"Spare the Swallows!"

The swallow's relationship to humans stands at the opposite extreme from the blackbird and house sparrow. Roman law, for example, was explicit that the swallow was not to be killed --they were associated with the household gods--and this taboo was commonly known in England into the 18th century. Indeed, widespread folk wisdom held that killing a swallow had evil consequences--cows, for example, might give bloody milk. (Swainson suggests that there was actually a fair amount of cultural variability in perceptions of the swallow). That swallows were entirely insectivorous had been definitively established by John Ray's stomach dissection studies. Aside from perhaps taking the occasional honey bee (Virgil's charge) the swallow was a decided good for agriculture.

Planters in North America were aware of the swallow's insect-eating habits from very early on; by the time of Mark Catesby's expeditions, farmers were already hanging gourds [Wilson suggests that the use of gourds was a Native American practice]to attract the swallow's larger cousin, the purple martin, to their fields. (Here the perceived benefit seems to have more the martin's tendency to chase off blackbirds than their diet per se).

Nevertheless, by the end of the 18th century even the swallow was subject to persecution. I've embedded below a widely reprinted piece by "T.H.W" that ran in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1790, on "The Utility of Encouraging the Breed of Swallows" [It begins on the bottom right of the page below; please scroll down to see it].

Citing the swallow's insect diet (good for both the farmer's crops and the prevention of annoying gnats), the author argues that the swallow should be protected "by the same popular veneration" as the Egyptian Ibis and the Dutch Stork. Although the swallow is not a part of the British diet (unlike the Continent), it has been the victim of hunters' target practice. The urgency of understanding the relationships between birds and insects is highlighted by the recent problems in North America with the hessian fly and its widespread destruction of wheat crops(T.H.W. cites the Annals of Agriculture). This is the spirit that would energize discussion of the topic in the U.S. agricultural press two decades later.

A response to T.H.W. the following month by "Benvoglio" elaborates on this topic, suggesting that other birds (as well as the hedgehog!) are not sufficiently acknowledged for their assistance in the garden.


Another response a few months later ups the supposed benefits provided by swallows and their kin:

What is at risk is not just crops but respiration itself! Here is the sentiment put to verse:

[This, by the way, is good evidence that bird protection as a public issue was building momentum in Britain as early as the 1790s]

It should also be noted that the widespread killing of swallows and martins as decorations for women's hats later in the 19th century was the original impetus for the series of Forest and Stream essays by George Bird Grinnell that would eventually lead to Audubon societies.

Next: Benjamin Barton and the House Wren

New England destroys blackbirds (and pays for it)

In the colonies, as in England, it was more common to have laws requiring the destruction of birds than laws protecting them. Below is a passage from Alonzo Lewis's (1829) History of Lynn.

Lynn was not the only community in New England with such policies. Block Island, for example, put a price on the heads of crows in 1693 and blackbirds in 1717; Dorchester, MA in 1707; Hadley, CT in 1717; Woburn, MA in 1741. And Alice Morse Earle, in her 1894 Customs and Fashions of Old New England, provides this curiously arbitrary example from Eastham, MA.


According to Benjamin Franklin, communities with blackbird destruction policies eventually came to regret it.

This is from a letter to Richard Jackson dated May 5, 1753. (Thomas Harrison Montgomery cites it in his 1906 booklet on The Protection of our Native Birds, but mistakenly addresses it to Peter Collinson). Note: this story of the blackbirds is told in passing as an example of the dangers of messing with Providence (i.e, the balance of nature). Franklin's letter is more generally about the dangers of helping the poor (quite interesting the places the balance of nature idea goes...)

Some additional details are supplied by Peter Kalm in his Travels. Here's the relevant passage:

...As they are so destructive to maize, the odium of the inhabitants against them is carried so far, that the laws of Pennsylvania and New Jersey have settled a premium of three-pence a dozen for dead maize thieves. In New England, the people are still greater enemies to them; for Dr. Franklin told me, in the spring of the year 1750, that, by means of the premiums which have been settled for killing them in New England, they have been so extirpated, that they are very rarely seen, and in a few places only. But as, in the summer of the year 1749, an immense quantity of worms appeared in the meadows, which devoured the grass, and did great damage, the people have abated their enmity against the maize-thieves; for they thought they had observed, that those birds lived chiefly on these worms before the maize is ripe, and consequently extirpated them, or at least prevented their spreading too much. They seem therefore to be entitled, as it were, to a reward for their trouble. But after these enemies and destroyers of the worms (the maize-thieves) were extirpated, the worms were more at liberty to multiply; and therefore they grew so numerous, that they did more mischief now than the birds did before. In the summer, 1749, the worms left so little hay in New England, that the inhabitants were forced to get hay from Pennsylvania, and even from Old England.

Please note, not only was it counter-productive to persecute blackbirds (they eat harmful grubs and worms), they are "entitled" to a little corn as payment for this work.

This passage from Kalm, not unlike Bradley's 3360 caterpillars, was widely cited throughout the 1800s as a case study for bird protection. Here, for example, is Charles Willson Peale addressing "the inhabitants of Boxford Parrish, Massachusetts" in the Columbian Phenix and Boston Review (1800) [please scroll down]:

Note that Peale cites the authoritative zoology of Thomas Pennant for his Kalm story.

In truth, things seem to be a little more complicated than Franklin's story indicates. There was a severe drought in 1749, which is a better explanation in general for the poor hay yield. At the same time, there are various accounts of widespread insect infestation, particularly of grasshoppers. Indeed, the drought, as dramatized in Thomas Prince's widely printed 1749 sermon, resonated with biblical accounts of God's displeasure:

In general, it would seem, it was regular old human sin, not the killing of blackbirds in particular, that was perceived to be the source of the disturbance in the order of things. I also think that while one can surmise that the insect infestations might have been milder with a healthy population of blackbirds (the fact that blackbirds had become quite rare seems likely) there is no real way to prove cause and effect here, especially with the drought itself as an alternative explanation.

I'm intrigued, though, at the way the stories of God's punishment through drought and Nature's punishment through insect infestation parallel each other. This was still an era in which natural history and concepts like the balance of nature were directly connected to Christian cosmologies. (Is it just a coincidence that Kalm's friend Linnaeus first articulated the "economy of nature" in 1749?)

I've also been unable to corroborate Franklin's assertion that enmity among the people towards blackbirds actually abated. As T.S. Palmer (1899) clearly shows, many states maintained bounties on crows and blackbirds well into the 1800s and beyond.

Nevertheless, the story of New England's disastrous persecution of blackbirds provided a powerful moral framework for understanding farmers' relationships with birds, even if it is more legend than hard fact.

Next: "Spare the Swallows!"

A Response to Bradley

While Bradley's contributions to the long-term project of bird protection should not be overlooked, I don't mean to suggest that his arguments were generally effective, particularly among contemporaries (and particularly in respect to the house sparrow). My favorite response (one surely overlooked by those who would introduce house sparrows into the cities of the U.S.) can be found in William Ellis, Agriculture Improv'd (Google Books has a 1746 edition--I don't know anything else about its history). I've embedded the relevant section below:

Clearly, Bradley is considered a voice to be reckoned with, and Ellis concedes most of his points when it comes to the good birds do generally. But he is absolutely unwilling to budge an inch on the house sparrow. While they may feed their young on insects,

as soon as their bodies become robust enough to digest grain, they are not wanting to feed on the same; and which, to mine and all the farmers' cost in our parts, we find to be too true throughout, or almost throughout, the whole year; and which we cannot well hinder, so long as they have liberty to fly; because there are few, and very few, barns so close-boarded, but what the sparrows can get into ; and so into many granaries, ricks, and stacks of grain, where these arch-thieves [my emph.]find opportunity to pillage from the farmer:

Urban gardeners may see more benefits and fewer overt costs but they surely "do a great deal of mischief, even in a garden."
So house sparrows should be destroyed, and Ellis provides a long section on exactly how this might be done. He advocates the use of boys, "because it is a pleasant sport for them to climb and take them out of their holes," and the use of nets, traps, and lime twigs ("by these, boys sometimes catch them, to their great diversion"). [Note: Ellis references the bee expert, Joseph Warder, here.]The place of boys in the history of bird protection will be a recurring theme; here, Ellis encourages what later authors will admonish as thoughtless cruelty.
Ellis closes his chapter with an odd story, about a sparrow and a boy who teamed up to rob houses:

This story seems gratuitous, as it speaks more directly to the character of the boy than his tame sparrow. On the other hand, it reinforces a "criminal" frame (and Ellis doesn't disapprove of capital punishment for petty thieves).
Note: Ellis next turns his attention to the damage done by pigeons.

Next: New England Destroys Blackbirds (and pays for it)

Richard Bradley and Claudius Aelianus

What little I know about Richard Bradley (who turns out to be a very interesting historical figure) is from a short 2006 bio by Frank Egerton in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (download here).
Egerton (who also cites the "3360 Caterpillars" passage) notes that Bradley, a strong believer in the balance of nature concept, had tried to stop farmers from killing birds in their fields.

Here's the relevant passage, embedded from Google Books:

The passage turns out to be more about insects than birds--Bradley is trying to convince his readers that much of what is considered "blight" is actually the work of caterpillars. By eating the caterpillars, birds are "rather Friends than Enemies." (Note: this is the first explicit utterance that I know to the effect that "birds are the farmer's friend"--a staple of bird protection discourse in the 19th century).

Egerton goes on to suggest that this shouldn't have been news to the farmers in question--that birds eat insects that feed on crops was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. He cites Aelianus On Animals, Book 3, Chapter 12. The passage in question is as follows:

The inhabitants of Thessaly, of Illyria, and of Lemnos regard Jackdaws as benefactors and have decreed that they be fed at the public expense, seeing that Jackdaws make away with the eggs and destroy the young of the locusts which ruin the crops of the aforesaid people. (Aelian on Animals, Scholfield translation, p. 169)

Claudius Aelianus, like most writers on nature into the 18th century, is notoriously unreliable; it should also be noted this protection of jackdaws is treated as a curiosity, not a widespread practice. Nevertheless, here we have it--the first record, in the Western tradition at least, of the kind of bird protection that would be advocated in the U.S. agricultural press in the 1800s.

Next: Responses to Bradley

3360 Caterpillars

You can do this search yourself.  Go to Google Books and type in "3360 Caterpillars." You will get close to two hundred results. What exactly is going on? The answer leads us one of the first and most important pieces ever written in respect to the protection of birds and one which would eventually help to change the North American bird landscape forever (not necessarily for the better).

 The key text is a 1723 letter to Richard Bradley published in his General Treatise on Husbandry & Gardening--perhaps the first true agricultural periodical. I've embedded the Google Books version below.



The letter, from an un-named correspondent, "S.C.," begins:

Reading lately Mr. Mortimer's Treatise of Husbandry, I took notice of his remarkable prejudice against the winged species, insomuch as to wish for a law for extirpating several tribes of them.

We begin in the middle of a conversation. Mr. Mortimer has stated his opinion--kill off the destructive birds, in fact make it a law requiring farmers to do so.  I've been unable to find the exact text referenced here [see bottom of page] but Mortimer elsewhere displays a matter-of-fact attitude toward the destruction of putatively harmful birds. In his 1707 book, The Whole Art of Husbandry, he lists "work to be done in the orchard and kitchen garden" for January:

Prune vines and forward fruit trees: if the weather be open and mild, dig and trench Gardens...Set Traps to destroy Vermin where you sow and have such plants or seeds as they will injure. Take fowls; destroy sparrows in barns, and near them kill bullfinches, etc. [my emphasis]

Indeed, Mortimer's position might be considered the leading position, and an ancient one at that. As early as 1533 we can see an act of Parliament promoting the destruction of "choughs [jackdaws], crows, and rooks." By the 1700s, agricultural communities would establish "sparrow clubs" aimed at eliminating this particular threat to their crops.

S.C., however, wants to inject a different perspective into the conversation.  In doing so he will introduce a number of arguments and rhetorical figures used one hundred, even two hundred years later in service of bird protection.

I shall in this beg leave to be an advocate for these innocents who cannot speak for themselves; and endeavour to show, that the services they do us, abundantly balance the inconveniences, and that instead of being nuisances they are blessings, and that without them, we should be like the Land of Egypt under the Curse, that the grasshoppers would come, and caterpillars innumerable, and would eat up all the grass in our Land, and devour the fruit of our ground, and multiply so exceedingly, as to creep into our Kings' palaces; and flies would so abound, as to be extremely incommodious to us.

>Without much elaboration it is useful to notice the following:

1. That birds--indeed animals of all kinds--are "dumb innocents" who need humans to speak for them--a key figure in early anti-cruelty movements. (Their "slaughter" also has biblical overtones).
2. That we should approach the issue like an accountant, balancing costs and benefits.
3. That the complete loss of bird-life would cause a plague of insects (this may be called the apocalyptic argument--with explicit biblical references).

 S.C. follows with this observation:

In order to make some estimate of their services, I lately observed a couple of sparrows who had young ones, and made twenty turns each per hour; and reckoning but twelve hours per day, let us compute what a number of those vermin were destroyed by that nest alone,

40 caterpillars per hour.
12 hours of feeding per day.

---------

480 caterpillars destroyed per day.

7 Days supposed between hatching and flight.

---------

3360 caterpillars destroyed by one nest alone in one week.

Here it is, the single most important calculation in the history of bird protection--the model of what would be called "economic ornithology," and a number that would be cited for the next 200 years. S.C. watches a single pair of sparrows for a single hour and then extrapolates, using figures that are admitted to be crude estimates, to get to the magic number: 3360 caterpillars destroyed by one nest in one week. By sparrows.

I don't have space here to cite every subsequent use of this number (while I was researching, I imagined an entire blog obsessively devoted to this project). Suffice it to say that "Bradley says a pair of house sparrows destroys 3360 caterpillars a week" became a common fact cited again and again in bird books and agricultural journals, and that this number directly contributed to the notion that house sparrows were the ideal solution to the problem of cut-worm infestation in the cities of the United States. [Buffon, in his influential natural histories, apparently cited the number, rounded up to 4000 (I've yet to solidify this link but it is very likely), Buffon was in turn cited in Bewick's very authoritative bird books, and the rest is history.]

This is not necessarily what S.C. intended. Rather, he was using a rhetorical gesture that would become the key approach used by economic ornithologists in spreading their wisdom, namely the assertion of the counter-intuitive scientifically-grounded fact. You may THINK that house sparrows are the most useless of useless birds, but IN FACT, if you OBSERVE CAREFULLY, you will find that EVEN SPARROWS have their uses when it comes to controlling insects. S.C. goes on to say that other birds (tom-tits, wrens, et al) are almost certainly MORE useful than sparrows in controlling caterpillars, but it was the sparrow number that stuck.

This is not to make light of the overall importance of S.C.'s letter (and Bradley's use of it). Bradley's correspondent goes on to detail several more cases of unfair prejudice against birds (tom-tits, bullfinches, and rooks in particular) and (anecdotal) evidence supporting the idea that bird extirpation (even of sparrows) leads to insect infestation. Most remarkably, S.C. proposes a law for bird preservation, protecting parent birds, nests, eggs, and young ones. Taking into account the possible objections of sportsmen, he proposes the closed season only during the breeding period (March to September).

Finally, it should be noted that Bradley includes an additional piece of business. He had shown S.C.'s letter to Charles Dubois, treasurer of the East India Company (and famous sponsor of Mark Catesby's expeditions).  Dubois approved and added that the destruction of moths by birds (or lighted candle) should be figured into the total number of caterpillars destroyed (at least 300 per each moth). 

[UPDATE: March 28, 2017]

I've found the Mortimer text referenced above. In Chapter III of his Treatise on Husbandry, he writes:

Bullfinches are most pernicious birds to young fruit trees, by feeding on the young pregnant buds in spring time which contain the blossoms and are the only hope of the succeeding year.  

If January prove very cold, that the blackthorns are backward in February, the bullfinches will be very busy in the garden. The trees there growing being forwarder than in the field in a cold winter. I have known so many of them in a garden, that in a little time they have almost totally unbudded the plum trees, currant trees, etc. of a whole town. They are easily taken off with a fowling piece, only you must be cautious that your shot spoil not your young layers or branches of your trees.This bird is so bold that no scarecrow or other thing will frighten him from the trees he delights to feed on; but on the Morocco plum or the Damson, he will settle and feed, notwithstanding all you can do: so that the best way to preserve these bugs is to birdlime the twigs.

Goldfinches are very injurious to the gooseberry buds, coming flights, and cleansing of a whole garden of them immediately, as the bullfinches will the bud of the currant trees: the remedies against them are the same with the other. 

The chaffinch, greenfinch, titmouse, and other small birds are injurious to some fruits, but not like those before-mentioned, who will prey upon the buds of all sorts of fruit trees, under the very nets that cover the trees and near unto the dead bodies that hang on them. 

Sparrows, although they are but small, yet are they a numerous generation of corn eaters: It is unknown how much they devour and what a great damage they are to the husbandman, especially in scarce and dear years. Many ways are made use to destroy them but none more effectual than the large folding sparrow net, which will take many dozens at a draught: they beings so easily induced to come to a shrap or place baited for them especially in hard weather in the winter, and in the summer before the corn is ready for them: at both times meat is scarce abroad, and then they flock to barns. To prevent birds eating of new sown corn, sow lime or soot upon it. 

Next: Richard Bradley and Claudius Aelianus

Winged Wardens Inaugural Post

Another year, another blog project. Last year I spent my sabbatical publishing material on my Thornton W. Burgess Research League blog. I am still pursuing that project (though my posts have stopped for now) but when I started the scholarly writing process it became clear that I was lacking a solid historical foundation, particularly around the history and rhetoric of bird protection in the United States. It turns out that a history of the type I was looking for is not available. Thus this blog, which is as much a chance for me to organize my thoughts as it is to bring the topic to the public stage.

There are a number of good books on the history of bird protection. (I'll be populating a page of resources as part of this blog project). They tend to begin with the foundation of the Audubon societies in the late 1800s, which makes sense given the institutional energy needed to bring the issue of bird protection to broad public attention and legislative agendas. By that point, however, the rhetoric around the issue of bird protection had been evolving for nearly a century in the United States in what is now a largely forgotten medium--the agricultural press. Only Richard Judd, as far as I can find, has noted this fact, in his 2000 book Common Lands, Common People.

The chief law protecting birds in this country, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, was eventually justified on the basis of national food security--insectivorous and weed seed-eating birds were necessary to protect U.S. agriculture, especially during times of war, and thus deserved their own defense. (This did not include game birds, which is an important story in its own right). As Kurpatrick Dorsey details in his 1998 book, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy, the institutions of "Economic Ornithology" were crucial in developing these arguments, but I want to push back earlier into history, before these institutions were firmly established.

The title of this blog is drawn from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Birds of Killingworth." I'll be fleshing out the significance of the poem in a future post. For now I'll just note the importance of the poem as a condensation of some chief arguments and modes of communication around the issue of bird protection.