Mockingbird Song

and church dues and to buy coffee and other things their climate would
not permit them to grow. Clouds of parakeets descending ravenously on
heavy orchards, then, provoked no expressions of awe at the birds’ plumage.
Country folk netted and killed, blasted with scatter guns, and poisoned,
usually with arsenic concealed within bait, which was becoming a com-
mon method, by the s at least, for coping with pests. Carolina para-
keets were, to millions, as menacing as Ole Slewfoot. Market hunting of
many sorts of mammals and birds, meanwhile, is difficult to separate from
the more ennobled subsistence hunting, because the line between the two
was often invisible. Daniel Boone, honored model for marksman-soldier-
pioneers, was also a market hunter from youth into advanced age. At fifteen
Boone and a companion delivered many bundles of deerskins from the Vir-
ginia mountains to Philadelphia buyers. A few years later, settled in North
Carolina’s Upper Yadkin Valley, he reportedly killed ninety-nine bears in a
single season, a stunning statistic hardly comporting with pot or subsis-
tence activities. In those days Daniel, like the natives, was a ‘‘fire hunter,’’
too. At eighty, in Missouri, Boone and his male offspring spent winters
checking leg traps in the woods.^8 Another hunter, more typical than Boone,
might kill one bear or so a year, keep most of the meat and oil, and sell the
hide. He and his family needed foodandsome cash. A shooter of fifty pas-
senger pigeons or doves might exchange twenty-five for cash or something
else needed or simply desired.
But by the s, market hunting, especially of waterfowl, presented a
distinction quite clear. Rapid metropolitan population expansion in the
coastal Northeast, the improvement of guns, and the ease with which mi-
grating waterfowl might be harvested at the birds’ regular stops combined
for a seasonal carnage that persisted well into the twentieth century. One of
the prime shooting locales was Back Bay, a coastal section of Princess Anne
County, Virginia, just north of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where
enormous convoys of canvasbacks, redheads, and mallards also rested and
fed during their heroic journeys south from Canada. Local watermen and
farmers had for a long time shot and packed the migrants for local mar-
kets—Norfolk, Portsmouth, and probably Baltimore as well. But by , a
single Back Bay farmer employed twenty gunners who in a single season
‘‘consumed,’’ as a Virginia newspaper reported, ‘‘twenty-three kegs of gun-
powder with shot in proportion.’’ Gunners and other workers packed the
kill in barrels, which went overland to the Norfolk waterfront and then in
speedy packets to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
A few booster urban editors, steamboat owners, and commodity traders
   