The Heartland
Page 24
If Forbes came to preservation from agricultural science, Isaac Hess, a merchant in the town of Philo (about nine miles south of the Champaign County seat), came to it from hunting and gathering. Over the course of his life, Hess made it into the papers for two accomplishments, both connected to eggs. The first had to do with his wife’s fertility: after delivering a set of triplets, three years later she had twins.163 The second achievement, his “fine collection” of wild birds’ eggs, won him even more acclaim.164 Though an avid hunter as well as amateur oologist, Hess pressed for bird protection.165 He gave illustrated talks on that issue in schools and to the Masons, the Illinois Corn Growers’ Association, and audiences at the University of Illinois, the Illinois State Academy of Science, a Chautauqua gathering, and at least one farmers’ institute. His wife, too, had a passion for birds, but Florence Hess made it into the paper on that matter only once, for a lecture on the topic to club women.166
The Courier publicized the legislative successes achieved by the bird protection movement in the early twentieth century: zones of protection, daily bag limits, restricted seasons, curbs on the sale of certain birds, and prohibitions on killing other types of birds, migratory songbirds chief among them.167 Recognizing that state and federal laws were of limited utility in protecting birds that crossed jurisdictional lines, the Courier took favorable note of the bird protection treaty—justified in large part by hunting and agricultural concerns—that the U.S. secretary of agriculture negotiated with Canada in 1916.168 Although it sometimes lamented the “veritable forest of regulations” that hedged in hunters, the Courier claimed that “the greater percentage of the fraternity regard the laws as beneficial.”169 Reminding readers that even seemingly good hunting years were outliers in a general pattern of long-term decline, that the ravages of insect pests could be traced to the destruction of native birds, the Courier advanced the cause of the international treaty proponents and other protectionists.170
The multiple scales in which bird protection legislation advanced—from state to federal to international—raised the question: Who had what rights to mobile animals? The answer hinged on another question: Where did birds belong? Despite reports of robin sightings from U.S. servicemen stationed in Veracruz during the Mexican-American War, the Illinois Farmer placed the robin’s southern limit in Georgia, well north of Veracruz. This might seem like an effort to nationalize the robin, but the Illinois Farmer noted that the bird’s range extended to Hudson Bay and Nootka Sound. Its statement that “the Robin inhabits the whole of North America” thus used misleading claims about the range of robins to suggest that the United States and Canada formed a geographic unit that ended abruptly with Mexico.171 According to the Illinois Farmer, the robin belonged not only to the United States and Canada, but also to a united dominion of the North.
The Illinois Farmer was by no means alone in such efforts to lump the United States and Canada together in opposition to points farther south. Upon its founding in 1883, the American Ornithologists’ Union directed its attention to the United States and British America.172 Giving a different name to the same geographical unit, U.S. Department of Agriculture ornithologists focused on “North America north of Mexico.”173 Following these approaches to bird study, writings on birds tended to treat the United States and Canada as a singular entity that emptied of migrating birds in the fall and refilled in the spring. Not only did this conception slight birds such as snow buntings, chickadees, and grosbeaks that wintered in the Midwest after summering farther north, it also warped geography by exaggerating east-west connections and shrinking ones that ran north and south. The unit “North America north of Mexico” wrongly implied that Illinois birds had closer connections to Newfoundland and Oregon than to Mexico and Panama.174
The more ornithologists mapped long-distance travels, the more they wondered where birds truly belonged. Rather than accept migratory birds as nomadic, they tried to domesticate them, to pin their citizenship down. Those who favored the North as the true home for most migrating birds pointed out that some were so eager to return in the spring that they froze or starved in ice and storms. Those who favored the South countered that birds flew there sooner than necessary, as soon as their fledglings could shift for themselves.175 The most compelling argument had to do with birthplace. That nailed down the case for the North.176 According to the birthright citizenship logic, birds from “North America north of Mexico” resembled the northern tourists who went to the Caribbean for seasonal diversion, on winter cruises advertised as “south with the birds.”177
Beyond associating northernness, and only northernness, with mobility and access, the idea that migrating birds had “true homes” suggested that the different peoples these birds encountered had different claims on them, just as states had sovereignty over their own citizens and farmers had dominion over their own herds.
Having established northern claims to birds, protectionists placed a disproportionate amount of blame for their decline on outsiders. Along with blaming the “market hunters” who traveled long distances to shoot for profit, protectionists looked south for culprits—to Italians arriving from southern Europe, to “negroes” in the rural South, to the lax regulatory regimes of southern states.178 Although Bird-Lore acknowledged the work of bird protection in Mexico, Mexican hunters also came under fire.179 Field and Stream took Mexicans to task for harvesting migratory ducks, baiting them with barley and corn and then driving them to the place of slaughter. At one hacienda, hunters reportedly killed nearly a quarter of a million ducks in a winter, “and as there are hundreds of other haciendas doing the same business of weekly or twice a week shoots, the amount of slaughtered ducks is almost incalculable.” Commented the author: “I think this statement will give Americans an idea of what becomes of the ducks which they protect by their prohibitory laws after they reach Mexico where they are ‘harvested,’ as they have been from time immemorial, in the manner here described.”180
Cruise ads urging wealthy white tourists to head south in the winter with the birds resonated with claims that migrating birds merely visited warmer climes; that their true homes lay in the North.
“The Great White Fleet,” Life, Sept. 28, 1916, 556.
Readers of the hunting press would have known that there was plenty of bird-killing in Canada, too, and not only by inhabitants. British sportsmen saw Canada as they saw places like Kaffirland: as an imperial hunting ground.181 But coverage of Canadian birdlife drew comparatively more attention to protective legislation and cooperation with the United States in conservation measures. Indeed, pamphlets on U.S. game laws typically included sections on Canadian regulations.182 This gave the impression that the unit “North America north of Mexico” applied to humans in their relations with birds as well as to birds themselves, that the true tragedy of the commons was the southern destruction of a rightfully northern resource best left to northern custodial care.
The view from the ground was, in sum, filtered through politics. Mexicans did, indeed, kill ducks, though not in disproportionate excess. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service later estimated that in a given year, hunters in Mexico shot about as many ducks as U.S. hunters shot on the opening day of the season. And not all these Mexican hunters were Mexican. Field and Stream’s reference to “time immemorial” deflected blame from the likely culprits at the bait-and-kill hacienda: the U.S. sportsmen who relished this form of tourism, no doubt its own subscribers among them.183
THE MYSTERY OF MIGRATION
In addition to prompting questions of rightful dominion, investments in wild birds prompted questions of range. The more acute the concerns about decline, the more pressing the mystery of migration. Where did birds go in the fall? And where did they come from in the spring? For hunters and farmers, figuring out the mysteries of migration was more than just an intellectual pursuit, it had bearing on food security.
Writings on bird migration in the Illinois area can be dated back at lea
st as far as John James Audubon’s efforts, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, to settle the long-standing debates over whether swallows became torpid in the winter—perhaps hiding in the mud—or migrated. After some years of observation and reflection, Audubon concluded that birds such as swallows migrated, and, furthermore, that observers could estimate the distances by keeping track of arrivals and departures. Among all the species of migratory birds, he wrote, “those that remove furthest from us, depart sooner than those which retire only to the confines of the United States, and by a parity of reasoning, those that remain later, return earlier in the spring.”184
As Audubon built a case against the hibernation theory and in favor of associating travel dates with distance traveled, his contemporary Alexander Wilson tackled another great mystery: Which direction did migrating birds travel? From their viewpoint in the Caribbean, European naturalists had claimed that ricebirds passed from Cuba north to Carolina for the winter. After consulting with informants from Maine to the Mississippi who told him that the birds were seen in their areas only in summer, Wilson determined that the migration went in the other direction, that regardless of which direction the birds took to the air, they ultimately headed south when the weather got cold.185
In the ensuing years, ornithologists continued the work of tracking migration. In 1856, the Illinois Farmer ran an article refuting the stubbornly persistent presupposition that swallows hibernated by explaining where they went: “He passes to the south; and is seen in Louisiana, Mexico, and even in Central America.”186 The Illinois Farmer provided similar details on the purple martin: “They are found in the far north, and in the south in Chili, and even in Terra Del Fuego.”187 That was a start. But so much remained unknown, even for large and common birds, such as the Canada goose. In an 1864 article, the Prairie Farmer admitted “how far north they travel is not well known and how far south their journey is taken is a like mystery.”188
Solving this mystery was no easy task. Until ornithologists—including a pathbreaking team from the University of Illinois—began to use radar in the post–World War II period, it was nearly impossible to track nocturnal migrations.189 Even the minority of birds that flew during daylight hours could not always be clearly observed. Lacking better methods, naturalists sometimes shot birds down to determine what they were.190 But the luckiest of shots revealed only a dot, not the entire line of travel or general array. It was like predicting the weather based on the view from the porch.
From the start, mapping migrations relied on human communications networks and human mobility. To track migration, the American Ornithologists’ Union called on meteorological networks for observational help.191 The Audubon Society developed its own network of correspondents through appeals in its magazine, Bird-Lore. Observers from Alberta and British Columbia to the Isle of Pines off the southwestern coast of Cuba responded to such appeals.192 Reports came in to the Smithsonian from agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company and to Ornithologist and Oölogist from a Mexican observer named Juan Renadro.193 In hopes of adding still more pieces to the puzzle, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also solicited the help of volunteers. Its Department on the Geographical Distribution and Migration of Birds cooperated with the American Ornithologists’ Union to ascertain where migrating birds went in the winter and what routes they followed.194 Over two thousand observers in North and South America and the West Indies responded to the call for cooperation. By 1918, the survey had more than five hundred thousand observations on file, some from Champaign.195 The Ekblaw family sent in a notable number of reports. George E. Ekblaw and W. Elmer Ekblaw were early participants in the Audubon Society’s Christmas bird count, and Eddie L. Ekblaw and Sidney E. Ekblaw later joined the work.196
Along with drawing avocational bird-watchers such as the Ekblaws into the migration-tracking effort, groups such as the Audubon Club, the American Ornithologists’ Union, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Geographic Society backed expeditions that gathered ornithological data.197 Following from the importance placed on economic ornithology, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Biological Survey group became the major government player in the migration-tracking game, sending field naturalists to study birds “from Panama to the Arctic Circle.”198 The findings from these studies appeared in the annual reports of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the many agricultural magazines that publicized the government’s work.199 Hunting magazines such as Chicago Field, American Sportsman, and The American Field also relayed information on migration, as did ornithological journals such as the Auk, Bird-Lore, and Ornithologist and Oölogist.200 The Courier, too, like other daily newspapers, spread newfound ornithological knowledge to more general-interest audiences.201
Despite the diversion into latitudinal theories of western migration, most reports on bird mobility focused on seasonal migrations along longitudinal lines. The more precise these mappings became over time, the more incredible the stories of connection they told. “Everybody knows that birds when they migrate in the fall generally ‘go south,’ but knowledge is seldom more specific,” claimed the Courier in 1915. Now more specific answers were at hand. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new bulletin revealed “that while some birds go to Florida or the West Indies or Mexico, others go as far south as Paraguay and the southern part of Brazil.”202 A later article reported that a hundred northern U.S. and Canadian species traveled to Central and South America for the winter, among them the scarlet tanager (which migrated from Canada to Peru) and blackpoll warblers (which flew from Alaska to the southern coast of the Caribbean Sea). The most astounding discovery was the distance traveled by nighthawks, which flew all the way to Patagonia, eight thousand miles from their summer nesting grounds.203 In addition to birds that departed from or passed through the Midwest, other birds relocated to the area in the fall from points farther north, including myriads from the Yukon.204
Thanks to networked watchers who reported sightings, ornithologists began to figure out the mysteries of migration, as this Department of Agriculture map depicting the distribution and migration of the rose-breasted grosbeak shows. The U.S. Department of Agriculture took the lead in governmental efforts to study and protect birds because of their significance for agriculture.
Wells W. Cooke, “Bird Migration,” Bulletin of the U.S. Department of Agriculture 185 (April 17, 1915), 30.
Such reports of migration made it clear that Illinois was not only a flyover state, but also a place where birds of the tropics met those from the Arctic.205 It was a place in the middle, a place of encounter; a place both to land and to take off.
INSIDE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
Elmer Ekblaw became a polar explorer because of migrating birds. As a boy, this member of the Ekblaw band of birders explored the fields and wetlands near his home in Rantoul (in northern Champaign County), with an eye on perches and the sky. After a stint teaching school, he enrolled in the University of Illinois, where he pursued his interest in the natural world.206 Following his graduation in 1910, his alma mater hired him as an assistant instructor in geology.207 By 1912, he had written several geographical articles and become a member of the Illinois State Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Wilson Ornithologists’ Club, the American Ornithological Union, and the National Geographical Society.208
Thus when F. W. Pitman and F. N. Pitman, Jr., shot five ducks that they could not identify, they took the birds to Elmer Ekblaw, who identified them as “the rather rare species of American merganser, which is not typically found here, though its ordinary range is from New Brunswick to California and from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay.” Lest there be any doubt of Ekblaw’s expertise, the article reporting on this incident identified him as the head of ornithology on the Crocker Land expedition, “which leaves in July for a three years’ stay in the Arctic regions.”209
The Crocker Land expedition aimed to explore an area off the northwest
coast of Greenland spotted from afar by the Peary Arctic expedition in 1906.210 It was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the American Geographical Society, with the cooperation of the University of Illinois, which supplied two members of the expedition team.211 The second Illinois graduate was Dr. Maurice Cole Tanquary, a professor of entomology at Kansas State Agricultural College.212 The prospect of two homegrown men exploring the Arctic caught the imaginations of many residents of Champaign. About a hundred people subscribed to an “Illinois Arctic Club,” which helped the two men purchase personal equipment.213 To explain Ekblaw’s desire for a polar adventure, the Courier turned to his Swedish heritage, describing him as “descended from old Viking stock.”214 Subsequent stories covered trip preparations, the grand farewell party, and embarkation.215
The Courier also reported the embarrassing discovery that Crocker Land did not exist, at least not in the range that Peary had ascribed to it.216 Rather than head immediately home, the expedition proceeded to explore what they could. Sometimes together, sometimes apart, always living in great intimacy with the indigenous Inuit people, the explorers surveyed the country.217 Ekblaw kept himself in the news by leaving letters on a coastal rock, for pickup by occasional Danish schooners.218 Despite the disruptions of World War I, some of these exciting letters, with stories of snow blindness, frozen feet, walrus hunts, and sleeping on ice at 50 degrees below zero, made it back to Champaign—covered in multiple postmarks—and from the recipients, they traveled to the offices of the Courier and onward to newspaper readers.219