The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds

An epic, fascinating history of the fight to save America's birds featuring heroes, martyrs, villains, and conflicted do-gooders.

From the time the country was founded, Americans assumed that the land’s natural resources were infinite—they hunted and trapped, plowed and drained and clear-cut their way across the continent. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, with the rapid demise of the Passenger Pigeon and the carnage of the American Bison on the Plains, that some Americans realized action needed to be taken.

What followed could be considered both a spiritual awakening and a great crusade to save birds and their habitat. The campaign took place on thousands of battlefields: political luncheons in the White House, society teas in Boston, smoke-filled hunt clubs on the East Coast, the sloughs along the Mississippi River, where market hunters and sport hunters faced off in battle, the mangroves in the Everglades, where bird wardens died resisting feather hunters, and in the editorial pages of newspapers and periodicals. The crusade to save birds stretched from the heady days of the Gilded Age to the misery of the Great Depression. Those five decades birthed the conservation and bird protection movements, and brought together a remarkable coalition of people and organizations to save the birds of America.

The Feather Wars is an epic work of American history, an incredible story about how disparate characters—from progressive politicians, free-thinking society belles, nature writers and artists, bird-loving U.S. presidents, gunmakers and business titans, to brave game wardens—came together during a decades-long crusade to save hundreds of species of birds in America. Heroes, martyrs, villains, and conflicted do-gooders—the early bird conservation movement had them all. Together they transformed how Americans thought and cared about birds, a not to be killed, but to be protected and preserved.