Column on Birds
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Column published October 21, 2024. Editor’s Headline: “For the Birds”
Thanks to my partner, the past months have renewed my interest in songbirds and raptors, not just when we hike but also when I thumb through past issues of Wyoming Wildlife.
First off, it means acknowledging the destructiveness wreaked on birds and other wildlife by newly arrived Europeans who, 125 years ago, fed into the mother continent’s greed for feathers and hides. For the sake of men’s top hats. beavers lost their lives in traps by the hundreds of thousands. Sadly, women’s fashions were no less harmful as they funded an all-out slaughter of birds. Sometimes birds’ plumes, sometimes entire carcasses, adorned women’s hats.
In 1886, William Dutcher of the Ornithologists’ Union reported, “A New York taxidermist informed me, he had in his shop 30,000 bird skins, made up expressly for millinery purposes.” In 1903, he reported that “nearly 80,000 Snow Buntings were found in a cold storage house . . . Leading department stores in New York offered for sale such valuable birds as Flickers made up as millinery ornaments.”
Another observer of the feather trade noted, “In 1903 the price of plumes offered to hunters was $32 an ounce, which makes the plumes worth twice their weight in gold.” A single wholesale house in London sold 1,608 heron plumes made up in 30-ounce packets. “These sales meant 192,960 herons killed at their nests, and from two to three times that number of young or eggs destroyed.”
A change arrived in the spring of 1882 with an individual with a lifelong interest in songbirds and raptors. That year, Frank Bond arrived in Cheyenne at age 25, college degree in hand. He had taken a job with the Wyoming surveyor-general’s office where, among other projects, he prepared a site plan for Devil’s Tower. In 1890, he served a term in the state’s first legislature. By 1895, he had taken on the editorship of The Wyoming Tribune, Cheyenne’s daily newspaper. At the time, the city held some 14,000 inhabitants, while the state’s population consisted of about 100,000 residents.
In college, Bond and his twin brother collected and preserved more than 500 bird specimens. After college, determined to see laws enacted for the protection of non-game birds, he joined the American Ornithologists’ Union and published his first paper for its periodical. When the group drafted a model statute to protect non-game birds, he lobbied to have the Union’s model adopted in Wyoming.
As editor, “If anyone was in position to proselytize for . . . the bird law,” Chris Madson observes in an issue of Wyoming Wildlife, “Frank Bond was the man.” In 1900, he successfully sold the model bird law to “the handful of people who had settled in Wyoming.”
The governor supported the idea, and Senator Guernsey wrote the legislation, which passed early in the session. From then on, bird aficionados journeyed to eastern states, urging them to emulate the Wyoming effort. When the Audubon Society was formed, Bond was one of its first members; two months later, having acquired a prodigious knowledge of regional wildlife, he initiated Wyoming’s first chapter of the Society in Cheyenne. In particular, he was passionate about Wyoming’s populations of songbirds and raptors.
What must it have been like 125 years ago, when great flocks of birds darkened the skies? Bond reported “countless thousands” of Townsend’s solitaires in the North Platte Canyon alone. It makes us realize the birds we observe today are mere remnants of their former populations.
Birds were still hunted “for the pot,” regardless of season or limits. Additionally, many farmers shot raptors and songbirds on sight, the former for their threat to poultry, the latter because it was believed they ate the grain before it could be harvested. Soon after its formation, the Ornithologists’ Union pressed the federal government to undertake research on birds’ benefit to agriculture. The government responded by creating a Bureau of Economic Ornithology, which later morphed into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Frank Bond eventually left the editorship in Cheyenne for Washington, D.C., where he took a post at the General Land Office, the forerunner of today’s Bureau of Land Management. When Teddy Roosevelt set aside Pelican Island as a refuge for birds, Bond set out—successfully, as history shows—to persuade the president toward a system of reserves on federal lands. Soon his expertise in cartography made him invaluable in protecting national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges.
“It was he who prepared the Executive Orders . . . to the President for the remaining fifty-one reservations,” Madson quotes T. Gilbert Pearson.
“Quite an impact by a newspaper editor at the turn of the twentieth century,” I said to my partner.
“Right you are,” he said in answer.
Sally Hagemeister
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