Looking For a Good Book

It’s been a long, tough road for bird conservation. Some of the biggest names of those who took an early interest in birds, made their observations primarily by killing the very birds they were interested in reporting on. Many birders (‘birders’ is the approved term for avid bird watchers) today still talk about the extinction of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (every now and then there will be an unconfirmed report that someone’s seen one) and the Passenger Pigeon – a bird once so plentiful it was hard to imagine it could every become extinct. But of course when someone offers a bounty for a particular bird’s body, that will hasten their demise.

James H. McCommons’ book, The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds, is almost more a series of short biographies, detailing the many different men (yes, they were almost exclusively men), in chronological order, who played a part in protecting birds and bringing America to where it is today in bird conservation.

Most of the names of these bird heroes were unfamiliar to me, though I did recognize a few – such as Teddy Roosevelt and John James Audubon.

McCommons is quite thorough in his presentation and we meet a number of interesting characters who’ve played their part in this environmental chain, including a warden who died in his efforts to protect birds.

But we also meet a few, shall we say ‘villains,’ who’s short-sightedness in seeing the potential effects of their actions, threatened more than one species of bird. It shouldn’t be surprising that many of these people were men in some position of political power, sometimes at a state or even simply local level. Politicians who can’t see long-range effects of their actions?  Who could imagine?

There’s a lot of information here. Maybe too much so. It’s a dense and often dry read.  I didn’t always get the impression that people included were chosen because of the impact they had so much as they fit nicely in the timeline

I have a couple of pretty ardent birders in my family and I’m honestly not sure if I can recommend this book to them. I don’t know that this provides any truly unique or useful information to birders and yet its target audience would seem to be birders.  Those interested in American history might find it interesting.

Looking for a good book? The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds by James H. McCommons is a textbook-like deep dive into American history, reporting on the chain of men who had an impact on bird conservation to get us to where we are today.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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

author: James H. McCommons

publisher: St. Martins Press

ISBN:  9781250286895

hardcover, 416 pages