The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism 1850–1920 by Andrea L. Smalley (review)

Reviewed by: The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism 1850–1920 by Andrea L. Smalley Darryl McGrath (bio) The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism 1850–1920 By Andrea L. Smalley with Henry M. Reeves, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 307 pages. $59.95 hardcover and e-book. The most riveting impression that a reader takes away from The Market in Birds is the mental image of millions of bird carcasses—frozen in warehouses, compressed into barrels or piled in boats—all on their way to being eaten or deplumed, or stuffed and mounted. The book delivers this image in a straightforward, almost dispassionate narrative that nevertheless makes the reader cringe at the sheer extent of the carnage from a particularly grim chapter in this country's environmental history: seventy years of destruction of the country's once-vast populations of wild birds for consumption as delicacies, for decorations on women's hats, and for private collections of eggshells and mounted specimens. The grim tallies boggle the mind: 35,000 ducks killed in Virginia in 1900 with the help of the newly invented semiautomatic shotgun. Forty thousand passenger pigeons, which were being shipped live for use in target shooting contests, dead from dehydration in a rail car in the 1880s. In Minnesota, 25,810 pounds of dead birds were shipped in just two months alone in 1876. And in one unforgettable passage, the stench of decaying dead birds almost smacks the reader in the face in an account of the frequent failures of early forms of freezer storage. A series of such losses for one dealer culminated with him dumping hundreds of rotting bird carcasses on the prairie from whence many of them had come, with no concept of a teachable moment but plenty of exasperation over his lost profits. This book is neither a fast read nor a casual, entertaining one. It is also not a book likely to appeal to an amateur birder, with its references to the Progressive Era conservation [End Page 228] movement, its detailed accounts of state and federal court battles, and its description of what the authors call "the tangled connections between ecology, economy, culture, and law that the market had thrown into sharp relief." Instead, The Market in Birds is more likely to serve as an extremely important reference for academics and conservationists that carefully sets out the authors' theory of the complex relationship between the country's wild resources and the consumers who, had their lives depended on it, could not have identified a living version of the roasted American Woodcock that appeared on their dinner plates in a nineteenth century New York City restaurant. Completely unregulated in its early years, the market-hunting era decimated bird populations and contributed to the extinction of several species, including the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon, and the Labrador Duck, which was rare even before its carcasses started appearing in urban game markets. The slaughter was slowed by a series of state and federal laws and court decisions, mostly in the twentieth century, and finally came to an end in 1918, with the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which remains in effect today. The publication of The Market in Birds is its own remarkable story. Lead author and historian Andrea L. Smalley, a professor emerita at Northern Illinois University, based the finished manuscript on the work of the late Henry M. Reeves, a renowned biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Reeves died in 2013 and left an unfinished manuscript and extensive research on the market in birds. Smalley was introduced to Reeves's family, acquired his materials, and used them as the foundation of the final book. Completing another writer's work is exceptionally difficult, and the Reeves family acknowledges that with gratitude in the foreword. As the author of an earlier book on the effect of American colonization on wildlife, Smalley was well-suited to the task. Every story like this needs a villain or a hero, and Reeves found his villain in Henry Clay Merritt. A nineteenth century market hunter of birds turned dealer in game...

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