10-11: The Feather Wars with James H. McCommons
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
The early years of bird conservation in North America, is a fascinating period, featuring colorful characters and countless battles fought in the pages of newspapers and magazines regarding the need for conserving the continent's wildlife. It is a history thoroughly recounted in the book The Feather Wars and Great Crusade to Save America's Birds by James H. McCommons. The author joins the American Birding Podcast to talk about the creation of the bird conservation movement that not only saved a number of species from extinction, but provides the basis of our the conservation landscape we enjoy today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take your birding in new directions with east-west birding tours. Small group tours that connect you to birds, wild places, and people through attentive guiding, thoughtful planning, and moments that linger long after the trip ends. From the canyons of Arizona, rainforests of Costa Rica to the Andes of Ecuador, enjoy classic birding tours, relaxed trips, or experiences that blend |
| 0:22.5 | nature with history and local cuisine. |
| 0:24.7 | Collect moments, not just lifers, at east-west birding tours.com. |
| 0:34.1 | Hello, and welcome to the American Burning Podcast from the American Birding Association. |
| 0:40.0 | I am your host, Nate Swick. |
| 0:43.0 | I will be completely frank with you. |
| 0:47.0 | I spent the better part of a week trying to find something to chat about in this opener, |
| 0:50.4 | and I came up kind of dry. |
| 0:53.1 | Even the birding in my part of the world, which is generally |
| 0:56.5 | something I can work up into a brief note, has been pretty slow. I don't know that I have |
| 1:01.3 | anything new to mention. It doesn't help that the weather has kind of seesawed something fierce |
| 1:06.5 | this week from near 80s to storms and lows in the 30s. |
| 1:11.0 | Everything seems a little confused, including me. |
| 1:15.7 | Pine warblers are still singing the woodpeckers are out really doing their thing, |
| 1:18.7 | but not a lot else. |
| 1:21.0 | Here in the south, we have this kind of slow roll towards migration, |
| 1:26.7 | and we're definitely in that right now where everyone expects the warblers |
| 1:31.3 | to be right around the corner but the truth is they're probably six weeks or so away and |
| 1:36.4 | we're all just extremely impatient plus all the good science related content that I could |
| 1:43.0 | draw on I'm saving for this month and birding, |
| 1:45.1 | which is next week, and I'm recording, you know, as of this, you know, tomorrow. It's going to be a |
| 1:49.9 | good one, a little bit of a promo for that. So let me just do the thing where I say, |
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