The works of such pioneers as Florence Merriam Bailey, Neltje Blanchan, Mabel Osgood Wright, and Olive Thorne Miller was based on appreciation, sympathy, and care, but it was also often infused with a strain of economic practicality. That practicality was centered around the call to welcome "economically valuable" birds to thrive around us, around home and farm. Such questionable science was called "economic ornithology" and was driven by the early American Ornithologists' Union, government workers (especially at the USDA and at corresponding state agencies), as well as by the legions of women bird defenders.
The general public - rural and urban - was regularly presented the "useful" message. Early on, at the turn of the century, some species were deemed beneficial (for example in the East: Brown Thrasher, Baltimore Oriole, Eastern Bluebird, and Rose-breasted Grosbeak), while others were considered injurious (for example, Cooper's Hawk, American Crow, Common Grackle, and, in the South, Bobolink).
Useful birds, attracted with food, water, and cover, were perceived to eat harmful insects in spring and summer and eat weed seeds in fall. At this time in our history, birds often were simply described as good or bad, saints or sinners, and were, by the evidence presented, vindicated or convicted. A "guilty sentence" could mean persecution, or even death.
Books and pamphlets were written on the economic issues or with economic sub-themes. For example, Florence Merriam wrote, How Birds Affect the Farm and Garden (1896) and Neltje Blanchen wrote How to Attract the Birds (1903). (Blanchen in particular had an aversion to "evil" raptors.) One of the most powerful publications on the subject was the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture's, Useful Birds and Their Protection (1907), by Edward Howe Forbush, a book over 400 pages long.
As they all worked for laws to protect non-game birds, bird advocates seemed compelled to show that more people would profit from saving free and living birds rather than they would from selling caged or dead ones - or their fashionable feathers.
Perhaps inadvertently, Frank M. Chapman summed up the logic-trap in the arguments early on. In the August 1899 issue of his new magazine, Bird-Lore, he wrote, "As long as man's attitude toward nature is the standpoint of dollars and cents, bird-lovers will welcome every fact which places them in possession of a fresh argument to be used where appeals to sentiment are of no avail."
Moreover, by the entry of the U.S. into World War I, the economic arguments received an additional boost. Saving "useful birds" would safeguard harvests of food and fiber, and "defeat the Kaiser." For example, the Los Angeles Audubon Society presented a bird fountain to Exposition Park on April 18, 1918, in which the society's president, Mrs. F. T. Bicknell, dedicated the fountain, "To our birds," fighting "against enemies of the crops" and to the "battalion which saves our forests from which we get the lumber to build great ships and air-planes."
During this entire period, the theme also reached the general public through popular culture and education. One popular way the general public learned about these useful birds was through collectible bird cards placed in boxes of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, from the Church and Dwight Company. At least 13 sets of bird cards were produced from 1888 through 1938, with multiple sets touting "useful birds." The cards featured bird artists including M. E. Eaton and the brilliant Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Each of the baking-soda cards included a fine painted image of a bird on the front and a bird profile on the back. Each card began with the "useful birds" introduction and card ended with the phrase, "For the good of all, do not destroy the birds." The image shown here, reproduces both sides one of these cards for Baltimore Oriole. The back extols the virtues of the "valuable" bird, as it consumes great numbers of "hairy and tent-caterpillar and of the brown-tail and gypsy moths." (Later, these images would be used in instructive wall posters and
distributed to schools across the country.)
We can chuckle over some of these older misbegotten arguments, but many money-maker arguments persist, if not in different ways, today. For example, fast-growing U. S. wild bird-feeding sales and avian tourism-related figures are often cited as significant measures of birds' post-agricultural worth to the American economy. One might conclude that such a current "dollars and cents accounting" may be a throwback to the limited view of old-fashioned "economic ornithology."
But for bird educators there are places for all sorts of arguments, including the "economic" ones. It's probably a question of prioritizations, and each bird educator may have her or his own curricular hierarchy. Beyond the economics, consider the following:
What birds tell us via scientific monitoring may be crucial to our own survival. Indeed, the whole issue of climate change can be read through birds' altered ranges, distribution, and shifts in migration and in nesting phenology.
What birds teach us by capturing the curiosity of classroom and outdoor-study students may have lasting impact for the future of science, conservation, and education.
What birds do for us aesthetically is however, personal and inestimable. There is often a solid health consequence to outdoor bird appreciation and one that approaches a spiritual renewal.
To get important laws passed, our early bird protectionists and bird educators were often forced to downplay beauty and sentiment and make their economic case for birds. In the 21st century, the intrinsic value of wild birds can become more appreciated, that is, more up-front and obvious for bird educators.
- - - - -