is regarded as a classic paper; he was the first American to set down an argument and a plan for systematized banding. Cole covered the philosophy and logistics of banding, recognizing that following
individuals was a logical next step after Cooke and Merriam’s observational studies.
Cooke, Wells W. “Many Eyes Are Better Than One Pair.” Auk 24.3 (July 1907): 346-348. In order to see whether cooperation was as essential an element in migration study as he suspected, Cooke conducted a small research project in which he compared bird arrival dates gathered by a single observer to the earliest date found by a group of observers.
Grinnell, Joseph. “Bird Migration in its International Bearing.” Scientific Monthly 7:2 (Aug. 1918): 166-169. Writing just before the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Grinnell enumerated the many facets of the importance of birds to people. He stressed especially the need for international cooperation, conceptualizing birds as a natural resource of significant economic value.
Huxley, Julian S. “Bird-Watching and Biological Science [part 1].”Auk 33.2 (Apr. 1916): 142-161. Huxley, Julian S. “Bird-Watching and Biological Science [part 2].”Auk 33.3 (Sept. 1916): 256-270. Huxley, an eminent biologist, wrote in the Auk about bridging the gap between amateurs and professionals, which he recognized as both one of ornithology’s greatest challenges and the core of many of its possibilities.
Lincoln, Frederick C. “Bird Banding - In Progress and Prospect.” Auk 43.2 (Apr. 1926): 153-161. Six years after the ABBA gave way to the Biological Survey as the managing organization of American bird banding, Lincoln wrote an article in the Auk evaluating the progress of banding activity. He reported primarily on waterfowl data, as it had already become clear that these species were the most useful model organism for data collection.
Lincoln, Frederick C. “Keeping Up With the Waterfowl.” Audubon Magazine 46 (July 1946): 195-205. Lincoln used this article to urge responsible hunting, even after the “duck depression” was past. He outlined the techniques used to determine hunting seasons and educated readers about the lives and behavior of waterfowl.
Wood, Harold B. “The History of Bird Banding.” Auk 62.2 (Apr. 1945): 256-265. Like many disciplinary histories written by scientists, Wood’s article cites ancient history to lend a more august tone to the field. Wood referred to all marking and
branding of birds as “banding,” showing a focus on technique over concept characteristic of internalist histories.
Taverner, Percy. “Ornithology a Science.” Wilson Bulletin 17.4 (Dec. 1905): 123- 124. Taverner addressed the role of scientific inquiry as a mediator between fascination and knowledge, attempting to answer allegations that ornithology was not a legitimate science and only an amusement. b. Biographies, autobiographies, and obituaries
Allen, J.A. “The American Ornithologists’ Union.” Bird-Lore 1.5 (Oct. 1899): 142- 148. Chapman, Frank M. “In Memoriam: Joel Asaph Allen.” Auk 39.1 (Jan. 1922): 1-14. Palmer, T.S. “In Memoriam: Clinton Hart Merriam.” Auk 71.2 (Apr. 1954): 130- 136. Palmer, T.S. “In Memoriam: Wells Woodbridge Cooke.” Auk 34.2 (Apr. 1917): 119-132. Obituaries printed in the Auk are among the most complete sources for biographical information on ornithologists. The “In Memoriam” pieces were often written by those colleagues who had felt particularly keenly the import of the late scientist’s studies and who knew him personally. These articles thus give the historian a sense of the impression the ornithologist left on his colleagues and on the field.
“Dr. Chapman Dies; Ornithologist, 81.” New York Times 17 Nov. 1945: 17. “Dr. Chapman Feted on 70th Birthday.” New York Times 13 June 1934: 27. Atkinson, Brooks. “An American Master of Bird Lore.” New York Times 19 Nov. 1933: BR6. Chapman, Frank M. Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (New York: Appleton, 1933). Murphy, Robert Cushman. “Frank Michler Chapman, 1864-1945.” Auk 67.3 (July 1950): 307-315. Chapman’s Autobiography of a Bird-Lover took the tone of an adventure story; he assumed, and perhaps rightly, that his readers wanted to hear about his travels to far-flung lands and would find his museum work comparatively boring. Nevertheless, Chapman was an articulate and reflective writer, and his musings bring a necessary depth to any history of turn-of-the-century ornithology. Brooks Atkinson reviews the Autobiography in the New York Times, bringing it to the attention of a public as interested in Chapman’s personality as in his work. Though many scientists’ obituaries list publications and contributions to the discipline, Robert Murphy’s article catalogued instead all the available biographical material on Chapman. From Science to the New Yorker, many magazines and journals had taken up Chapman as a human, not just as a
scientist, and Murphy’s page-long bibliography is an indispensable testament to Chapman’s prominent place in the public eye. The two unattributed New York Times articles focused mostly on Chapman’s role in drawing the public into birdwatching. The authors also took particular interest in Chapman’s role in making their local natural history museum into a national landmark.
Miner, Jack. Jack Miner and the Birds (Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1923). Miner, Jack. Jack Miner on Current Topics (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929). Miner, Jack. Wild Goose Jack (Kingston, Ontario: Jack Miner Migratory Bird Foundation, 1969). Miner’s three autobiographies traced the evolution of his personality cult as he grew from a renegade conservationist into a full-blown folk hero. In Jack Miner and the Birds, Miner did not stray far from his personal banding activities, outlining his techniques and results. This book brought Miner enough recognition that he took on a more authoritative tone in his next volume, Jack Miner on Current Topics. Here, he ranged wider in his material and commentary, airing his opinions on wildlife legislation and hunting practices in general. His final book, Wild Goose Jack, was by far the wordiest and most self-congratulatory of the three. It read almost like a sermon, expounding at length on Miner’s personal virtue and selfless evangelical mission. Not a particularly articulate writer, Miner excerpted liberally from newspapers and magazines that presented him in a more coherent and expressive style than his own. All three of these books are now out of print, but Wild Goose Jack, the least conservation-oriented and the most overtly religious of the three, is also the easiest to find.
Gabrielson, I.N. “Obituary (Frederick C. Lincoln).” Auk 79.3 (July 1962): 495-499. Terres, John K. “Big Brother to the Waterfowl.” Audubon Magazine 49 (1947): 150- 158. Frederick Lincoln made a much less dramatic public character than either Lincoln or Miner. He hardly wrote about himself at all; even his obituary concentrated on his scientific accomplishments, saying only that he did not have a single hobby or pastime outside of ornithology. John Terres managed to learn more about Lincoln in his 1947 feature article. He squeezed some personal anecdotes out of Lincoln and gave readers a sense of the magnitude of Lincoln’s task as banding supervisor. c. Magazines and newspapers
“Aunt Dolly’s Page for ‘Times’ Junior Club Members.” Los Angeles Times 27 June 1926: L3. “Aunt Dolly,” giving advice to an audience of young readers, held up Miner as an example of “straight thinking,” showing the reputation Miner enjoyed in American moral culture.
“Jack Miner Dead; Bird Protector, 79.” New York Times 4 Nov. 1944: 15. “Wild Birds Find a Good Friend.” New York Times 29 May 1927: X12. The New York Times was not as unreservedly flattering of Miner as the weekly magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, but still found space to outline and promote his accomplishments.
“In the Driftway.” The Nation 138.3583 (7 March 1934): 276-277. According to The Nation’s lighthearted take on game restoration, many Americans were happy to see the government intervening in what they saw as a major crisis in wildlife management.
“Birds of the Museum.” New York Times 8 March 1909: 6. “Museum to Open Novel Bird Exhibit.” New York Times 6 Nov. 1925: 21. The New York Times followed Chapman’s museum career with interest, as Chapman was responsible for some of the American Museum of Natural History’s most innovative exhibits, including the habitat dioramas for which the museum is today renowned.
“Duck for Every Puddle Goal in Game Restoration.” New York Times 7 Jan. 1934: N2. This very brief article alerted New York Times readers to the creation of the Game Bird Restoration Committee in 1934 and the associated government funding appropriations.
“Opera-Glass Students.” New York Times 31 July 1898: 18. The New York Times published a feature article on the growing popularity of birdwatching in high society, particularly among young ladies.
“Reorganization of the U.S. Biological Survey.” Science, New Series 80.2064 (20 July 1934): 65. This brief report outlined the major structural changes within the Biological Survey, prompted largely by concerns about waterfowl and other wildlife conservation.
“The Migratory Bird Treaty Act.” Reprinted in Bird-Lore 20.5 (Sept. 1918): 387- 392. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which set bag limits and hunting seasons across the United States, was reprinted in full in the fall 1918 issue of Bird-Lore as an item of great interest to readers.
“The Shooting Season.” New York Times 4 Nov. 1911: 12.
This article, published before the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act standardized hunting seasons, gives examples of the irregularities and inconsistencies in state hunting laws.
Ambler, Laura. “Our Wild Game Counted.” New York Times 18 Apr. 1937: 184. Ambler reported on the use of new technology, particularly airplanes, to estimate numbers of many kinds of wildlife, from waterfowl to elk.
Arbib, Robert. “Bird Census to Begin.” New York Times 22 Dec. 1940: 113. Arbib followed a group of birdwatchers participating in the 1940 Christmas Bird Count, giving readers a picture of the count as both a social activity and a scientific service.
Barnes, Irston R. “The Test of Conservation Programs.” The Washington Post and Times Herald 4 March 1956: E2. Writing several years after Jack Miner’s refuge was taken over by his son Manly, Irston Barnes, president of the D.C. Audubon Society, attacked the refuge’s overmanagement and lack of ecological principles. “Their work is the very antithesis of the work which is being done… by reputable conservation organizations,” he wrote.
Becker, Bob. “Canada Geese Visit Farm and Get Tag.” Chicago Daily Tribune 8 May 1933: 20. Bob Becker reported primarily on Miner in order to persuade hunters that returning bird bands, even out of season, would not land them in jail or even prompt censure. “Because Miner prevents hunters from doing damage around his sanctuary many think he does not want them to shoot a goose,” wrote Becker, pointing out that Miner was himself an enthusiastic hunter.
Bennett, Henry Holcomb. “An Army of Observation.”St. Nicholas 38.6 (Apr. 1911): 483-487. Henry Holcomb Bennett wrote an extremely intriguing piece for the children’s magazine St. Nicholas using the military as a metaphor to explain the structure of migration study. Viewed in light of increasing American colonialism overseas, this article gives science the feeling of a conquest; seen as a manifestation of Taylorism and mass production philosophy, the article points up the power of the military as an organizational model.
Broley, Myrtle. “A Morning’s Migration.” Bird-Lore 36.1 (Jan. 1934): 95-97. Bird-Lore was founded as a forum for readers like Broley to share their experiences. The magazine printed hundreds of short, anecdotal essays, of which hers is a representative example.
Burgess, Thornton. “Radio Nature League.” New York Times 30 Jan. 1927: SM6. Thornton Burgess, a newspaper columnist and radio personality, pointed out one of several biological inaccuracies in Miner’s writing.
Greenfield, George. “Wood, Field, and Stream [encouragement of refuge building].” New York Times 28 Feb. 1935: 27. Greenfield, George. “Wood, Field, and Stream [migration and homing instinct].” New York Times 21 Apr. 1935: S7. Greenfield, George. “Wood, Field, and Stream [Christmas Bird Count].” New York Times 24 Dec. 1935: 20. George Greenfield wrote a column in the New York Times in the 1930s meant to keep hunters up to date on policy and science that concerned their sport. Other topics he covered included changes in open seasons and bag limits and new techniques in shooting and trapping.
Lange, D. “The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life.” Atlantic Monthly 104 (Aug. 1909), 230-36. Lange, like St. Nicholas’ Bennett, wrote for a nonspecialist audience about the social and observational challenge of migration study. Like several other writers, he draws parallels between bird travel and human travel, capitalizing on the still-exotic allure of geographical movement in order to interest the public in science.
McDougall, Harry. “Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary.” Canadian Geographical Journal 83.3 (1971): 102-108. Rankin, Norman S. “Jack Miner, Philosopher and Bird-Lover.” Canadian Magazine 59 (Oct. 1922): 479-486. Tigrett, John Burton. “A Duck’s Best Friend is Jack Miner.” Saturday Evening Post 216 (18 March 1944): 26-27. Wade, Margaret. “Bird Life a National Asset.” Canadian Magazine 85 (May 1936): 51. The most glowing depictions of Miner came from feature magazines. Rankin’s visit to Miner’s farm took the tone of a pilgrimage; Rankin found in Miner an inspiration and a spiritual model to follow. In the medium-length feature “A Duck’s Best Friend is Jack Miner,” Miner was painted as a messianic figure working for wildlife protection. The color photographs in the Saturday Evening Post showed a day in the life of Miner and his wife, identified only as “Mrs. Miner.” Margaret Wade took a similar tone, giving Miner more scientific credit than his more educated contemporaries would say he deserved. Harry McDougall’s article in the Canadian Geographical Journal was more scientifically specific than most articles discussing Miner’s work. McDougall put forth both Miner’s philosophy and the objections of his contemporaries. Though McDougall eulogized Miner enthusiastically, his inclusion of other viewpoints is notable.
Rendel, John. “Wood, Field, and Stream [waterfowl census].” New York Times 19 Jan. 1944: 17. This short article alerted hunters to the impending census and the impact it would have on the year’s hunting seasons.
Seibert, Henri C. “Jack Miner and the Birds” [review]. The Quarterly Review of Biology 26.1 (March 1951): 45-46. W.S. “Jack Miner and the Birds [review].” Auk 42.3 (Sept. 1925): 454. Henri Seibert’s review of Jack Miner and the Birds represents a more measured perspective on Miner’s work. Seibert saw Miner as an effective popularizer not to be taken particularly seriously; the word he most frequently used to describe Miner was “amusing.” The reviewer W.S., writing in the Auk, was somewhat more charitable, but still did not accord Jack Miner and the Birds the respect of a scientific monograph.
Webb, H.A. “The High School Science Library for 1925.” Peabody Journal of Education 3.6 (May 1926): 340-347. H.A. Webb briefly recommended Miner’s book as constructive reading for high- school level science classes. d. Fiction and essays
Aristophanes, “Chorus of Birds” from The Birds. ll. 29-31. Trans. John Frere. Greek Poets in English Verse (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1893). The birds in Aristophanes’ drama of the same name speak to the humans in chorus, underscoring the timeless nature of the human connection with bird life.
Chapman, Abel. First Lessons in the Art of Wildfowling (London: Horace Cox, 1896). Scott, Peter. Morning Flight: A Book of Wildfowl (New York: Scribner, 1935). Abel Chapman, an English sport hunter not connected with Frank Chapman, wrote floridly in the then-established genre of hunting essay. Writing some thirty years later, Scott takes up the same themes of hunting techniques and ethics.
Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone: or, A Discourse of a Voyage Thither (London: John Norton, 1638). Available at
Lagerlöf, Selma. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. Mary Hamilton Frye, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1915). Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a classic of Swedish children’s literature recommended to me by Sarah Jansen, serves as both a fairy tale and an introduction to Scandinavian wildlife. By accidentally participating in spring migration himself, unruly Nils gains new perspective on his life and his country.
Jaques, Florence Page. The Geese Fly High (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1939). Florence Jaques’ hunting essays comes out of the same tradition as Abel Chapman’s and Peter Scott’s, but she and her husband are writers and artists, not hunters. Her compelling, affecting writing has a more preservationist consciousness and thus makes for more sympathetic reading for the non-hunter. e. Historical science
Allen, J.A. “Cooke's ‘Report on Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley.’” In "Recent Literature.” Auk 6.1 (Jan. 1889): 58-61. Allen, one of America’s most famous ornithologists, underscored the novelty and significance of Cooke’s work in this review published the year after the migration study. I was not able to obtain an original copy of Cooke’s report, which numbers over three hundred pages. Allen aired his opinions on the essential strengths and weaknesses of the report while speculating on the future direction of migration study.
Merriam, C. Hart. “Bird Migration.” Auk 1.1 (Jan. 1884): 71-76. Merriam, C. Hart. “Committee on the Migration and Geographical Distribution of North American Birds, Circular for 1885.” Auk 2.1 (Jan. 1885): 117-120. Merriam, C. Hart. “Preliminary Report of the Committee on Bird Migration.” Auk 2.1 (Jan. 1885): 53-65. Merriam, the manager of the AOU’s first nationwide migration study, reported on the study’s organization and progress periodically in the Auk. His tone was optimistic yet frustrated; by 1885, he was already beginning to realize that his scope was too large for the AOU to handle, yet he seemed to have recognized this discomfort as endemic to any truly innovative enterprise.
Lincoln, Frederick C. The Migration of American Birds (New York: Doubleday, 1939). Lincoln’s famous text on bird migration summarizes the accumulated knowledge in the light of the flyway concept. Lincoln covered such diverse aspects of bird movement as physiology and weather influence, but he focused primarily on the spatial dimensions of migration.
Taverner, Percy. “Tagging Migrants.” Auk 23.2 (Apr. 1906): 232. In this short, understated article, Taverner reported the first return from a bird tagged with one of the bands he supplied to the mostly Midwestern amateurs he directed. This first piece of data heartened Taverner; he realized his scheme could actually work and began to impress upon others the need for large-scale organization.
f. Current science
“Flight School.” Nature. PBS. WNET, New York. Rebroadcast 25 Dec. 2005. Nature followed scientists from Operation Migration on their yearly journey from Wisconsin to Florida; the scientists, in turn, followed a small flock of whooping cranes.
Gustafson, M. E., J. Hildenbrand and L. Metras. “North American Bird Banding Manual.” United States Geological Survey. 1997. 12 Feb. 2006.
Owen, Myrfyn. Wild Geese of the World: Their Life History and Ecology (London: Batsford, 1980). Owen gives a useful grounding in waterfowl behavior and describes the migratory routes of most of the world’s goose species. A basic familiarity with the state of today’s knowledge has informed my analysis of historical science, helping me realize that placing and mapping waterfowl is no longer a priority in ornithology, thanks to the work of Lincoln and his contemporaries and predecessors.
Tompkins, Shannon. “Banding Keeps Tabs on Subjects.” Houston Chronicle 2 Feb. 2006: 11. Tompkins’ newspaper article gives a brief snapshot of banding activity in the U.S., geared towards readers not familiar with the technique.
Trimble, Jeremiah. Personal interview. 14 Feb. 2006. Trimble, a Harvard ornithologist, spoke with me about the use of banding data in current research.
II. SECONDARY SOURCES
Flyways: Pioneering Waterfowl Management in North America. A.S. Hawkins, R.C. Hanson, H.K. Nelson, and H.M. Reeves, eds. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1984). The lively Flyways presents images, stories, and eulogies centered around the Fish and Wildlife Service’s activities, beginning with Lincoln and continuing through the 1970s. Though the volume as a whole is unreservedly celebratory, the personal accounts from game wardens, flyway biologists, hunters, and farmers give the book a richness that shows the Fish and Wildlife Service’s consciousness of the many constituencies it represents.
Ahlstrom, Sydney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Ahlstrom’s canonical history of American religious life clarifies the social and moral environment that made Miner’s religious writings into instant bestsellers.
Barrow, Mark V. A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology After Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Barrow’s comprehensive, well-written history frames and explain ornithology’s crucial transition period. Tensions between professionals and amateurs, between collectors, scientists, and sportsmen, are detailed and followed up through the 1930s. Barrow does not treat the specificities of migration study; applying his analysis to this subfield illuminates new facets of the relationship between birdwatchers and scientists.
Delucia, Christine. Personal communication. 15 Oct. 2005. Harvard undergraduate Christine Delucia graciously shared with me a paper she had written about bird migration imagery in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. She argues that Faulkner uses migrating geese to mirror the human desire for change, as well as a connection to the land.
Harrison, Thomas P. “Birds in the Moon.” Isis 45.4 (Dec. 1954): 323-330. The prevailing 17th century theories of migration involved either hibernation and estivation or voyages to extraterrestrial havens. Like many historians of ornithology, I mention these theories mainly as curiosities, but Harrison gives the lunar migration hypothesis a serious and thorough treatment in light of Galilean astronomy.
Herman, Daniel Justin. Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2001). Herman explores the complicated social constituencies of hunting, focusing primarily on early frontiersmen and the role hunting has played in forming an “American personality.”
Holmes, F. L. “The Old Martyr of Science: The Frog in Experimental Physiology.” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (1993): 311-328. Holmes looks at the way a model organism – the frog, in this case – impacts the science that appropriates it.
Jansen, Sarah. “An American Insect in Imperial Germany: Visibility and Control in Making the Phylloxera in Germany, 1870-1914.” Science in Context 13 (2000): 31-70. Jansen’s paper unpacks the scientific and social construction of the “pest” phylloxera, an organism whose study draws in scientific and administrative practice in order to give it a cultural visibility distinct from its simply physical visibility.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Kuhn’s classic concept of science advancing through “paradigm shifts” is a useful way to think about the changes in late 19th- and early 20th-century ornithology.
Koppes, Clayton R. “Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American Conservation.” Donald Worster, ed. The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Koppes’ outline of the guiding principles behind 1930s conservation informs any environmental account that incorporates the very different political worlds of the Progressive era and the New Deal.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). The backbone for countless studies in environmental history, Nash’s seminal work informs this thesis by elucidating a general sweep towards environmental appreciation and eventually into increasing management and pragmatism.
Orr, Oliver H., Jr. Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992). Orr, like Mark Barrow, gives significant weight to the early 20th-century Audubon movement as a driving force in both ornithology and conservation.
Orsi, Jared. “From Horicon to Hamburgers and Back Again: Ecology, Ideology, and Wildfowl Management, 1917-1935.” Environmental History Review 18 (Winter 1994), 19-40. Orsi’s history focuses on refuges rather than waterfowl, placing refuge policy in the context of mechanization, administration, and efficiency. Orsi sees a broad
societal relevance in wildlife management symptomatic of Progressive-era land use concerns.
Reiger, John F. American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975). Reiger’s account of hunters’ contributions to environmental activism is solidly positioned against the anti-hunting protests of his own time. His defensive attitude and bias towards hunters makes his work harder to use historically but does serve to show the polarized nature of the hunting debate. Tate, Peter. Birds, Men, and Books: A Literary History of Ornithology (London: Henry Sotheran Ltd., 1986), 113. Tate uses the field guide as both object and concept to anchor his examination of early British ornithology.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Thomas centers his analysis of the relationship between man and nature on the human philosophy towards the animal world. Though he writes almost exclusively about Great Britain, his reinstatement of animals as mediators between man and nature is extremely valuable to any research involving the history of wildlife.
Unwin, Peter. “The Man Who Would Have Dominion.” Beaver 81.5 (2001): 28-35. Criticism of Miner is rare indeed, partly because even those who did not fall prey to his public persona recognized that he was at least popularizing some form of conservation ethic. Unwin, the only historian to criticize Miner outright, maintains that Miner was deeply psychologically troubled and harmed more animals than he helped. Unfortunately, Unwin does not include a bibliography and I was unable to reach him, so his conclusions are difficult to verify.
Warren, Louis S. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth- Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). The creation of wildlife as a common good, argues Warren, had broad social ramifications, particularly for market and subsistence hunters who operated outside the bounds of the “hunter’s code.” Warren’s interpretation of game as a contested resource points up broader themes in environmental history as well as providing a bottom-up look at hunting policy.
Wilson, Robert. “Directing the Flow: Migratory Waterfowl, Scale, and Mobility in Western North America.” Environmental History 7 (2002): 247-266. Wilson’s subject matter is very close to my own, but he treats policy with greater attention and pays less attention to the act of scientific study. The problem of
regulatory scale, from local to federal, is the subject of Wilson’s research on the creation of waterfowl refuges.