Haunting Birds

Allen Frost

“Let all the American people be warned that to the really greedy and savage pot-hunter, no bird is sacred, and no bird is safe. But for protective laws mercilessly enforced, the pot-hunters would kill all our song-birds, woodpeckers, tree protectors, shore birds, herons and cranes in about three years!”¹

Hornaday’s American Natural History book of 1927 presents that dreadful picture of the state of the American air. A victim of that war can be seen clearly in the terror poured on the Carolina Parrot. Their red gold and green used to sweep over American land, from the hot swamps of Florida, over rivers, forests and plains and meadows, all the way north to the shores of blue Lake Erie. But as the land was broken and cut up by fences and telegraph poles, roads and railroads, industries, towns and cities, the natural tide of life was dammed. As a result, the settlers’ new continent was a world out of balance, suffering extinctions.

So what can you say about a painted bird that has as much as doomed itself against the eventual empire growth of the United States? The ways it knew couldn’t go on.

John James Audubon was there to see the parrot before it disappeared. He could capture it in painting and words. Equating this rare bird with the strangling, invasive cockle-bur weed which it fed upon, he allows it to symbolize a threat to civilization.

“The parrot does not satisfy himself with cockle-burs, but eats or destroys almost every kind of fruit indiscriminately, and on this account is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener.” ²

Not surprisingly, a terrible reaction lay in store for the parrots. Slaughter. Audubon war coverage: “The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours…”³

When the shooting was over, the parrots were almost gone forever, there were only scattered survivors left to vanish. An unnamed mercenary in Hornaday’s American Natural History, found his way deep into the wetland of the Sebastian River. Carrying a lantern late at night, he was half in water, splashing and shining, looking for the right dead hollow tree. The parrots who roosted there were the last of the line and they were easy to catch. Drowsing, hanging from their beaks and claws to the rough bark, he soon had the lot of them. For a heady price he bagged them and sent them off by freight to die in New York City.

Next page: Ostriches fight back