In America’s first hundred years, the animal you were most likely to see was a passenger pigeon. And you saw a lot of them. Flocks were so numerous they literally blotted out the sun for days and their combined weight snapped the branches of entire forests where they roosted. Yet by 1914, the last specimen, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, marking the complete extinction of what had been North America's most abundant bird numbering in the billions just decades earlier. Early Americans assumed the nation's bird populations were infinite, so market hunters fashioned homemade cannons to blast sleeping ducks by the dozens, "pigeoneers" shipped passenger pigeons by the trainload to city restaurants, and feather hunters shot rare birds worth more than their weight in gold so Gilded Age women could wear plumes in their hats. What followed was an unlikely coalition of bird-lovers like Roosevelt, gunmakers, business titans, and brave game wardens who transformed American conservation. They couldn’t save the passenger pigeon, but they saved other species from extinction, like the Canada Goose and the trumpeter swan.

Today's guest is James H. McCommons, author of The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds. We discuss how Roosevelt used executive powers to create the first federal bird refuge at Pelican Island in 1903, why the revolutionary 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act made nearly all wild birds wards of the federal government while inadvertently establishing that federal law supersedes state law, and how conservation success stories including wild turkeys, wood ducks, trumpeter swans, and bald eagles were all brought back from extinction's brink. McCommons also warns that America faces a new crisis reminiscent of the Gilded Age. Since 1970, one in four birds (about 3 billion) in North America have been lost, with backyard species like sparrows, blackbirds, warblers, and finches disappearing as indicator species foreshadowing greater environmental collapse.

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