Books & Looks Podcast — The Feather Wars: Egret Plumes, Punt Guns, and the Fight to Save America’s Birds

A century ago, the birds at your feeder were fair game. Egrets were shot for their breeding plumes, passenger pigeons were shipped to city markets by the barrel, and fashionable women wore hats topped with whole stuffed birds, sometimes with hummingbird earrings to match. On this episode of Books and Looks, Blaine DeSantis talks with Dr. James McCommons about his new book, The Feather Wars and the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds, which traces how the country went from hunting birds to protecting them between roughly 1870 and 1930.

The fight wasn’t always polite. McCommons describes rival egg hunters arming themselves with small cannons on California’s Farallon Islands, night riders and burned hunting lodges in the Big Lake and Reelfoot duck wars, and market hunters paddling out with punt guns that could kill as many as 100 ducks in a single blast. He also shares the stories behind the laws that changed everything, including the wormy apple that helped win over a skeptical House Speaker for the Lacey Act, and the bird protection bill President Taft signed on his last day in office after swearing he never would.

Along the way you’ll meet the teenage “shotgun ornithologists” who grew up to lead the early bird protection movement (one of them went on to sculpt the Lincoln Memorial), Tabasco heir Edward McIlhenny, who raised snowy egrets by hand on Avery Island, and Coco Chanel, whose simple cloche hat helped make feathered hats obsolete. Whether you’re a backyard birder, a history buff, or just curious how conservation took hold in America, this conversation is packed with stories you’ve probably never heard.