When People Dined On Robins and Other Avian Oddities From America’s Past

Flocks of wild parrots roaming Iowa? A steaming plate of robin-and-bacon pie? Such avian oddities might seem outlandish in today’s America, but the past, as they say, is a foreign country—one where birds can serve as valuable tour guides. 

Exploring that strange terrain is the focus of Bird History, a newsletter from birder and amateur historian Robert Francis (a public servant by day). With extensive archival sourcing and engaging writing, Bird History is a trove of both obscure delights and thought-provoking illuminations of Americans’ messy, ever-evolving relationship with birds. As Francis has discovered since beginning the project three years ago, and sharing publicly since 2023, clashes over birds throughout the history of the United States often cut straight to the country’s deepest wounds and oldest struggles. Bird History is his effort to share what he’s learned and to ponder what we’ve lost.

Audubon caught up with Francis to talk about his own history with birds, where he gets his ideas, and how his deep dives have changed the way he sees birds and conservation battles, past and future. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity. 

Audubon: As you’ve shared in your newsletter, you’re not a lifelong birder. How did you first get interested in birds? 

Francis: Walking home from work several years ago, I noticed a group of small birds hanging out on the grass near my apartment, and I realized that I’d seen them dozens, maybe hundreds of times before, but I had no idea what they were called. I did some Googling. It took me about a minute to figure out that they were European Starlings, an incredibly common urban bird. But it struck me that other people probably knew what these were called, and people used to know what these were called, but somehow that information never made it down to me. 

From then I started just noticing birds more often, being like, okay, I know a cardinal, I know a chickadee, but I don’t know what that thing is. And kind of like with everything, the closer you look, the more that you see. And so I just kept looking more and more until it started taking up more of my life.  

Audubon: What about the history side of things? Were you already a history buff? 

Francis: Yeah, I’ve always loved American history. The way this all came together is I’d spent years reading a lot of presidential biographies and other works of American history. I was talking with a friend, and we were like, if you wrote a book, what would you write a book about? And I said, well, maybe something about birds and presidents, these two fixations that I have. And my friend said, you should write that book!

It didn’t take too long to realize there’s not really enough content for a book just about birds and presidents, but it got me thinking about how did people, before I was around, think about birds and interact with birds and conceptualize them in their world? There’s so many different types of relationships that people have had with birds, and it goes far beyond looking at them, being curious about them, or keeping them as pets. And our relationship with birds has changed dramatically over time. 

Audubon: Your research is always extremely thorough. Tell us about your process and sourcing for the newsletter. 

Francis: Sometimes I’ll go to sources like Audubon magazine, or before that Bird-Lore, but I’m especially interested in people who might not be birders or bird lovers but still find birds to be an important part of their life. I find a lot of really rich, interesting articles in mass market publications like Harper’s Weekly, Saturday Evening Post, from the 1800s and seeing how a general audience is reading about birds in this period. Google Books has been absolutely the best resource. It has literally every publication that’s in the public domain, and it’s searchable. Back issues of magazines, books that were published 150 years ago—I’ve been able to find everything there. 

The single source that has felt the most meaningful and rich for me is, in the 1930s the Works Progress Administration did a project called Slave Narratives. They interviewed hundreds and hundreds of formerly enslaved people, you know, 50, 60 years after the end of slavery, just understanding their experiences. And a lot of them talk about birds and talk about the way that they interacted with the natural world. 

I look at a really broad range of sources, and a lot of them feel a little unexpected. First-hand accounts of explorers and naturalists, but also novels from the 19th century where characters talk about what high society dinners look like and the things they’re eating. I think that really goes to show that birds show up everywhere in people’s lives. 

Audubon: How do you know when something is a good fit for the newsletter? Do you have a giant list of questions and future topics? 

Francis: I do, yeah. It’s like 160, 170 items long right now. Finding topics is often just stumbling upon something that feels unexpected. Like finding out that the DuPont ammunition manufacturing company held a crow killing contest in the 1930s. Stuff like that. There are broader tensions in society—like conflicts between classes, conflicts between genders, conflicts between races—where birds are the arena where you see these conflicts playing out. Like learning that there was a lot of persecution of Italian immigrants because they killed and ate songbirds, which is something that was culturally anathema to WASP-y northeasterners. And similarly, there was persecution of African Americans for the ways that they killed and ate birds. The ways that elite groups stake out a claim to birds and say: We are the ones who are killing birds the right way, and other groups are killing them the wrong way. And we have the clout and the power and the resources to pass laws to make it so those other people can't kill birds, but we still can. 

A recent piece I did on eating robins, I thought it would be, okay, here’s some robin recipes. But when I started researching it, I learned the reason that we stopped eating robins is because of class and racial intersectional conflict. You had these affluent northerners who were like, robins are a helpful species, and they’re morally coded as innocent, and we shouldn’t eat them. And we have all of these poor, Black southerners who are eating them as food, and they’re slaughtering these birds, and we need to pass laws specifically stopping them. So it came to be this moral crusade where you had rich, white, land-owning sportsmen in the South and northern wealthy white men and women who are like, we need to change these laws; killing a robin is not like killing a Mallard or a goose, which is perfectly legal and fine. So there was this saga around it, and it speaks to a lot more than “this bird that we don’t think of as food now used to be food.” All of this changed for reasons that are really core to America’s most longstanding conflicts. 

Audubon: Do you have any personal favorite pieces you’ve written for the newsletter? 

Francis: I wrote a series on Carolina Parakeets that felt a little more meditative and helped me understand a little bit of my relationship with birds. When we talk about extinct birds, often we focus on their extinction, and what it means when they’re gone. I think that’s very important, but it was really fun to imagine a world where Carolina Parakeets were still around, where we still had parrots in America. Up to New York, over to Iowa, you could see these native, wild parrots. I’ve had Audubon’s painting of Carolina Parakeets as my phone background for years, so it kind of felt personal. 

I wrote a piece about mockingbirds and why they’re so culturally prominent. Even though today most people wouldn’t know what a mockingbird looks like or what they sound like, everyone’s heard nursery rhymes about mockingbirds. I did an informal poll on Instagram. I asked how many of my Instagram friends have read To Kill a Mockingbird. Everyone who responded said that they had. And then I shared a picture with like 30 different birds and asked: Do you know which one’s the mockingbird? Maybe 15 percent did. 

Audubon: Have any particular discoveries or facts you’ve come across stuck with you or changed the way you look at birds? 

Francis: I think core to the way I’ve come to understand birds is this broader narrative of transformation, where birds were a resource, a commodity, but also a part of daily life. This was transformed through moral changes and legal changes to being: Birds are something that we protect. Learning all of the ways that we used to interact with birds on a daily, intimate basis. They were the food that we ate. Everyone slept on feather mattresses. It took something like 2,000 Passenger Pigeons to fill a feather mattress. 

If I had to say one bird fact that’s really blown my mind is just the number of Passenger Pigeons that there used to be. I love getting people to guess how many Passenger Pigeons do you think could be in a flock? They’ll guess like maybe 10,000? It was 2 billion. Two billion birds in one flock. You have these accounts of explorers waking up at 5 in the morning and seeing a stream of birds a mile wide that completely blocks out the sky, and it goes for 14 hours. That scale, we can’t comprehend it. And now they’re gone. 

Audubon: What do you think birders today stand to gain by looking at the deeper history of birds and how our human lives have intersected with them?  
 
Francis: So much. One area is this idea of shifting baseline syndrome. We assume that what we see now is normal or has always been this way, or this is the proper number of birds that we should have. We know we’ve lost 3 billion birds since 1970, which is maybe the best baseline that we have, but go back further than that. It’s sobering, just how many birds there used to be.  

But I think it’s also important to understand: The challenges that we’re facing today, these are battles that we’ve fought before and often won before. People have been fighting to protect birds for a really long time. I think it’s important and helpful to understand the strategies that they used and change our ideas of what’s possible. 

Looking back at the turn of the century when hunters were killing birds for restaurants and for their feathers and just really destroyed populations, there were a lot of birds that people thought were going to go extinct. We know about success stories like condors and Whooping Cranes, but people wrote about expecting Wood Ducks to go extinct. They wrote about expecting woodcocks to go extinct. There are a lot of birds that they thought were getting close, and they’ve recovered really fantastically. And it’s because of, like, the Junior Audubon Society, and all of these children joining up and writing letters to their congresspeople, and working in schools, working in communities. There was a society-level effort to protect birds. The challenges facing birds today are potentially more grave than the ones that they were facing 120 years ago, and so all of what I’ve learned is making me ask, what would it take for us to have that society-level effort again?

Audubon: You mentioned  Bird History came out of your idea for a book. Do you still see this work turning into a book somewhere down the road?

Francis: Someday that's the vision. When I started I thought, okay, this is going to be a five-year project. Now that I’m three years in I’m like, okay, this is gonna be a 10-year project.