Townhouses and telephone wires are non-native too, it's fun to think of cities as novel ecosystems. And thanks for reading!
Writing about birds in people history and people in bird history birdhistory.substack.com
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Townhouses and telephone wires are non-native too, it's fun to think of cities as novel ecosystems. And thanks for reading!
can anyone confirm if this is true?
I came across this table during my research, fascinating that they can hit pretty high numbers but can't sustain them
I wrote about everything the global trade in parrots brought to the US, and everything it took from the rest of the world, in my latest piece. Read it here: birdhistory.substack.com/p/parrots-go...
You can find wild Rosy-faced Lovebirds in Phoenix, Red-crowned Amazons in McAllen, Red-masked Parakeets in San Francisco, and Monk Parakeets everywhere from Chicago to New Orleans. Los Angeles has 15 kinds, and Florida has 20. These birds all escaped from the pet trade.
At least 25 species of parrots have become naturalized in the US, which are just a fraction of the 1,500+ kinds of wild birds that Americans imported as pets. We've mostly forgotten about the wild bird trade, but the 1950s-80s was an unprecedented shuffling of biodiversity.
People used to catch Cardinals and ship them to England as pets. Here's what they had to say about "Virginia Nightingales" in 1740.
I wrote about how the sport of trap shooting contributed to their extinction here. Passenger pigeons gained an ironic sort of immortality in clay pigeons, which were invented to replace the real thing once they disappeared open.substack.com/pub/birdhist...
The last passenger pigeon died 111 years ago today and not a day goes by that I don't think about how their flocks numbered in the *billions*, that their roosts covered 100+ square miles, that they collapsed trees with their nests. America is incomplete without them
Inside you there are two birds
That's my bet!
“There’s lots of hawks, some FAT turkeys, some that are red blue black and yellow, some that are like the ones in England but different, plus a bunch where I don’t know their names.” -A guy writing down all the birds he saw in Maryland in 1635.
"log god" and "wood god" honestly describe it better than Pileated Woodpecker
One of the few folk names that birders still use is calling woodcocks Timberdoodles. But some of the other options are just as good! A personal favorite is "Labrador Twister."
Old folk names for American birds are just too good. We could have gone with Tweezer, Wheezer, Weaser, or Wooser for this guy but instead settled for Common Merganser. Major missed opportunity.
Robot is Czech for forced labor??
This statistic on US bird imports is insane
Blood Pheasant's gentle cousin!
I'm confused that the existence of blood pheasants is not a more prominent part of our culture
So this note sent me on a bit of an etymology spiral and I learned some really fun things so it’s time to bring back my favourite trend: the gosh darn etymology thread
I found out that my hometown newspaper just shuttered after more than a hundred years in print. Hold your local journalist extra close tonight for me.
Question - which state reps its state bird best? I don't care which state has the "best" state bird, I want to know which one loves theirs the most.
Right but doing it with a beloved family pet is another level! Also, fun coincidence - I'm listening to Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior, cited in the article, right now ✨
I mean, it's certainly low-waste!
Insane suggestion from this pet manual in 1888: "In case your pet Paroquet departs this life, it is an easy matter to have him stuffed, and used to good advantage on the headgear of your wife or female friend."
I assumed exotic bird introductions were a relic of the distant past but apparently the government tried introducing dozens of game birds between 1948-70, and basically all of them failed. I wrote about the Foreign Game Introduction Program in my latest post. birdhistory.substack.com/p/welcome-to...
Thanks for the reminder!
Since odd lots is having a moment I gotta promote my favorite episode
It seems like my main problem is that ornithologists are just really lazy at counting
That's a very elegant solution
As soon as they find a bird with six of something I'll have a killer idea for a kids book
visiting Bird HQ
There's a whole constellation of gr-/kr- roots that mean harsh bird cries (imitative obviously). They give us, "crow", "raven", "heron", "egret", "crane", etc. (and "cormorant" of course!) circumvent bsky image compression: www.aidanem.com/images/word_...
In French the ordinary word for "fox" (reynard) comes from the name of a character in a fairy tale about foxes
Like in other European languages the name for robin still translates to redbreast, and the English went "we're just gonna call them Steve"
Never forget what they took from us
I honestly don't think there's a more deeply ingrained human behavior than giving animals names. This is how localized bird names were in the US before legal/scientific standardization, and they were just as diverse in the UK.
Yoo good to see you too, thanks for saying hi!!
Also worth noting that robins were called redbreast, not orangebreast, because they didn't have a word for that color until oranges reached england a century later
Worth noting that cormorants were the only bird that Audubon refused to eat
This was the subject of my first substack post two years ago!
Incredible how the names live on, right? Or that there are dozens of species of birds called robins which are all unrelated except for a superficial resemblance to the European robin
Actually my favorite bird etymology is that in 1400s England they gave human nicknames to birds (Jenny Wren, Tom Tit) but some of them stuck. Jack Daw became Jackdaw, Maggie Pie became Magpie. With Robin Redbreast they just dropped the original name of the bird entirely.
Cormorant is just bastardized latin for corvus marinus (sea raven)
When she was just 26 Florence Merriam wrote the first guide to birding with binoculars in 1889. And she slipped in this incredible feminist gem:
If we're still looking for new names for the Audubon Society we could take some inspiration from Florence Merriam Bailey, when she founded the Smith College Audubon Society in 1886 she almost called it The Pterodactyl
I've got range 🙃
My love language is when people send me pictures of birds to identify
This is a legal requirement before you enter your 30s
I love when a bird's name accurately describes its grace and beauty
your bird photos are not like his bird photos
We have this idea that modern grocery stores give us access to unprecedented abundance, but when it comes to products from nature I actually think we have it backwards. An 1867 list of grocery items in NYC makes me think they could buy more plants and animals than we can today 🧵
Obviously this doesn't include our incredible abundance of processed foods, I'm pretty grateful for my cinnamon toast crunch. And this is just me looking through a 150 year old book and jumping to conclusions - if anyone actually knows about this stuff please jump in.
Here's a small sampling of herbs and medicinal plants you could pick up
Some of the 59 kinds of fruits and 21 nuts the book lists, many of which I assume are native plants we've never figured out how to cultivate at industrial scale and consequently forgot they exist
But even when it comes to fruits and veg I think they have us beat. Like I hadn't thought of 1860s New Yorkers eating cauliflower but here it is, listed alongside five kinds of cress, brussels sprouts, and something called "cavish"
A lot of this is because they could buy 120+ kinds of wild birds, as well as dozens of species of fish, not to mention the occasional dolphin, sea turtle, bear, or raccoon, something that we've outlawed for good reason.
We have this idea that modern grocery stores give us access to unprecedented abundance, but when it comes to products from nature I actually think we have it backwards. An 1867 list of grocery items in NYC makes me think they could buy more plants and animals than we can today 🧵
It kicks ass that the guy who made the first bird list in north america (1634) did it as a poem just for fun
Sparing a thought for Old Abe, a regimental mascot in the civil war whose stuffed body later ended up presiding over the Wisconsin state assembly
Norman Rockwell was actually a progressive and challenging artist and his reputation for nostalgic schlock was undeserved.
One of Benjamin Franklin's objections to choosing the bald eagle as national symbol was that they were easily driven away by a “king bird”, which was not proper for a country that recently defeated the crown. Fitting that the kingbird's Latin name is tyranus tyranus. Anyway, happy 4th!
This really was a suggestion pushed by the USDA to try to get rid of invasive house sparrows.
What if all the house sparrows have been Abd al Kuri sparrows all along?
Wow, Jack Bouchard’s 2024 @envirohistory.bsky.social article is phenomenal. It’s as beautifully and compellingly written as a novel, while making very important interventions in animal and maritime history as well as #envhist. Highly recommend! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
We take for granted that people used to sleep on feather beds, but you have no idea how expensive they were. If you didn’t want to spend $1/lb ($30 today) to stuff a 40lb mattress, you could make one yourself after a decade plucking live geese or shooting ducks and pigeons...🧵
Accommodating our birdy neighbors, circa 1966
I wrote a lot more about feather beds! Read more here or follow the link in my bio.
Feathers from dead birds were an inferior product, going for 50 cents/lb. You had to pluck 500 ducks or 1,700 passenger pigeons to fill a single 30lb mattress. But there were plenty of feathers to go around as a byproduct of market hunting that killed millions of birds each year.
When I started this research, I assumed most feathers came from dead birds. But that's not the case! People plucked down from their barnyard geese just like they sheared sheep. But this was not a fun chore and it took years to get enough feathers.
Since they were so expensive, people passed beds down for generations. When the tick they were packed in wore out, you'd just move the feathers into a new mattress bag.
Even though they were extremely expensive, almost everyone in 1800s USA had one. In 1845 an Indiana farmer said “He is poor indeed, in this land of abundance, this paradise of geese, ducks, and turkeys, who cannot feather his own bed."
We take for granted that people used to sleep on feather beds, but you have no idea how expensive they were. If you didn’t want to spend $1/lb ($30 today) to stuff a 40lb mattress, you could make one yourself after a decade plucking live geese or shooting ducks and pigeons...🧵
Some weird birds out there
Here's a grainy clip of a Laysan Rail from 1923. The birds went extinct after rabbits were introduced to Laysan (in Hawaii). One writer called the chicks "a black velvet marble rolling along the ground [whose] feet and legs are so small and fast that they can hardly be seen."
I don’t need a stamp collection, looking at wild birds is enough. I don’t need a stamp collection, looking at wild birds is enough. I don’t need a stamp collection, loo
Had a super chaotic day but stopped by the lake I've been hanging out with the ducklings and the swallows put on a show. The light wasn't right, but tomorrow. 10:30-1pm. I think the light is right. let's get the shot. #birds
🧐
I've been writing about birds for years and finally had the perfect opportunity to use this screen grab
I bet these family reunions are a good time
Lmao that's really good
Honestly such a good way of putting it. I went to Ecuador in March and it nearly doubled my life list.
If you haven't gotten into birding yet and think that it's all about peacefully connecting with nature you should know that there's a leaderboard and that the competition is fierce
There were so many passenger pigeons that they had to exorcise them twice
wtf is glaucous and why are there two of them
Audubon had too much fun with this one
That's the one, good eye!
Oh that's fascinating, that never would have occurred to me but the map is a great illustration
It seems like a gold mine!
This is so petty
Stunning!! I've never seen such a good picture of a female
My eyes are up here
Some casually gorgeous magazine covers from 1917
This passage from Louis Halle's "Spring in Washington" (1947) hit me deeply
I was just there in March! Unfortunately couldn't get there by car
Iconic!!
Fortunately someone already put together the itinerary
I'm putting together a road trip
It was a mistake to standardize bird names, I wish I could say “look that’s a chunk duck” to my friend from Arkansas and she’d say “oh you mean a bumble-bee-buzzer”
