Category: Information

All conservation eyes are looking ahead to 2018 and the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the legislation that even today, ninety-five years on, offers some sort of protection to every native non-game bird in the US and its neighbors.

Before the MBTA, however, came the Tariff Act of 1913, enacted one hundred years ago today. The happy result of years — decades — of effort on behalf of scientific and conservation organizations, Schedule N of the Act included a provision that

the importation of aigrettes, egret plumes or so-called osprey plumes, and the feathers, quills, heads, wings, tails, or parts of skins, of wild birds, either raw or manufactured and not for scientific or educational purposes, is hereby prohibited.

T.S. Palmer reported that the new law was enforced without delay,

in the case of plumage worn by travelers as well as in the case of feathers imported for sale, and notwithstanding vigorous protests, all persons at ports of entry with prohibited plumage either in trunks or on their hats, were compelled to relinquish such trimmings….

William Dutcher, President of the Audubon Society — one of the key players in seeing the legislation through Congress — noted in Bird-Lore that

for several weeks [after October 3] the New York daily papers have contained many articles regarding the words and actions of indignant ladies who found it necessary to give up their aigrettes, paradise plumes and other feathers, upon arriving from Europe…. There is little doubt but what the cries of resentment and opposition raised by the distressed ladies along our New York water front will be quickly heard abroad, and it will surely deter other women from attempting to wear birds’ feathers to this country.

What was a modish lady to do? Enterprising milliners offered an alternative.

Dutcher pronounced the Audubon Hat, lacy and beribboned and entirely featherless, “becoming in every way.” Skeptical fashionistas were reassured by the motto on the hat’s label:

Audubon Hat. Save the Birds!

Naturally, there was resistance, then resentment, against the “obnoxious paragraph in Schedule N” on the part of the milliners whose trade had flourished during the plume days. But even for them there was a grudging silver lining. Reporting from Paris, the Illustrated Milliner pointed out that

the majority of the premier designers express themselves as highly pleased at the turn tariff matters have taken in America…. The fact that the same aigrette garnitures were used by their owners season after season interfered seriously with the business, and deprived many a milliner of a great many opportunities in showing her skill in inventing new forms of decoration; the fad for aigrettes also meant a considerable loss of profit to the milliner, as many of their customers required nothing but the shape to serve as foundation for the trimming she already possessed.

All the same, the editors couldn’t resist pointing out the “inconsistency” of “the Audubons,” who at the same time as they protest the killing of egrets and gulls and ibis urge that House Sparrows and feral cats be killed. More sinisterly, the Milliner hints at legal action against the conservation “faddists” with their “vast income and high salaried officials”:

Some day the American people will awaken to the fact that there are other trusts besides those which are being condemned for violation of the Sherman Anti-trust law and the restraint of trade.

It didn’t come to that, but emotions ran high. And the plumers and the milliners were right: October 3, 1913, truly was the beginning of the end for the feather trade.

It’s that time of year when lots of us get lots of photos of juvenile night-herons with the request to help: which one of the goofy, brown-spotted, sluggish-looking species is it?

That pair — Black-crowned and Yellow-crowned Night-Herons — is one of the many usually more easily identified in the field than in photographs, but given a reasonable shot, there’s a neat trick to quickly distinguish them even if you can’t see any of the generally reliable marks of plumage patterns and soft part colors. We call it The Tilt Test.

Here’s how it works: Mentally tip your puzzling night-heron’s body, all of it, back until the tail tip hits the tarsus, that long stretch of “leg” (foot, actually) that ends in the toes. Be sure to do this only mentally — you could easily lose an eye otherwise.

Where does the tail tip touch the foot? If the point of contact is just above the toes, you’re looking at a Black-crowned Night-Heron; if it’s just below the “ankle,” no more than halfway down towards the toes, it’s a Yellow-crown.

Obviously, this is nothing more than a rough quantification of the “relative” field mark we’ve known about for years, but it’s a quick and easy way to put it into practice without having to wait for the birds to take off to see how much tarsus protrudes beyond the tail in flight. And it’s a lot better than guessing.

If you find this hard at first, practice on adults, which are definitively identifiable with no effort at all. Then go on to the more subtle age classes, and I think you’ll be happy to see how well it works.

What do you think of the two birds in the photographs above?

New birders learn early on, sometimes to their startlement, that birds are not distributed generally across the landscape. There’s this thing called habitat, you see, and as a well-known birder once wrote,

You would never expect to see a Meadowlark in the woods, although the Flicker might leave its grove of trees to dig up an ant’s nest at the edge of a field.

With a little experience behind us, most of us most of the time can remember that and many other of the often subtle relationships between birds and their environments. At least, that is, in the breeding season. We are — by which I suppose I mean “I am” — less keenly aware of the habitat preferences of the birds we see in migration and winter. And that’s a shame, since even in fall, when many southbound birds are more catholic in their choice of stopovers, a careful eye for certain landscape features can still increase your chances of running into some of the sought-after migrants.

Looking for migrating Connecticut Warblers? Check open field edges with dense stands of goldenrod and ragweed.

Wintering Sagebrush Sparrows? Look for patches of inkweed among widely scattered mesquites.

And autumn Cape May Warblers? Grapes seem to do the trick.

On September 12, 1914, at West Grove, Chester Co., Pa., … I observed three Cape May Warblers … feeding upon ripe grapes…. for several days a few of them might be seen at almost any time in the tree over which the grapevine grew.

Isaac Roberts‘s observation might seem just an incidental curiosity. But exactly a year earlier, Frank Burns had found that species to be “a destructive grape juice consumer at Berwyn, Pennsylvania,” where two trees in his yard had been taken over by “fugitive” grape vines:

on September 12, 1913, I took a specimen … and on the 14th and 15th observed twenty and thirty adult and immature female Cape Mays…. six shots failed to drive the survivors from the tree…. on the 20th, I saw an individual alight on a bunch of Niagara grapes, deliberately puncture the skin and eat greedily; this and several other specimens were taken with dripping bills.

Cape Mays gorged themselves on Burns’s grapes until October 7, 1913, laying on important energy reserves for the rest of their flight south:

Specimens secured early … were rather lean, but after some days of feeding became fat, inactive and even sluggish; an adult female shot in the act of eating from a grape … was positively enveloped in fat, and the skin became so saturated with oil I had the greatest difficulty in saving it.

The following year, Burns found Cape May Warblers in his grapevines beginning September 6; within ten days, his entire grape crop, red, purple, and white, was “utterly destroyed.” The last bird was seen six weeks later, on October 20.

Like Roberts, Burns’s neighbors suffered the same depredations:

complaints of the ‘little striped yellow bird’ were many, and so far as I am able to learn, all unbagged grapes were ruined; the loss must have been many tons worth several hundred dollars.

A century later, I’ll be paying special attention to grapevines these next few weeks.