Podcast: Smarty Pants (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Shotgun Ornithology
Pub date: 2026-03-20

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Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This is the subject of James H. McCommons's new book, The Feather Wars. Birds were threatened by aggressive logging, farming, hunting, sport, and the desire to put a feather in a woman's cap. But they were also imperiled by the very people who claimed to love them—ornithologists, and their kindred oologists, whose hobby consisted of killing thousands upon thousands of birds and collecting their eggs to fluff out their collections. McCommons takes us behind the battle lines of the first American effort to save the birds, in the hopes that some lessons might apply to our current circumstances.

Go beyond the episode:

James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds
Get to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Learn how to garden for wildlife
Read this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916)

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