Mr. Hornaday's War (28 page)

It infuriated Hornaday that the ornithologists of the day—the people who avowedly loved the birds the most—seemed to be much more interested in “studying the skins, nests, eggs, and migrations of birds than in the preservation of the birds themselves.”
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Yet meanwhile, all around him, he saw evidence that dozens of bird species were in grave peril, if they were not already lost. What was the use of studying them if they would vanish forever soon? Almost nothing in the avian world could compare to the almost incalculable legions of the passenger pigeon, which had darkened the skies when he was a boy. Ornithologist Alexander Wilson had once estimated a flock of passenger pigeons at 2,230,272,000 birds—that's 2
billion
—which he called “an almost inconceivable multitude, and yet probably far below the actual amount.”
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And yet the passenger pigeon had now almost vanished. And the heath hen, just to name one other imperiled species, had become extinct everywhere except for one remnant colony on Martha's Vineyard. (The last passenger pigeon on Earth, named Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo; the last heath hen perished in the spring of 1933.)

Even in Washington, Hornaday found “absolutely no man-power functioning through the federal government for any form or phase of wild life protection, save traces in the Yellowstone Park.”
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(Yellowstone,
the world's first national park, was established by an act of Congress in 1872, but because there was no effective enforcement of game laws, hunting, trapping, and pillaging of timber and minerals were so widespread that the park had to be taken over by the U.S. Army in 1886, as if it were a war-torn country of its own. Yellowstone remained under military occupation for the next thirty years.)
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“On the whole,” Hornaday later wrote, looking back on the situation in the early twentieth century, “the evil conditions surrounding the wild life of America were so bad that it is difficult to imagine how they could have been any worse” (though, of course, they did get worse). Not only was the approaching darkness going unnoticed by almost everyone, but no one had mapped out a comprehensive battle plan proposing the thoroughgoing reforms that would be required to even slow down, much less halt, the destruction. For now, Hornaday wrote, “there was nothing to do but plunge in and try to salvage the situation, piece by piece, and from day to day.”
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Even the new conservation organizations often seemed impotent. One day, while searching through the annual reports of the American Ornithologists' Union “looking to hook up with some group of bird men,” Hornaday found a notice from 1894 of the union's Bird Protection Committee asking “to be discharged, the need for such a committee being no longer urgent; of late its functions having been merely advisory, and its services not often required.”
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The whole house was burning down, and the firemen were asking to be discharged because they couldn't even smell the smoke!

Most of Hornaday's waking hours were consumed with the task of building and managing the New York Zoological Park, and he was delighted with his job, but there were days when his official duties seemed almost beside the point. Outside the tidy perimeters of the park, a great war was going on, arguably the greatest and most important war in human history, and vast armies were massing against all the nonhuman life on the planet. What good would it do to keep a few lonely examples of vanished species behind bars in New York if night had fallen on the rest of the world?

Hornaday was itching to get into the fight for wildlife, but he was disgusted by the timidity and impotence of the American Ornithological Union and other such groups. Fortunately, the bylaws of the
New York Zoological Society offered him a justification to enter the fray. When the society was created in 1895, Grant and Osborn set down as its second declared object six ringing words: its essential purpose, among others, was “THE PRESERVATION OF OUR NATIVE ANIMALS.” (Hornaday wrote these words in his autobiography all in capital letters, like a shout from the Almighty.) Later, partly at Hornaday's urging, the original wording was broadened to “THE WILD ANIMAL LIFE OF THE WORLD.”
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To become a champion and a crusader for all the wild animal life of the world was the noblest calling imaginable—a task big enough for Hornaday's outsized ambition and personality.

It was a clarion call to action, and William Temple Hornaday intended to take up the fight. The board of directors, of course, had hired him to run the zoo. That was his day job. But he volunteered for the additional job of running a war because he felt that he had no choice. He solemnly assured the board that his official duties at the zoo would come first and that he would pursue the broader mandate of wildlife protection on his own time, without a dime of further compensation.

“I have taken up this matter,” he wrote his friend Charles Bessey, the famed botanist and his former professor, “solely because no one else has done so in a manner to suit me, and I think the time is ripe for a grand crusade for the better protection of our birds and quadrupeds in the districts they are so rapidly disappearing.”
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Later, in his autobiography, written at the age of eighty, he did not express a moment's regret about embarking on this “grand crusade.” In fact, “had I elected to remain passive, I could have shirked the whole thirty-four years of it; but my sense of duty would not permit it.”
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Over the next several decades, Hornaday seemed to be living a multitude of lives at once, running the New York zoo at the same time he was conducting a global war for wildlife on multiple fronts simultaneously. He fought the seal hunters on the Pribilof Islands, who seemed determined to drive the Alaskan fur seal to extinction. He waded into the battle against the gun manufacturers, fighting to reduce the absurd lethality of the new repeating shotguns that seemed to be turning sportsmanlike hunting into mass murder. He fought the millinery feather trade and its cunning lobbyists in Washington, who were hunting the world's most exquisite birds to extinction just to adorn women's hats. He fought for bag limits and shorter seasons
on birds and game. He fought for the establishment of wildlife reserves and ranges across the West and elsewhere. In fact, wherever he found the enemies of wildlife, he fought them, in a stream of books and articles, in congressional testimony, and in speeches and public appearances without end. And when he went after the enemies of wildlife, he did it like an avenging angel of the Lord.

Some historians of the period have argued that Mr. Hornaday could actually have achieved a good deal more for the cause of conservation were he not “the most defiant devil who ever came to town,” not so ferociously combative, not so unwilling to make alliances with conservation groups with which he disagreed—chief among them the gun lobbies and hunting groups. It's easy enough to say such things today, long after the smoke has cleared from those battlefields. But during his lifetime, Hornaday faced a phalanx of implacable foes who were enormously well funded, had access to political and legislative power, and very often had the weight of public opinion on their side as well. But in the killing-fields of the Montana Territory, Hornaday had seen firsthand what happened when market hunting, sport gunning, thrill-killing, and plain lawlessness were allowed to run riot, as it had all across the country.

Throughout all this, Hornaday remained a devoted spouse, writing a prodigious stream of letters to “the Empress Josephine,” who remained by his side come what may. He opened one letter to her: “Really, there is no reason on earth why I should write you just now, unless it is the fear that if it is not done now, you may miss a letter tomorrow morning.”
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Josephine's love was something Hornaday came to depend on, like milk and honey in the wilderness, especially when his public battles grew increasingly bitter and he came to feel increasingly alone. Their only child, a daughter named Helen, also became an ardent defender of her father's good name and his privacy, rarely speaking out in public but praising and comforting him in her private letters—much as her mother did. There were times when he felt betrayed, often by those who were allegedly his friends. There were times when his enemies attacked him with poisonous lies or nasty innuendo, and having become such a public man, he had to fight back publicly, even when it was awkward and embarrassing to answer an untruth. His response to all these attacks was to be forever on the attack, never to back down or apologize, to respond to a withering hail of incoming fire with relentless
fusillades of his own. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, his whole life gradually became one of more-or-less continuous war.

The year before he was appointed director of the New York zoo, Hornaday had begun closely examining the battlefield situation in the “war for wildlife,” and what he found was alarming. The enemy had taken the high ground with vastly greater arms and manpower; and the defense was scattered, demoralized, and sorely lacking in armaments and ammunition. There were laws on the books in many states to protect songbirds, gamebirds, and other game, but they were essentially worthless because there was no funding or public interest in actually enforcing them. Many of these hunting laws had been essentially dictated by hunters themselves, to maximize their kills. But even where the game laws offered some protection, there was very little money to pay salaried wardens, and unsalaried wardens were very often useless. If there was no enforcement, there might as well be no game laws at all.

The first task in his “grand crusade,” Hornaday believed, would be to be to “scare America into a state of wakefulness and anxiety, by sounding out alarms.”
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This, of course, was not a scientific intent, not an open-minded search for truth; it was a propagandistic intent, from a man absolutely convinced of his rightness.

As a way of beginning the crusade and creating a simple “baseline” of data about populations of birds and game, he decided to survey several hundred knowledgable people around the country. He would ask them four basic questions: Are birds decreasing in number in your locality? About how many are there now in comparison with the number fifteen years ago? What agency (or class of men) has been most destructive to the birds of your locality? What important birds or quadrupeds are becoming extinct in your state?
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Hornaday's survey drew responses from nearly two hundred observers, representing all but three of the states and territories in the nation. He received what he considered a “satisfactory” number of responses from thirty-six states, so he only included these in his final report. Many who responded were ornithologists, naturalists, or simply astute observers of the state of nature in their areas, and many of their answers were lengthy and detailed. It was clear that they had
responded to Hornaday's questions with deep seriousness, perhaps welcoming the inquiry from someone who shared their alarm about what was happening.

Hornaday's report,
The Destruction of Our Birds and Mammals: A Report on the Results of an Inquiry,”
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was published by the New York Zoological Society in its second annual report in 1898. He opened the survey with an unabashed call to arms: “Unless man is willing to accept a place on the list of predatory animals which have no other thought than the wolfish instinct to slay every living species save their own, he is bound by the unwritten laws of civilization to protect from annihilation the beasts and birds that still beautify the earth.”
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Of all the states reporting in his survey, he went on to say, the average decrease in bird life during the previous fifteen years was
nearly half
(that is, 46 percent). The highest declines were in Florida (77 percent); with an estimated 75 percent decline in birds in Connecticut, Montana, and the Indian territories. Three states—North Carolina, Oregon, and California—appeared to be in balance, with no noticeable decline at all, and four Western states—Kansas, Wyoming, Utah, and Washington—reported a slight increase over the fifteen-year span.
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According to a tabulation of the survey's responses, the villains included “pot hunters” (those who hunted for food), “sportsmen,” boys, egg collectors, and Italians, “who kill all sorts of birds for food.”
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But Hornaday set aside a special ring in hell for the plume hunters and for the women who wore their wares. “One of the strangest anomalies of modern civilization is the spectacle of modern woman—the refined and tender-hearted, the merciful and compassionate—suddenly transformed into a creature heedlessly destructive of bird life, and in practise as bloodthirsty as the most sanguinary birds of prey.”
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(But even Hornaday himself did not entirely rise above all the pernicious beliefs of his day. In his report, he mentions that “the fact has been clearly established by the researches of the U.S. Biological Survey that of all our hawks and owls, only the sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper's hawk, and the goshawk have a debit balance against them, and deserve destruction.”
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He based these erroneous conclusions on studies showing that the contents of the stomachs of many of these birds contained large numbers of songbirds, and sometimes domestic poultry.)

In his report, Hornaday also described, with a kind of raging incredulity
a peculiarly ignorant form of small-town American sport known as the “side-hunt.” It was, Hornaday wrote, essentially “a game of murder,” in which a large group of men and boys—sometimes 100 or more—divided into two teams, armed themselves to the teeth, and then, for a given period of time, shot every living thing in sight to earn points. In one side-hunt, for instance, a fox was worth 500 points, a mink 150, a heron 100, and so on. At the end of the hunt, scores were totaled up to see which side had “won.” Hornaday reported that on Thanksgiving Day, 1897, fourteen boys in a side-hunt in Sedan, Indiana, bagged fifty English sparrows, eight chipping sparrows, five bluejays, twenty-seven nuthatches, seventeen downy woodpeckers, fourteen hairy woodpeckers, twelve red-bellied woodpeckers, and two flying squirrels.
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