By using the terms hurricane, cyclone, and tornado interchangeably, weather reports associated Illinois not only with U.S. states on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, but also with places like Jamaica, the Caymans, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Philippines—that is, with the tropical places featured in its warm-weather windstorm coverage.108 It was not just the force of the wind that brought these tropical connections to mind, it was also what violent storms left in their wakes. On occasion, powerful windstorms blew in rare birds “from the swamps of the south.”109 They also left the kinds of disarray associated with more equatorial climes. One “full sized cyclone” reportedly made Urbana look “like an African jungle, so thickly did the broken trees fill the streets and yards.”110 Such coverage echoed an earlier tornado report of a storm that killed nineteen people, among them an infant tossed into a slough: “When we review what we have written it seems like a tale of the horrors of the terrible elemental commotions of the tropics.”111 These allusions to jungles and tropics positioned storm-tossed Illinois at the northern limit of the South.
Slowly and unevenly, however, advances in meteorology disassociated tornadoes from tropical storms.112 By the teens, the Courier was associating hurricanes specifically with the East and West Indies.113 It also began to distinguish between tornadoes and cyclones. Citing the U.S. Weather Bureau, a 1918 article defined cyclones as slower and less violent than tornadoes. They might provide the preconditions for tornadoes, but they were not to be mistaken for them.114 The disaggregation of twisting windstorms took tornadoes out of the hurricane and cyclone zones, placing them smack in the center of the nation in a category of their own.
Seemingly the most local of storms—with their abrupt origins, concentrated power, and limited range—tornadoes became the signature weather events of the Midwest. And yet even as tornadoes began to define the region at the heart of the nation, the people on the ground realized that these fearsome vortexes, capable of sucking entire dwellings into their craws, did not originate in a vacuum. In redirecting the question that figured so largely in meteorological journals—why tornadoes?—to the more relevant question for its readers—why so many tornadoes here?—the Courier made it clear that the convergence of equatorial and polar currents was to blame.115 Meteorologists might place the tornado belt in the middle of nationalist maps, but those who picked through the rubble situated themselves much as Dunlap had before: on the front lines of a boundless north-south weather war.116
SCOPING OUT THE SKIES
Rural people had compelling reasons other than weather to look to the sky. Before the United States tilted from rural to urban, hunting figured largely as a provisioning and leisure pursuit and birds figured largely in the chase. An 1837 book on the attractions of Illinois described the state’s birdlife as an abundant source of food and feathers: “the ponds, lakes and rivers, during the spring and autumn, and during the migrating season of water-fowls, are literally covered with swans, pelicans, cranes, geese, brants, and ducks, of all the tribes and varieties. Many of these fowls rear their young on the islands and sandbars of the large rivers. In the autumn, multitudes of them are killed for their quills, feathers, and flesh.”117 Even as other objects of the hunt dwindled down to insignificance or disappeared altogether, birds offered the promise of abundant animal protein, there for the taking.
Hunters took nature up on the offer well before the first Europeans appeared on the scene. An archeological excavation of a Kickapoo village in Logan County, Illinois (about seventy miles to the west of Champaign), uncovered bones from fish, turtles, and mammals, and approximately thirty-four species of birds. The most important food bird for the Kickapoos in that village was the turkey, but the excavated refuse pits also yielded bones—some bearing butchering marks—from great blue herons, egrets, Canada geese, ducks, hooded mergansers, greater prairie chickens, woodcocks, sandpipers, passenger pigeons, hawks, woodpeckers, and a swallow-tailed kite. They also turned up bones from small passerine birds such as flycatchers, chickadees, wrens, kinglets, vireos, warblers, and buntings. Though possibly eaten, these birds seem more likely to have been killed for their feathers and skins.118
Following often literally in Native Americans’ footsteps—on the paths they made through the prairie—the pioneers, too, hunted fowl. Some of their targets lived in the state year-round. Subject to constant assault, these nonmigratory game birds soon declined: the wild turkey, ruffed grouse, bobwhite, and prairie chicken all became increasingly rare.119 The rapidity of the decline stemmed in part from their commodity value. A single U.S. express company reportedly exported fifty tons of midwestern prairie chickens in a year, helping to explain why the birds sold for as little in London as in Chicago. Along with smoked prairie chicken breasts, settler colonists sold thousands of prairie hen eggs to distant markets.120
As resident game birds struggled for their existence, hunters came to rely more on seasonal pickings. Ducks and geese were just the tip of the migratory V, for the category of game bird was a capacious one into the twentieth century. Among the migrating birds classed by the Department of Agriculture as game birds were swans, coots, plovers, surf birds, snipe, woodcocks, sandpipers, and curlews.121 In contrast to year-round residents, migratory birds seemed relatively more impervious to overhunting. Spring after fall, the rivers and wet bottomlands of Illinois enticed birds to land. Pond-riddled and lakelike fields also attracted waterfowl, all the fatter and more delectable for the grain that they consumed. “Such ducks!” exclaimed a hunter, describing his 1890 haul. “Their skins ready to burst with fat.” And so many of them, too: in swarms, not flocks, so plentiful that they could hardly be driven away.122
Waterfowl and other wild birds had to contend not only with hunters, such as the ones in the foreground of this bucolic scene, but also with significant habitat loss over the course of the nineteenth century.
“Birds-eye view on the (1100 acre) farm of the late Milton Babb,” History of Champaign County, Illinois (Philadelphia: Brink, McDonough and Co., 1878), plate after 170.
The Courier provided ample coverage of the hunt. It reported on the arrival of birds from their winter and summer havens and their presence on nearby ponds and puddles.123 “Duck Shooting Is Good This Year,” noted the Courier in the spring of 1913, as canvasbacks, mallards, bluebills, wood ducks, and green-winged teals began to alight.124 In times of nearby scarcity, the Courier reported on expeditions to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, nearby counties, Indiana, “the wilds of the northwest,” and hunting grounds as far as the Everglades.125
The popularity of such expeditions grew as the nearby haul declined. Even as Illinois hunters continued to celebrate good seasons and remarkable shoots, by the late nineteenth century, they no longer spoke of inexhaustible flocks, as they had in the 1860s.126 Take three accounts from 1902. Whereas twenty-five years ago, a “fair shot with a good dog” could secure forty to fifty woodcocks in a day’s hunt, only “ten percent of the former bag could now be obtained.”127 An Illinois heronry nearly three miles long and half a mile in width, with two to ten nests every tree: gone.128 The flocks of wild pigeons so immense that their fall passage shadowed the earth for hours: likewise gone.129
Struggling to make sense of quiet skies, some hunters blamed migrations of the permanent kind. These mappings emerged from the discovery that English sparrows were following settler colonists across the continent and that European starlings were drafting a few years behind.130 “Wherever European civilization has gone this pest bird has gone with it,” complained the Courier of the sparrow.131 The realization that these immigrant birds were heading west lent credence to claims that native birds were doing so as well. Hunters trying to explain how onetime shooting paradises had turned into wastelands in which a hunter could go for miles without finding any birds concluded that they had “somewhat changed their course of migration,” that they had abandoned their “once tenanted breeding haunts in our Middle and Northern states, for t
he vast, undisturbed solitudes of the Northwest.”132
Blame for the supposed westward exodus also fell on farmers, and not just for keeping pigs that ate the eggs of ground-nesting birds and large numbers of cats that crept around farmhouses, living by their wits. The press acknowledged that mowing, plowing, brush clearing, and tree chopping dislodged birds.133 Retracing a visit to a birding site in Illinois in 1883, twelve years after an earlier trip, ornithologist Robert Ridgway described the change as “almost beyond belief”—the open prairie replaced by thriving farms, and no characteristic prairie birds to be found.134 By 1912, Illinois bird counters were reporting that cornfields had fewer birds of any kind than pastures did.135
By the early twentieth century, the open prairie that had once offered diverse habitats for wildlife had been largely plowed over and planted with corn and secondary crops.
Frank Elmer Wood, “A Study of the Mammals of Champaign County, Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History 8 (1908–10), plate 26.
And then there was the tiling and draining. After noting that “our sloughs, swamps and marshes are being ditched and tiled,” The American Field rued the implications for ducks.136 Local histories and the Courier also acknowledged that drainage dissuaded game birds.137 Even the Drainage Journal admitted the costs: “Drain the bogs, and what can the woodcock do for a living? Reclaim all the wet lands . . . but after that look in vain for snipe and duck.”138 This kind of coverage suggested that hunting alone was not to blame for declining numbers—that some birds were decamping for wetter places. Rather than fully confront the specter of extermination, those who looked out on quiet landscapes imagined birds the ways they imagined Native Americans: as fading to the West. And if not to the West, then to the new “bird reservations” devised by conservationists.139
ECONOMIC ORNITHOLOGY
Not every decline in birdlife was lamented, for some of the hunting was exterminationist in intent. This component of the hunt stemmed from the perception of birds as agricultural pests. Bad birds were guilty of a variety of offenses. The bee martin had a reputation for visiting the apiary to suck the honey from bees. Another “pestilent fellow” was the fruit-tree-menacing sapsucker.140 Although some farmers may have appreciated hawks and owls for keeping mice in check, chicken keepers regarded them as predators.141 Grain growers had their own particular targets. The land baron Michael Sullivant reportedly hired a hundred gunners every fall to drive waterfowl from his vast array of cornfields in central Illinois.142
If any bird merited most-wanted status, it would have been the English sparrow. Antisparrow reports cited the work of Eleanor A. Ormerod, consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, who found that sparrows drove off swallows and martins, thus permitting an increase in insects destructive to the garden and orchard. By her estimation, the bird caused over $3.85 million per annum in damages in England alone. And England was not the only place to suffer its depredations, for the sparrow’s reputation as an agricultural pest reached from Bermuda and Cuba to Germany, Austria, Russia, India, Egypt, and Australia. By the 1880s, the U.S. commissioner of agriculture had joined the ranks of the antisparrow movement, describing the English sparrow as “a curse of such virulence that it ought to be systematically attacked and destroyed.”143 Chiming in to the outcry, the Courier said that whoever “first brought these birds to America . . . should have been court martialed and sent to the penitentiary for life.”144
Such warnings resulted in bounties in Illinois and other states. They also resulted in heavy collateral damage, in many cases from an inability to distinguish sparrows from other small birds.145 The Flatville twelve-year-old who made the newspapers after accidently killing his brother hints at the common and casual nature of such attempts: the boy had reached for his rifle to shoot a sparrow, and the hammer had caught on his sleeve.146
Efforts to kill birds for agricultural purposes gained some scientific justification from the rise of economic ornithology, devoted to evaluating the impact of birds on agriculture. Department of Agriculture reports on stomach and gizzard contents spurred on efforts to kill English sparrows by quantifying the damage they caused.147 Yet such damning studies of bird guts were the exception. Overall, economic ornithology built a powerful case for protection. In so doing, it affirmed the claims of those who had long insisted on the importance of birds for insect control.
As early as the 1850s, bird-watchers advised Illinois farmers that although birds ate some seeds, they also ate insects.148 In 1861, the Illinois Farmer urged prairie residents to plant trees, “to induce the robin and other birds to breed their young, to keep down the numerous insects that would otherwise destroy the crops.”149 In 1864, the Illinois Farmer claimed that injurious insects were overrunning the country because “civilization” had destroyed so many birds. One had only to look in the crop (the pouch near the throat) of a single bird to appreciate the number of bugs, worms, and flies it consumed. Birds ate so many pests that farmers could forgive them the ripe cherries they ate for dessert—especially given the likelihood that their quick eyes had “perceived a worm in the very cherry you grudge them.” To check the “teeming millions” of insects, farmers needed to treat birds as “the naturally commissioned sentinels of our fruit trees . . . a standing army—on picket duty—self-marshaled and trained to meet and overpower the invading army of the insect world.”150
The Illinois Department of Agriculture weighed in on the issue by advising farmers that it was better to “give half our fruit to birds than all to worms.”151 In 1878, it published an essay applauding barn swallows and chimney swifts for chasing gnats and mosquitoes. It likewise credited orioles, warblers, woodpeckers, and nuthatches with hunting insects, and it praised robins, flickers, and meadowlarks for “working harder and accomplishing more in the extermination of insects in a single hour than we could do in a year.” The only birds it found to be unworthy of protection were six types of hawk and the English sparrow.152
Agricultural experts touted birds as the frontline defenses against insect predations in part because of a lack of other options. To be sure, farmers did try chemical agents to reduce pests, as demonstrated by the case of the San José scale. This sap-sucking insect took its name from the scales that appeared on the fruit trees it infested. After discovering the pest in California in the 1880s, agronomists traced its origins to China, from whence they speculated it had come around 1870. Birds and wind spread the licelike young. Not only did the insect kill orchard trees within two to three years, but it also caused Canada and several European countries to quarantine U.S. plants and fruits.153
Stephen Forbes, the entomologist in charge of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History and a professor of zoology at the University of Illinois, discovered the scale in Illinois in 1896. Following widespread practice, he used whale-oil soap as a remedial spray on his experimental orchard in Champaign. Coating Illinois apple trees with oceanic animal fluids had only limited effectiveness, however, so Forbes experimented with a Florida fungus, with cutting and burning, and with washes of lime, sulfur, and salt. He found the latter to be more effective than whale-oil soap and considerably cheaper. His discoveries helped propel him to the presidency of the Entomological Society of America, in which capacity he traveled to Oxford in 1912 as a delegate to the Second International Congress of Entomology, thereby extending his scientific agricultural connections.154
But the sulfur wash was just one defensive measure against the insect swarms. Until chemical warfare against insects took off during World War I—subsequently endangering birds as well as insects—birds remained major agents in pest control, as demonstrated by Forbes. Recognizing that the role of birds varied according to species, agricultural practice, place, and insect populations, Forbes embarked on a series of investigations to determine which birds ate what, and in what quantities, where.155 It was his studies of bird craws that provided the numbers for Departm
ent of Agriculture reports on birds as insect controllers.156
Joining in the economic ornithology campaign, the Courier reported on devastating swarms of locusts that proliferated in the absence of birds.157 Rather than chastise birds for poaching produce, it applauded them for policing “insect criminals.”158 After the United States entered World War I, the Courier shifted to more militaristic terms, depicting the Hessian fly and other destructive insects as “agents of the Kaiser busily at work in America” and birds as a well-organized “aerial arm of our forces.”159 Although the Courier did not use the term food security, its writings on birds addressed it. “Human life on this planet is one unending war with the insect world,” it warned. “In this war the birds are our allies. Without their help the insects would win in a very few campaigns.”160
The view through the lens of economic ornithology? Not just dinner or dearth, but the destiny of nations.
Following the U.S. entry into World War I, the battle against insect pests took on greater urgency. In reprinting this cartoon from Country Gentleman, the editor of Bird-Lore pointedly noted that the farmers on the front lines of farm defense were foolishly shooting their allies, the birds.
“Battle for the Crops,” Bird-Lore 19 (Sept.–Oct. 1917), 296.
DOMINION OF THE AIR
Concerns about the declining hunt and rising insect hordes helped push a number of Illinois farmers, including Grange members and Farmers’ Institute speakers, into the movement for bird protection.161 Having quantified the significance of birds for agricultural production, Forbes became a prominent advocate of bird preservation. Following a census of the summer bird population in Illinois in the summer of 1907, he concluded that the present bird population was less than it ought to be and less than it would be if birds were properly protected. He energetically advanced that point in public talks and writings.162
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