Connections newsletter

January - March 2012

History Lessons
by Chris Leahy, Gerard A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology at Mass Audubon

Pleasant Valley, shown in this 1930s image of sanctuary director Stuyvesant Morris Pell, links past to present through its longtime record of land stewardship.

Traumatized by war and its widespread consequences; wracked by fiscal uncertainty and a sputtering economy; bitterly divided over issues of race, gender, morality, and the way forward—surely an unpromising moment in the nation’s history to issue a battle cry in the cause of bird conservation. Or so it must have seemed in the 1890s when Harriet L. Hemenway and her cousin Minna B. Hall began a letter-writing campaign to end the indiscriminate slaughter of birds to satisfy the demand for feathers to bedeck women’s hats.

Our own times have without doubt been “interesting,” but the second half of the 19th century seemingly contained enough catastrophe and social turmoil to reduce the sturdiest structure of civilization to rubble. The Civil War was still an open wound that festered well into the 20th century. The nation endured a continual sequence of recessions, leading to widespread bank panics, high unemployment, and the rise of market manipulators. The women’s suffrage and temperance movements rent the social fabric along the same weak seams that are splitting again today. Two presidents were assassinated, crime and corruption were rampant, and by 1898, we were once again at war.

Welcome Illumination

And yet, this same period was also a time of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual awakening of great brilliance—as if to bring much-needed light into the darkest of times. Many of Boston’s enduring cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and some of its finest architectural achievements, such as the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church, arose in this tumultuous era. Most striking of all, perhaps, was a renewed appreciation for nature, stimulated no doubt by the rampant conversion of American landscapes and wildlife into profit. Consider this list of “green” organizations and projects that emerged in New England in the late 19th century: The Arnold Arboretum (1872), the Appalachian Mountain Club (1876), Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace (begun 1876), The Trustees of Reservations (1891) and, of course, the Massachusetts Audubon Society (1896). And, in the broader horizon, Yellowstone was established by Congress as the world’s first national park in 1872.

The struggle between the forces of light and darkness was no genteel debate. Then as now, there were those who could not imagine what wilderness might be good for and thought of national parks as nothing more than theft of resources perpetrated by “the government.” And Mass Audubon’s Founding Mothers—Mrs. Hemenway and Miss Hall and the 900 well-to-do women they quickly assembled to battle the plume merchants—were among the radical feminists of their day.

Birth of Advocacy

The killing of birds to supply the women’s hat trade prompted a public outcry that lead to the birth of Massachusetts Audubon Society, now known as Mass Audubon.

Success did not come easily. Many millions of dollars were at stake; market gunners and recreational hunters feared that their livelihood and sport would be compromised; and the intrinsic value of birdlife was not universally recognized. Debating the wisdom of new conservation laws on the Senate floor in 1913, Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, “speaking of egrets,” wanted to know “why we should worry ourselves into a frenzy because some lady adorns her hat” with the feathers of a “long-legged, long-beaked, long-necked bird that lives in swamps and eats tadpoles and fish and crayfish…” The first bid to pass a national wildlife protection act in 1898 had failed. But in 1900, Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa proposed a law that would prohibit interstate trade in wildlife killed in violation of state laws. By this time, a grassroots pro-wildlife movement, inspired by the Audubon initiative, had passed conservation legislation in many states and, when the Lacey Act became law, the plume trade was doomed and market gunning mortally wounded.

The slaughter of the plume birds was indeed appalling. The newspaper accounts that jolted Hemenway and Hall into action vividly described the gore, stench, and orphaned nestlings left in an egret colony in Florida after the plume hunters had killed the adults and skinned them for their nuptial feathers. Colonies of terns in Nantucket Sound that had numbered more than 100,000 pairs were reduced to fewer than 5,000 within a few seasons. But these early champions of conservation had tapped into something broader and deeper than a love of birds. The founders of the Audubon movement convinced the public that while birds were worthy of our admiration—for their beauty, song, power of flight, and spiritual symbolism—their destruction by people portended something even more ominous than a world without birds. They were simply the most vivid examples of the threat being posed to all of nature, representing a gross degradation of the quality of human life.

Then and Now

Compare those troubled times with our own 21st-century challenges. We are at war and in debt; financial malfeasance is part of the national discussion; our politics are feckless; and the nation is divided on a wide range of social values. In the midst of this turmoil, does anyone really want to have a conversation about bird conservation?

I’m pretty sure our Founding Mothers would have said, “Yes, indeed!” They understood that when a democratic society is struggling with its identity, it is especially open to hearing the truth, confronting issues, and seeking bold solutions.

Among the most disturbing phenomena described in our recently published State of the Birds report include the sudden decline of some bird species for no single, obvious reason and the gradual decreases in the populations of some of our commonest birds over the last 50 years. This implies a complex of threats pervasive in the environment, some of which we don’t yet fully understand. It may be that the solutions to these issues will require more than sweat and treasure, but rather the kind of political will that banned the commercial killing of birds a hundred years ago. As messengers from the natural world, birds have alerted us to our follies before and pointed the way out of traps of our own making. Are we still listening? And will we respond?