fell from the trees upon the water, while those unscathed flew screaming
through the air in terror and dismay.’’ Still this was not enough for the men.
The boat pilot insisted on a trip of another half-mile over water, this time to
‘‘four hundred cormorants’ nests over our heads.’’ Audubon and the others
blasted away at sitting birds, ‘‘and when we fired, the number that dropped
as if dead, and plunged into the water was such, that I thought by some
unaccountable means or other we had killed the whole colony.’’Unaccount-
able?
There is a famous fictional slaughter of birds, almost contemporaneous
with Audubon’s Florida mischief, in the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking novels,The Pioneers(). The scene here is a frontier
town in upstate New York where one day townsmen and local farmers are
blasting passenger pigeons, a species later to become extinct. Cooper’s
hero, Natty Bumppo, appears and condemns the shooters’ ‘‘wasty ways,’’
recommending the common sense of killing only what one needed for
food. But all to no avail. So-called binge killing—of birds, alligators, deer,
and other animals—was in fact a phenomenon common across the conti-
nent well into the twentieth century. Frontiersmen (as one historian sug-
gests) quite logically hate wild nature. They dwell on an edge of civilization
not yet won for human security and convenience. Trees are the enemy, also
wolves and other predators, naturally, and birds believed to endanger vari-
ous crops. By the late nineteenth century, evidence had accumulated that
crows, more commonly associated with consuming grain than were passen-
ger pigeons, actually fed principally on grubs and insects, the greater dan-
ger to crops. Yet farmers persisted in shooting them and setting out arsenic-
laced bait in their fields, especially in the South. Binge-slaughters of deer,
meanwhile, were common in the same region through the nineteenth cen-
tury until about World War I. Rural men and older boys, always drinking
liquor, would hunt on Saturday nights, killing and leaving animals to rot in
the woods, sometimes concluding their rampages by disrupting church ser-
vices the next morning. The same males, apparently, also enjoyed circuses
and fairs where bears and exotic animals were poked and tortured. Here
was a premodern masculine culture so wasteful and violent as to prompt
women and their preacher allies to organize reforms and see to enactment
of liquor laws and hunting regulations.^7
The casual killing of one pelican by Bartram’s shipmate, Egan, and the
instrumental killing of pairs (sometimes six individuals) of a species by
J. J. Audubon for his portraits of birds might be explained another way:
Bartram and Audubon admired, perhaps even loved, birds, but nature in