Ep. 848: How America Almost Lost Its Birds

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That's f-i-r-s-t-l-i-t-e-e.com. Well, everybody, we're joined today by author James McComb, and we're going to talk about how America nearly wiped itself out of dozens of species of birds during what we can think of as the dark days

of American conservation. Lost several of those birds to extinction. And then brought a great many of them back from the brink of extinction. The name of his book is The Feather Wars

and the great crusade to save America's birds. James McCombon's is a emeritus from near to emeritus professor. That means you're a former professor. But in good standing.

But in good standing. So what would you do? Like, give me something you would do to not be just to be able to be that you were a former professor, not an emeritus professor.

“I don't know, well, you have to ask for it first.”

You do? Yeah. You have to ask for it as to go through a committee and before they grain up to you. Oh, so it's like a gift. Yeah, well, yeah, it's an honor. It's an honor to be an emeritus professor.

Right. And then oftentimes, particularly at a research-based institution, you get to keep your office. You get to keep a lot of the grad students, and you get to continue your work. Oh, OK.

All right. And then sometimes you see professor emeritus. Well, I don't know. You don't know about that. OK.

Either way, he's an emeritus professor. Get this Northern Michigan University in Market, where he taught journalism, journalism, and nature writing for 20 years. What's Robert Traver?

He's kind of a big deal up there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, we would-- Anatomy of a murder in all that matter.

Right. Anatomy of a murder is very important to the community. Yeah, it is. Sure.

“We have Jim Harrison, which I think you had to show about.”

So without a doubt. And then some other writers that we would go off and do field trips on in this book, George Scheiris is in this book. He was a world's first wildlife photographer. We would go out to wear his first wildlife photograph

we're taking and read some of George's stuff. Oh, God. Yeah. So years ago, I was working on a--

I was researching a book that I never wrote about the Great Lakes.

And I was hanging out at Lake Independence there. Yeah. And it was like the anatomy of a murder murder. The couple was camped there. That's right.

Yeah, and the guy was a military guy involved putting some kind of equipment in there. And then the wife, like, depending on who you asked, there was like a bear hanging around the campground. She goes down to the local bar, runs into some guys

in the local bar, whatever. The guy comes and kills a dude in the bar. And I had heard all you can still see a bullet hole in the wall. Yeah. And I went and asked the bartender, my hey man,

is there really a bullet hole in here from like the whole anatomy of a murder thing? And he goes, the reason doesn't make sense. He says, where everybody thinks there's a bullet hole, the bar wasn't at that wall back then.

He goes back then, the bar was over on that wall. So he goes, it doesn't make sense to me that the bullet hole is over there. Yeah, you're familiar with all this? Yeah, OK.

I've been in the Lumberjack Cafe. Was that what I was talking about?

Yeah, his stuff's cool, man.

“Like his writing about the fish and stuff”

and the fish and quotes and all that. And they made the movie with tells his name, the same dude from its wonderful life. Jimmy Stewart, right? Right, right, right.

Like, he's always running around,

trout rolled up and he's tying flies in the courthouse. Yeah. And he's always like, he comes out, trout wrapped up in his newspaper, that was a good stuff, man. That's good stuff.

Yeah, there's kind of like a little bit of a literary aspect to that town, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, Robert Traverse, you know, wrote some pretty profound things about wanting to be

in the environs of our trout live. And that I'm important that was, too. Yeah, he had cool fishing quotes.

“He had cool fishing quotes that still stand today.”

They do. Yeah, they're good fishing quotes. So what got you into the bird story? So, you know, George Chyris is in this book. And George Chyris is the Chyris.

So I want to point out the listeners. Sure. The way with the taxonomy of mousse. Well, we have the giants, you have the Yukon mousse. And then in the Rockies, there's other ones. There's like some people argue, there's a new Finland mousse.

In the Rockies, our mousse here, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and elsewhere, that is the Chyris. Chyris mousse. Oh, it's Chyris, that's Chyris. That's right.

But that's the dude, right? Yeah, it is. It is.

Yeah, you know, on one of his expeditions, so he was the world's first wildlife photographer.

He was taking pictures in the 1880s, 1890s before anyone else. He was a lawyer from Pittsburgh, whose family would come to the upper peninsula to summer. And starting off with his grandfather and his father, Pittsburgh, but they would go to Michigan's upper peninsula. Yeah.

Going back then, as the hell with the lid off, yeah, it was a nasty place just because it was industrial. Yeah, in the 1880s without a doubt. And so a lot of the well-known and wealthy families in Pittsburgh would go someplace to spend summer.

The Chyris's were trout fishermen and his father first started going up to the upper peninsula very early on, like 1830s and then the family started to go up. They established a relationship with some folks around Marquette and they got a camp, not too far from Marquette. And that's where George, who was a lawyer, first started experimenting with taking pictures

of animals at night. And was that right? Yeah, so he would go out on white fish lake. You were a whole book about this. I did.

I did. I tell people that book. And that is how I got interested. But he would go out on white fish lake and he had a chemical flash that he would hold up.

They would listen for deer coming down to the shore and then they would jacklight the deer and then they would push in slowly with the boat. George would stand up with this chemical flash, take the picture, took them three years to get an image. But he took a lot of images at night.

And then he had a thing. He was going on familiar with the pictures.

“I had no idea that that's why they looked so strange.”

Yeah, they were called the midnight series of pictures and then so he had a chemical flash. Chemical flash. And then what he found out was that he could put a trip wire up, set these things at night and then put them on trails and the deer would trip them. And so he got pictures of deer but also pictures of birds and other animals.

He was like, he's running trail cameras. He's the inventor of the trail camera without a doubt. He was the one. He took a pattern out on that device.

But it was never really practical for anybody else to use.

Got it. Wow. And that's where I got interested in writing this book was, I had done a story on, or this book on George Shyrus. And the third thing Shyrus was, he was a congressman for two years from Pennsylvania.

And he introduced the Shyrus bird bill in 1904, which was the four runner of the Migratory Bird. Okay. And the Migratory Bird Treaty. I didn't know that.

Yeah. That was where I thought there's a bigger story to this. And then when I was writing that book, it's called Camera Hunter, I really had to learn a lot about that period of the 20th century and late 19th century and who all these people were many of the characters in this book or friends of Shyrus, including Theodore Roosevelt.

Yeah.

Well, you know when you start thinking about a book like that, like I'm working on a project

where I'm kind of in the phase right now of, you know what you're going to do, you know you're going to do something, like whatever, you know what kind of like why I'm going to do a thing about the blank. But then you get into that phase where you're like, and I'm going to have to, the themes of it, you know, you start, the ideas start taking shape.

You have the umbrella, but then later you realize that man is going to be a lot about this or a lot about that or I imagine the take away, like the take away is going to be this. When you start thinking about the story of birds in America, particularly the ones that we hunted to extrapation, near extinction, extinction, what emerged in your mind as kind of like the take away for people or like what is the thing that if you think in your head,

like if I don't achieve that for the reader, I will have failed.

“Well, I think at this point, Shyrus, when I got interested in doing it, Shyrus came from”

this point of view as a hunter.

He was a deer hunter and his first bill was only to protect certain birds, game birds at

that time. And then later what happened was with the migratory bird act, they expanded that to all birds. So I was looking for a way to tell the story how Otobon, the Otobon society, the folks who were professional and a phologist and the hunters all came together to make this happen. And so I wanted to explore more of that story.

And so that was part of it. And like anything, you say when you first write your book proposal, which you're pitching to, you're publishers, I want to write this book, you know it's not going to be exactly the same when you're done at home and you're going to be kind of the same. It may not be, you don't know where you're going to go, yeah, because you haven't done

the research.

I shouldn't say it's not going to be kind of the same, but no.

No. Well, yeah. But, you know, they want to table the contents and want all these things. And I understand that. No, I'm not hacking on the one, and it's a game, it's like it's a dance you do.

But do you know, you know the writer, Ian Fraser, he's on the show and he mentored me when I was young.

“I remember him telling me, he said, if I were had to write a book proposal, the first thing”

I'd do is throw it away. Yeah. The great thing is get to the point, you don't have to write a book proposal. That's where he was. And he wasn't sure.

No. Because he's like, I don't know what the book's going to be about. Right. Right. And so that was, you know, this one was, was I just started hitting the road, hitting our

guys, and then, you know, see where it went. You started out doing archive work. Yeah. Yeah.

“And so to tell the story, one of the interesting stories in here is how after the”

migratory bird treaty was, okay, by Congress, there was going to be a test case that literally somebody was going to go out and violate it, and then that would go up through the courts to make sure that it was a constitutional law. And in this case, it was the attorney general of Missouri, who was a duck hunter. His name was Frank McAllister, and that he was telling everybody in Missouri, like ignore

the law, spring hunting is okay. Everybody should go spring hunting, and I'm going to go spring hunting. And then I got, yeah, back up because I got confused. Sure. You mean they did this new that someone would, not that they planned that someone would.

So they knew that there would be a violator, or they were planning a violator. Well, it was kind of a, it was kind of both in the sense that Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and so that part of the Mississippi, Missouri area, these folks were deadly against the migratory bird treaty. Oh, okay.

I thought you meant they were putting, they were like, okay, Bob, you go break the law, so we can test this in the court. In one instance, that happened before this, the weeks McLean Act was tested like that. But anyway, when the migratory bird treaty happened, these days were still not happy with it.

And they were saying that, you know, we still own the birds. The federal government has nothing to do with this. They can't tell us what to do. We're going to have a spring shooting season and Frank McAllister, the attorney general, said

His name was Ray Holland, Ray Holland said, "I'm going to bag the attorney general."

“And so he sort of followed him, the attorney general went to a duck club, innovating Missouri,”

and shot over a hundred ducks, Holland got himself on to the property and was able to arrest the attorney general. The attorney general was fined for shooting these ducks, and then the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The attorney general actually argued his own case in front of the US Supreme Court and lost.

And that was the test case for the migratory bird treaty. And they held it, it was sound law. Yeah, it was sound law. What was his argument?

This argument was that the states, and this was the argument previously up to this

“time, all through the 20 or 30 years prior, was that birds belong to the states.”

All wildlife was owned by the states and the federal government had no jurisdiction. And what this movement was about was for the federal government to take jurisdiction over birds, birds were public trust, migratory birds moved from state to state, that each state having its own laws, its own bag limits, when birds were going to be shot, what seasons didn't make any sense biologically with their nesting and migratory patterns.

So slowly but surely the feds moved in to take jurisdiction over those birds and to culminate it in the migratory bird treaty act. Yeah.

And but that was a great story and I had just heard a little bit of that when I wrote

The George Shivers book and when I thought, I'll start there. So that's where I started to book was I got, I want to go find out more about Frank Holland or Ray Holland arresting the attorney general. And I found his papers in Connecticut and a college in Connecticut and there was an unfinished book biography or it was a finished biography that he wasn't able to get published and

I thought, okay there's got to be two or three chapters in there about this great thing he did back then and there was and so this kind of wonderful anecdote that goes on for ten pages in this book about how these guys arrested the attorney general came from that. Yeah, you know, a lot of people in our audience are pretty familiar with the commercial

duck hunting era like for instance right outside the door here we have a I don't know if you know what is coming in we have a big punk gun oh I didn't see that now we have a Holland and Holland London made punk gun okay like a commercial duck hunting gun so that was made in England and yeah you know it's funny it's got the address on it. Yeah I'm on the top of the barrel painted over in some kind of gun metal like some kind

of like a paint you use the paint like a like a like a cannon on a boat yeah but then the action is very ornate and fine you know but if you look if you can kind of like look through that paint you can see that there's an address from Holland and Holland we made a big punk gun shooting video that we haven't finished yet but anyways just in conversations we've had on the show we've talked about commercial duck hunting and I don't want

to leave that out of our conversation but I think we haven't touched on too much is that what we now regard of as songbirds right that these at a time where like a heavily exploited bird yeah I was joke about and and like my my father's bird taxonomy he knew game birds he was a duck hunter he hunted upland birds he knew his game birds he knew two or three other birds robins blue jays chickenies crow's but most birds he saw were

“tweety birds and they were like that's what they were and they were not of interest not”

of a trend is interest right because he had that he had that and I'm not even criticized and but he had that like hunter's value system of these are the birds that are important aren't yeah he these are the birds that I'm interested in these are the birds that we pay attention to these are the birds that have regulations these are the birds we eat right in a couple other common ones but are not he was more like yeah the twenty bird but at a

time like tweety birds is back then they call them dicky birds okay that was not but at a

of the extent of that and who and what and why was going on so robins particularly in the south

“when when robins go south into winter they they flock up and a lot of farmers would would”

catch those birds and nets and they would feed them to their hogs all that was pretty but people also ate robin pie and and so yeah without a doubt flickers were eaten and many woodpeckers as well what I talk about in this book is how immigrants came from southern Europe parts of Italy and from from eastern Europe who had a tradition of eating small birds and so when they came to America particularly like in you know 1910 1900 they were hunting small birds partly because they

were poor and this was way to put protein in the pot and so there was there's an incident that I

write about in Pennsylvania where a lot of these landowners in these farmers just hated the idea that these foreigners were coming out from Pittsburgh on the trains and going on on their land and hunting small birds but uh yeah shotgun shotgun yeah and anything else wood shock whatever took I mean it was just get me and you know taking meat back and but there's a one of my colleagues that I worked with on our cook we we have a couple cookbooks and I worked with the woman in

Christopher Wayne she has a Italian that as you I she has Italian ancestors on a side of her family and she talks about I don't want to get the guy in trouble she talks about the her grandfather like she remembers that her grandfather still putting him in you know putting him putting songbirds whatever he could get his hands on putting him into his sauces yeah and he just cook them down and shred them and be like any other meat you could throw in there but like in the pot could

be like low just things he kind of got out of his yard or effort and it was just like a food item it's right and you could put him on a spit you could put some bread on him some pork and you know you could do it that way yeah and more like that kind of I want to talk about the I want to talk about the commercial restaurant trade and the feather trade sure just to wrap up on the songbird thing was there ever were they able to have population level impacts like take robins

would that type of harvest was they able to have a population level impact like did we ever see

“robbing numbers decline to a dangerous level well I think robbing numbers did decline generally”

but on a on a localized level yes without a doubt a particular like in the south in Louisiana there were you know tens of thousands of robins that were were killed and people got a little anecdote in the book where people were you know killing these birds and then bringing them in a new iberia on a string and and selling them for you know 25 cents or 50 cents a string okay so it was it was it was kind of an annual thing to be able to buy robins on a street at that time

hmm okay talk about the the the the the the feather trade because this is the thing like people can picture I think a lot of people can picture that when people don't have a lot of money a lot of their game is in around you know we didn't have a lot of the times we're talking about deer numbers had already been depleted even going back to the mid-1700s you know so when you get you know whatever you get into the late 1800s does not as much game around people want to hunt

their hunt birds but the feather trade is not personal use like the feather trade isn't going out and getting some grub for yourself the feather trade is like his business you know yeah I think

you know people always hunted for feathers for stuffing you know mattresses feather fans like face fans

but it was around the 1870s 1880s where this fashion trend started of having bird feathers you know in your hat and women's hats and that grew fairly quickly that it was everyone needed to have

“these you know these bird hats as they called them that's what they called them yeah yeah”

there were names for bird yeah bird hats you'd be like I'm gonna go to the store and get my mom

and very wide one as well and all loaded with feathers all loaded with feathers right in fact these

“things kind of became as time went on through the 1880s and 1890s as the designers competed with one”

another these hats became more ostentatious they had to try to outdo one another so they got bigger and and then it wasn't just feathers they were putting taxidermy birds on their heads and so it wasn't unusual to see three or four birds arranged with maybe some natural materials that would show the bird you know so it's like wearable taxidermy it kind of ties into this like you tell that they sort of arms race not arms race but I remember I can't remember who but someone was observing how

fashion always become self-parity meaning someone will make a wide leg jean and then they're like oh yeah

yeah you think that's wide jean mean or like oh a little hole in your jeans is cool how

“but I remove the entire front of my jeans you know and that's how like fashion goes to self-parity”

and then the thing vanishes so it's funny to think of feathers being like oh you think a few feathers are cool right well here's a bird right here's the it's exactly what happened and they got more ostentatious sometimes they were really close fitting hats almost like a close hat and they were all feathers and then each time a new season happened you'd have to get a new feather hat so I mean we're talking about sort of Victorian fashion very long dresses bustles

you know lots of petty coats and women had a lot of clothing on and then it was often topped off by these big hats and I talked about how some women could not would have to put their head out the window in order to ride on a streetcar or in a coach because their hat was so bad yeah so damn big would not it would not fit inside. Welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by multi-mobile and on-ex maps 12 of meat eaters biggest and badass

hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of

what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in manitoba if you've ever wondered what

a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a treat check it out now on meat eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months was there like if you picture for the be that you know at a time like you go back to the 50s or whatever be like a like a make for that was good yeah if you had a must grab

for if you had a possum for not as good but a make for was the shit yep the consumers have a notion of what when when feathers were the rage the consumers have a notion of what feathers they wore meaning was there was there were they aware of that this is a very rare feather or that this is the sort of an exclusive feather so the breeding feather the most popular feathers were many of like the florida florida waiting birds okay egress and and a snowy egress especially was it's breeding

“feather the aircraft i think is how you pronounce it that's the feather yeah there's there's this”

long breeding feather okay that the the bird gets and that was um it was quite a more than once that it was worth more than it's waiting gold um didn't weigh much of course yeah you see exactly it's pretty pretty but but it was a beautiful white feather and so those were really popular and and the plume hunters absolutely went after those birds because snowy egress yeah snowy egress and and then the rosyet spoon bill was was very popular and that was often for face fans

they were very pretty of course so yeah there there was some packing order the one of the famous things that that was good pond right there you know you know or you just do it on I just did it I didn't know I feel you catch that pond it's great you caught it I catch it before I pointed it out no I didn't don't that was just used to you congratulations yeah or do you know harm it can I do you

how they they made a pond and they they insisted that they did it on purpose that you think that

“you told me that okay I'm eating with some friends and we're at this place and they bring a”

caviar dish out one of my friends winds up with a caviar egg stuck right here on his lip okay and he says Marilyn Monroe and then goes ha okay and he claims he knew all along and made the road joke to us we felt there was a delay and then it occurred to him that he had made after he knew that this was on his lip like he was just going on the fact no

no someone said hey you got a piece of egg right here and he says oh you know Marilyn Monroe

ha meaning row fish egg so he's like oh no even when I said Marilyn Monroe I knew I was making a row joke other people at the table felt that there was a delay and you could see him

“realize after saying it how spot on it was Marilyn Monroe we never could settle it we”

consider trying to get security camera footage from the restaurant yeah to see the look in his eye when he realized he followed me right that he made of yeah he claimed to this day that he did it on

purpose for the way the packing order did this train of thought I used to have an editor who had

tell me puns all the time and then I would tell him to shut up and he would say we have a lot of pun around here and I'm not gonna take it that far so there's a packing order of birds well it's so what Frank Chapman was a banker and he was a famous ornithologist okay and Chapman wrote for forced and stream magazine he later became the curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History okay yeah he'd done all kinds of things later in his career but early

in his career when he was a banker and these feathers were appearing on women's hats he went down and did but what what is known as his famous sidewalk survey yeah he went as if he went to the shopping area in New York took a notebook and noticed that 500 some women out of 700 had feathers in their hats and because of his ability to look at these hats and tell what kind of feathers they were he was that good he was very good yeah and and he could tell that they were you know flickers

and woodpeckers and many they were backyard garden birds and then he wrote an article for forced and stream magazine saying women are wearing the feathers of our songsters and so that was part of that movement but yeah so he was like so he's in New York and he's a heart of the military or hat but he's he's seen like perhaps locally sourced birds oh yeah yeah in fact forced and streamed in article right around that time where they they went to one of these military houses

and talked about how many birds were being shipped in from Long Island and that they were coming in every day birds in meat as they called it they had just been shot with dust shot and and now they needed to be processed what's the shot they would use so dust they could they called it dust shot collectors still use it today uh ornithologists that are still permitted to collect it's very very fine with the shotgun like do you know like well how you would you know

like a nine shot today would be about that's someone's gonna crack me on this they'd be about a small as you're gonna find would be like a nine shot I'd have to look in the book I I didn't I'd be curious what it is and I didn't know what it was myself but I talked to a collector

“at the University of California Davis and that's what they use they call it dust shot because I was”

trying to find somebody to tell me okay what were they using at that time yeah and if you got you close to the bird you could blow to part yeah so you're trying to find a crane you dust shot yeah looking for milling yeah like what shot size was dust shot did uh and your book you

people looking for something to eat or is it different than that it was both so uh there was

“this practice called uology okay so if you were interested in birds at that time um say 1850s”

right after right after the civil war you did three things you you shot birds you took their eggs and you took their nest and and and that was sort of the the entry into birding at that time and and the reason was that optics weren't very good and there really weren't no good feel guys at that time so if you were interested in birds you went out with your shotgun and your dust shot you the birds or that was a birding truth yeah that was a birding truth yeah

oh number 12 number 12 number 12 okay about uh one point twenty one point two seven millimeters wow does that smaller bigger than number nine that's it's descending okay that I didn't I didn't even heard of it like nine it's small yeah you know nine nine would maybe be like you

“know might have applications you know like some guys will shoot morning doves yeah okay nine okay”

that's small yeah eight is a more common dove yeah which 12 number 12 never heard of it

so smaller than that no I guess just for our own apologies that I have a permit to do so um so you would shoot the bird you'd bring it back you would uh you'd probably have a big thick volume because again there's not really a field guide to take out their width you'd identify the bird and then you would uh taxidermy the bird as a study skin and then put it away and then the other thing you would do is you would collect their eggs and blow the egg out and um put some

nomenclature on the outside and indie ink and part of it was at that period there were still studying you know where did birds occur okay what subspecies was what what was the color the the morphology

“of the of the egg yeah all those kind of things and then they would take nest uh that practice”

was no one is nightology so these were like the three things that one like my nose that that

night out man dude I've never heard oology oology oology or night out I know all of you's collecting

bird eggs but that's right but like no election science right and then night out of you is collecting a bird nest but many American children are night out of you well there were more about it pains them to leave a bird nest you know I mean right it pains them to leave a bird nest in a tree once they confirm that it's been vacated it's painful to me so we still do nine hours you did that yeah I mean people bring them home to look but um yeah my kids are like there's no way

there's no way I don't leave that nats I'm gonna take it on christmas truth yeah there you go there you go so oologists were people who were interested in science and many of them were young

to were young men that always intended to do this like affluent affluent people yeah well

and I guess what I'm leading up to here to say that um a lot of oologists were just interested in egg collecting collecting egg bird eggs didn't have any science behind it it was more like stamp collecting or coin collecting okay it was kind of a craze at one time really yeah to to display in what way well you you would display them in your cabinet of curiosity oh go have you heard that yeah you know so mine's more of a box well exactly so it was it was uh people

entertained back then into parlor and they would have a cabinet uh in their parlor or they might have a whole room where they would display items of scientific interests which could be seashells eggs uh fossils there was a lot of interest during the gilded age of that period in scientific discovery okay and there was a lot of magazines you could read because magazine journalism was a big at that time too and there was a magazine called the uologist was what magazine called the

nightologist and it's a magazine about it absolutely yeah and and so you could read on how to how to do it you could you could buy and sell those eggs trade those eggs so a lot of uology a lot of uologists and there were 10 to thousands of them around the country at that time were not all that interested in birds or interested in science they were simply interested in these kind of uh things that looked like like they were pretty bubbles and in many ways that you could

heard any of this what you're telling me is creating like a really interesting context that didn't

“isn't often observed about theater Roosevelt because when you're reading theater Roosevelt”

biographies are talking to theater Roosevelt biographers they always make a big deal about his

collecting yeah but no one ever points out that i'm aware of that like it would be like like many young men of his means he was a collector you sort of get the sense that it was like a freak thing no not at all it was like a thing people were doing absolutely yeah it don't ever like no one ever does a good job of conveying that he was one of one of many or or a sort of use a product of his time sure well hope i certainly mentioned that in my book and and i also

mentioned uh Franklin Roosevelt was also a collector of birds and i went to hide park to look

at his bird collection okay and it's it's all there in his cabinet of curiosity he has mounted

birds and they would they would preserve them with arsenic and his his mother was afraid of FDR using arsenic and so she sent his birds down river to New York City and a professional would do his birds but Teddy Teddy would what would do his like she was hip to the idea that was hazardous oh yeah oh yeah yeah and and but yeah theater art theater or had his his own museum specimens his father was one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History so

theater or got to hang out at the museum and learn from some of the tax determinants there

“and if you go there today i think on the first floor there are still a couple of his mounts there”

god as as well i want to ask the same question to ask about song bird hunters around the egg collectors bird collectors private collectors um did it have a population level impact yes particularly on um again localized level and and and and sometimes with certain kinds of birds so uologist would trade or sell these birds and the prices would depend on a difficult to give by me yeah so one uologist said that um to get a paragon falcon egg you had to climb

and and he said once you visited the nest of five duck hawks which were you know paragon falcons you're living on borrowed time and if you look at the list um that i found in the uologist of the price of these eggs uh any kind of raptor egg was much more expensive oh and the other was i could definitely see that you'd have population level impact on that for example reasons like like low facundity um low density but then you can pretty much go into an area and if you're

like an a good observer you could probably go into an area and spend some time there and be like there's one there there's one there and there's one there and that's it right right and so they

would go back and forth now some uh many birds would um lay a second clutch you know and so

if you did this ethically you would take one clutch cloud them to lay the second clutch and and then reproduce but a lot of these so strictly yeah but a lot of these folks were greedy and and they were trading and selling and so they would go back time after time after time after again in order to do this man i can't believe like it's kind of blown my mind that like i catch wind all kind of weird stuff you know i had no idea this was the thing yeah yeah so uh what the hell's the word again

nightology nightology you know that's nest that's nest uology um t Gilbert Pearson who was the head of the

“national auto bonds deciding in the early part of the century i think he he was the president for”

20 25 years and he grew up rather poor and Florida and he was newologist and so he would collect all the his eggs and he would go back time after time after time to get his manny's he could and he would sell them he actually traded his egg collection to a small college in uh South Carolina you know in order to go to school and then his job was to go there and uh get an education while he was there take care of the uh the cabinet the curiosity cabinet which was a museum you know

protectors started off this way as young people yeah you know i'm like in my own work right now

“I'm looking i'm spending a lot energy looking at the fur trade as a continuum you know i mean”

a lot of times when people get into the fur trade they they're talking about colonial America or

whatever but like looking at it as the thing that never ended um and an observation i have

that i'll spend time on that i write about is the the like the enormous difference between the people that collect the fur and the people that ultimately wear the fur meaning the difference between a kid that grows up on a ranch in Nevada and catches a few bobcats every year and a Russian oligarchs wife who ultimately wears those bobcats not only a big difference but there's a somewhat of a culturally like a mutual disdain right the egg guys though like did the

“the egg trade i know the feather trade did but did the egg trade like kind of hatch a”

that was the bomb what's that oh i knew that i guess you could say it flew over your head or is that oh yeah fun but a good one for thank you i knew that and hatched whether like poor kids like farm kids whatever like poor kids that wouldn't have been the kind of people that had a parlor and the curiosity box who were just hip to the idea they knew they're like listen man

people pay money for these eggs but they weren't they weren't aspiring or anthologists they were just collectors that's right yeah absolutely there were plenty of folks like that Pearson actually take Gilbert Pearson he loved birds but that's exactly what he was doing you know one year someone wrote to him through the uologist and said i will take all the bird eggs

“from that part of florida and so that's what he did he went out and collected like crazy”

and he wasn't coming to it as an as a bird enthusiast he's coming to it as like hey they're going to pay for it i'll get it yeah exactly i have my own collection and i know we're all these birds are and so i'm going to do that but yeah there were a lot of people who who who did that even the bird collectors many of the shotgun or anthologists who were out and collected their own birds they didn't have time or they couldn't get everywhere they needed to get

for certain birds that they wanted so they could buy them or they could contract with people who

call themselves taxidermists but they were basically this contract hunters who would shoot those birds

for them and bring them back now whether we're talking about market hunting for ducks which is just supplying restaurants meat markets with duck meat or we're talking about the feather trade shooting e-grits spoon bills for decorations over tombo egg collecting like any of these things were tombo um when and how extensive what when did the damage start to show like the resource damage when did it show and how extensive did the damage get regardless of

what the ultimate use was like what were we seeing in terms of birds that we now think of as a abundant that weren't or birds that we know were wiped out right like when did it become apparent and how bad did it get probably by the 1880s 1890s when the american or anthologist union

formed in 1883 they created a committee at their second meeting to look at bird protection because

these guys were I call them birdmen in the book because they were all men but they were they were collectors that they were scientists mostly self-educated because there there was no university courses for to become an owner of the colleges they had this committee that went out and then studied you know what was happening with birds and they identified plenty of places where birds

they created that committee they figured that there were 60,000 turns that were shot for the

“feather trade and because in a year in a year and because where New York was located birds were”

disappearing through Long Island the Cape along New Jersey Barnocket Bay and and further down into the Carolinas too eventually by 1890s over the kiln the turns for feathers feathers there were all kinds of for a lot of different kinds of birds were used gals were very popular as well yeah I don't think of them as having like a crazy tricked out feather like a heron does or something no that that's true but there was a need for a tremendous amount of just whatever and then some

of them you could die and so you could you could change that but anyway so a seagull that

thrills a white feather that might have turned up on the market as a red feather yeah as something else that's right that's right but I've got a picture in a book that herring gals were used

“to make a hat and a tippet set I think as they called it and so at one point by the 1890s it was”

estimated and I did talk to a biologist on that who said look we weren't taking really good we didn't have good science back then but it was estimated back then that 95% of Florida's waiting birds disappeared during this period because of the feather trade and and clearly most of the no-one rookies were wiped out and then that kind of continued through Louisiana and Texas as well so it was very evident by the 1890s that the showy birds were just being wiped out and it was

clear because the prices had gone up so much from scarcity god that they were hard to harder to get welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by multi-mobile and on-ex maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long-form episodes

so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba if you've ever

wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months a thing about just being alive you know in America in a lot of places you go your sort of haunted by past image you know or or you're haunted by a sense of absence

right like you go to a place like if I'm just thinking around here you know you could go to a place where mountain men would talk about hillside full of big horns and they're seeing three four hundred big horns on the hillside he's anything gonna happen now or you know herds buffalo that you watch cross a river for three days all day right and you feel that absence but it's interesting to think that you could be in Florida right today you could be on vacation down in Florida on the beach

and you're like thinking back you could think back to maybe an era of greater abundance but you can also think back to an era when you probably wouldn't see any of the things you see that's right that's right you know be like an example of oh no it's better now like it's been worse right which is true again and again on all kinds of game animals and things but you just don't like I don't anyway think that you know you imagine like that you're on a shoreline

that you could have been on a shoreline back then there were no herds you see eagrets all over

“and pastures there were no eagrets in those pastures yeah I think you know I'm from Pennsylvania”

originally and Pennsylvania had about 500 deer left around 1900 in the entire state and I can remember when we did not see eagles this is you know 1960s when I was probably didn't see eagles there were no bears in that part of Pennsylvania now today there are eagles there are bears and so yeah same thing's true you know true with the um with birds as well that they've they've come back there's they're still not as abundant as they could be you know and maybe will be in

the future depending on on how we take care of them right but yeah I mean things around 1900

I I have a chapter in this book about George Berger now and Theto Roosevelt found in the blood and Crocodile and and that that did have effect also on birds as well yeah so sometimes

today you hear politicians and they'll talk about like deregulation is always the greatest thing in the

world what saved America's birds is is regulation that's right like if if we had stayed it wasn't even deregulated it was unregulated if we had stayed unregulated they'd be gone saving wildlife in America was regulation it was enacting regulation when the when people started to really realize that we were going to lose stuff and we did lose stuff because the passenger pigeon went

“extinct in 19 I think it was 19 13 I mean it was effectively extinct well before that the last one”

died I ever built woodpecker wiped out right Carolina and Parakeet Carolina Parakeet wiped out but when it got to where they were people started to try to get a grip on it how did that take place like what when you if you go look and you have this sense of urgency they're vanishing they're still hunting them without regulation where do you even like where do you begin like

what were the first things they decided to try well yeah I think that was the heart of the book

was to look at how these different groups came together to stop this from happening the politicians and the legislation really came later partially because of of public pressure to do something but you know the autobahn movement started in the late 1880s it went away for a couple of years the mats along story but it was it was resurrected by these women in Massachusetts then it's spread to different states these were what they called the bird sentiment list we want to save

these birds they called themselves that they did they did it seems like a slight well it was it to set to some degree because it was often run by women who who again the mores of the time was their their sentimental their softheaded they're they're too softhearted even some of the birdmen who were concerned about this were very suspicious of the autobahn society because I should birds I don't you know I don't look at them and and then a hunting community came in

partly because of of a marketing hunting they wanted to stop marketing hunting and they saw that there was a synergy between all three of these groups and then that continued into the 1900s and eventually began to enlist the politicians but it was a slow process but part of it was

“people were looking around and they were just fewer birds and I think the passenger pigeons”

decimation the way the the populations dropped off very quickly really hit people hard

they're right yeah I think you know a lot of I I say in the book that a lot of people never

took a train and went across the gray planes and saw you know these great herds above alone that were then of course you know being killed but if you're east of the Mississippi you probably witnessed the passing of the passenger pigeons which was an epic you know sight to see were you know so that was at the time I know what happened fast but like that was the thing people saw happen they saw happen and it's like and it struck them emotionally it did it did you know again

a lot of them hunted them the passenger pigeons were marking hunted they were eaten in restaurants in cities but at the same time it was something people grew up with was you know seeing the sky dark and it sounded like thunder it would kick all the dust up from from the land and these birds would take hours to pass by it was just it was just a sight of nature that no one will ever

“see again you know it happened in their lifetime it was gone and I think that's true of some of”

some other birds as well that you know that birds that were sort of favorites to be on the farm or beyond in your backyard were just not there anymore at that time was it like were the

uneasy partners somewhat at the same time some of the sentimentalists were hunters you know and and you know certainly and reading meat and reading birds that they were buying down at the market

“go and so they understood that so I think it was a matter of over time coming together saying”

we can you know we can work together and and then it was not so much that well we don't like hunters we don't like market hunters and we don't like game hogs the pot hunter and the pot hunter was again the subsistence hunter who had no restraint because of the laws or you you could ignore them so they were going out and shooting a hundred ducks and and then the sport hunter tended to be someone who felt that there ought to be laws and there ought to be some limits now at the same time

when sport hunting first started in the 1870s 1880s the whole idea was to kill as many things as you could that was a good day in the field yeah and George Shyrus talks about that even when he

“introduced his 1904 build or protect game birds he said I would go out you know on a day and”

kill 200 birds and and just bring a few home and leave the leave the rest there or take him into town and sell them and it was part of this home mentality of the guilt of age that we live in a

limitless time and there's always going to be more why because there always has been more

you know and dislike the buffalo and I talk about it in the book that this this began to change people started to realize you can't cut all the trees down and you someday you will cut all the trees down or someday you're going to kill all the buffalo or you're going to kill all the kid candidates and that's where the term conservation comes into the lexicon and that isn't really come in until the 1880s 1890s so what were some of the legislative steps that that help sort of

sure put put get a grip on things or get things under control so the american one of the

colleges you can first came out with what they called their model law and it was a law that that they were

asking states to pass to protect non-game birds and that was non-game birds and so they kind of left all the game birds to sports people got it they'll sort that out exactly exactly although later that changed and and so you had some states that adopted these laws but there wasn't a lot of money for game organs you know to enforce it there were the sheriff's departments and these little these little counties did not want to arrest anybody for shooting birds sometimes their own families

were involved in shooting birds and so it really wasn't until the leci act which you know you know I'm sure a lot about well you know the leci act was John leci was a lawyer from Iowa

“in 1900 and I look at my notes a little bit because I've tried to remember in 1900 he passed the”

well but became known as the leci act and that was to try to prevent market hunting market hunters from bringing birds across state lines so if you if you shot birds and Kansas that were in violation of that of Kansas law let's say Kansas had a back season if you could pack them into barrels put them on a train and get them across the border you could just sell them and and so his so the the leci act was that birds can't be sold for wildlife in general

can't be sold outside of the state where it was killed illegally and that started to put a

damper on feather hunting and and meat hunting and it was really the first federalization

of wildlife and birds okay so that was that that was one of the initial introductions of the idea that a state couldn't just decide to wipe something out that's right you know under the argument that hey it's our state don't tell us what to do exactly so places like Louisiana and other other these states along to Mississippi Missouri that were still allowing lots of duck shooting could no longer their market hunters could not get those birds out of the

and because we hear the leci act now in terms of all kinds of things like you could poach a

“white tail buck and bring it to an Illinois and bring it to a tax nurse in Indiana and why not”

getting a leci act violation or it happens around fish but it was conceptualized as a bird thing yeah and and it was also there were leci agents that were created at that time federal agents that were going into cold storage facilities and and finding you know thousands of birds and barrels that they knew have been killed illegally and then they were confiscating when you heard that turn birds and barrels do you have any of that means yeah I mean you could pack a bird in a barrel

and in a brine cleaned birds or they mean like feathered birds you cleaned a bird and you could

pack it in a zinc barrel and you could pump you could pump all the air out of it and then you could keep it in a cold storage for years so these cold storage I have one whole chapter called cold storage man and I found this great book in 1904 about a guy who started off being a market market hunter then he became a cold storage man and he explained to me again so I got a bunch of birds you say you shoot a bunch of birds you know and initially you could put him into an ice house

yeah with natural ice and so you might just got him and put him in an ice house that's right

and then try to keep him for six months and then ship them because you got a train now

in many places now you have train transportation and you could put him in these ice boxes and get him to Chicago and get him to New York I mean a lot of market hunting went on locally and but once ice came along and and trains came along then you could start transporting birds another wildlife you know a thousand miles which is what happened with passenger pigeons passenger pigeons had roost and for weeks people would just kill them the pigeonears as they were known

they were hunters could kill them and ship them out on trains okay but explain the barrel thing to me so what this guy I mean and I I'm not an expert on this but but with this guy that they arrested who was known as the he was known as the quail king and he was raided his ice house was raided and they found tens of thousands of birds in his ice house and good and he had

“some in these zinc barrels where I think one airtight barrel airtight barrel pumped out and”

and that when the warden who came in cut open to barrel they took some of the birds and cook them and said they tasted quite well really yeah now that seems like a long time so he's like creating some kind of like anaerobic environment but something air out of a barrel exactly so you know in the chapter he talks about how he initially got into this business so he married he was he was in he was in Illinois he married a woman from Illinois and but he wanted to take

her back to New York to meet the the relatives it was it was spring it was still kind of cold he shot a few plover and he shot some prairie chickens he put him in his suitcase and then it was in a cool baggage car when he got to New York he pulled the birds out he walked down to an open market you know open air market at that time and people surrounded him immediately and wanted to buy his birds and he said he he he named and outrageous price and they bought his

birds he wanted to buy him to eat him yeah exactly exactly and you know and he's like wow you know they that's a great price then he started looking around at the at the other people who were selling birds there and just saw that their birds were just bad looking birds and just kind of spoiled and whatever known wonder everybody wanted his birds his birds still look fresh and he said I can make a lot of money if I can get these Illinois birds to New York on ice you know and

“make money and that's how his whole business started selling Illinois birds in New York yeah”

and then as Illinois got shot out then he moved out to Iowa in Nebraska and then he stopped hunting completely and just became a cold storage band or refrigerator meal what they call yeah and it was a great book to find this called the that's why I wrote it down so I couldn't remember

McQuail King and the cold storage man and you're asking me a question I can't find

“type that in crime Quail King cold storage man 1904 1904 I think the book was called the tale of the”

gun the tale of the gun yeah yeah and you wrote it in 1904 about his it's a memoir being a mark 100 and in his life it was a great fine I just found it on the internet I thought this thing works perfect yeah so if we if we left off we were talking about lazy act right what like so lazy act predated the migratory in songbird tree you're whatever that's right so so 1900 was

really the first federalization of of wildlife where the federal government's now moving in

and saying you know we're gonna do something about you people probably haven't fit absolutely particularly millenarian industry the mark and hunters they're all worried 1904 George

“Shyrus the third introduces the Shyrus bird bill which was something like the week and the”

migratory bird treaty although George was just saying that only game birds should be protected but what he is saying at that point is that the states cannot protect these birds and they're not acting in coordination so as a duck flies you know south and north and north and south it's being shot in every state pretty much as as it's going because there's not uniform regulations across that shy was new that law was not going to pass but he wanted to introduce that

concept and he was a lawyer so he had worked out this legal theory of national powers act police powers act to do this and he knew it wasn't going to pass in Congress then because there were a lot of states rights folks that said we don't want to fellow government

in the stepping into this sure man his conversation never ends right so

over the next few years though a lot of bad things were happening birds were still you know dying off now there's no passenger pigeons flying around the oddabond movement the the boon and crocket folks and all of these movements in public pressure starting to mount on this so in 1911 12 it bubbles up again and that becomes the weeks McLean act the other thing in happened at that time was the American game protective and propagation

association which is this long that they eventually made their name a lot shorter but that was the the ammo and gun manufacturers it said we want to help out and and we want to start disorganization because we're getting afraid that our people aren't going to have anything to shoot at or support hunters and they so that's when the hunters really moved into this bird protection thing and they decided that that you know their aim was stop market hunting

completely yeah protect migratory birds get you know get the feds and feds involved and they came together with the oddabond society to to push for the passage of this act now the oddabond

“society came in and said you know we what we will help you however you have to include non-game”

birds okay and that became the Dickey bird amendment was bringing in these like a treaty bird yeah the treaty bird exactly bringing in these little birds now there were still birds so that was like an add-on it was an add-on yeah it was it was the oddabond society that came in and said

well we basically support bird collection however you're just supporting game birds you got to add

the Dickey birds yeah you got to add the Dickey bird so it was called a Dickey bird amendment now which is British slang for a little bird like it would say treaty bird here so they they added that amendment and then the American game folks were good lobbyist aggressive lobbyist and the campfire club was involved in it and there were some other groups there and they all came in the Congress and they lobbied for the passage of the weeks McLean Act and then that was passed

in 1913 and then there was a the agriculture department had to create rules and so there was like

season on certain birds that were in danger of you know extinction including the wood duck

at that time okay and and that raised a lot of concern from these states down south that were you know Missouri and some of these other ones it still wanted this you know they still

“felt that the state was was the ownership of birds that's important in people involved in that”

time we're Howard Taft who was Roseville's vice president Taft had been a judge and a lawyer and later to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Taft said the week McLean's Act is unconstitutional because there was there was law that said the states really do own it and it's gonna lose and there's

also a guy named Elehu Root he was a senator he had also been Secretary of State under Roosevelt he

had been Secretary of War under Taft and so these two people told shy was look your law is unconstitutional and if it gets tested which it did guy shot two coots and they went all the way up to the Supreme Court so he said the way to get around that is well when they were pointing out that it's unconstitutional they supported the idea they supported the idea they just though it's bad legislation yeah they thought you know they thought George's legal theory was just not good on it was just not

going to make a constitutional muster yeah with the Supreme Court so they're advising him they're advised rather than rather than being an adversary so so the end around of all of this is like

“you need to go to Canada and and get a treaty if you get a treaty with Canada that”

basically we're gonna protect birds not only that go across state lines but also go across international law because that's what's going to a bird treaty it's actually my Detroit bird treaty because most of the the ducks are nesting in Canada and then coming back south so if you get a bird treaty under the supremacy clause the uh is circumstances Supreme Court and so that was the end around you know you're gonna lose in court and so let's go for the treaty and that'll be the

end around now they negotiated with Canada not Mexico because Mexico was still in the revolutionary

state of that point they joined in later they did the 1930 is we reopen so that the the ability to have that is based on this treaty but what is the treaty called so the treaty is called the migratory bird act treaty but it had to have been adopted by Congress right it was adopted by Congress yeah about about 1919 1920 they made it they made it like law law they yeah they made it a law but those guys in Missouri including the attorney general they talked about earlier

they were still not buying it they were still not buying it that's when they shot those ducks that's when they were caught by the federal ward and it went up to the Supreme Court Frank McAllister the attorney general argued the case in front of the court and the court said you know it it doesn't make any difference it's a treaty and that supersedes all states rights

“and and that's what it was but was this McAllister guy was he violating his own state law”

because by that point they probably had like kind of a fake law like they had a law that no one paid in the attention to or did they not have any regulation in his state they had regulations that they could that they had a spring shooting season that extended beyond what the feds had said just bring it so he wasn't he was legal in his state he was okay he was he was it's a great story actually when what what I had what ended up happening to that guy McAllister well he was

going to be the governor but he thought he was going to be the governor but this didn't help this cost him votes yeah it's cost him votes and and he ended up becoming a lawyer for the Kansas City Insurance Company and he was actually arrested with some Kansas City insurance executives when he was arrested they were all shooting out you know shooting these birds and so I went to stults like which is this little duct club of 25 people in the vaiden Missouri just

just to go there he is still there and and to see where those guys the way of the sort of role their club played not completely it was kind of funny because you know they were saying that they thought it was all a setup that that that that was sort of how the it had trickled down that

not true oh okay so it's it's become over time it's become that it was a little more benevolent

“yeah in reality he was like no I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do and and and he got to this club”

and these it's a great story these guys followed him down they they they they got out at four clock in the morning at this little town and it was a taxi driver there and they said they could sell to the duct club and the guys said well what duct club because the one max at the call them back and they actually took them out to the club and and on the way out they said you can't get in there because it's locked to keep the keep the game warden's out because don't worry

Mcillett is in and it wasn't locked and they were actually able to drive right in got dropped off

knocked on the clubhouse door uh dragged one guy out of bed so apparently those guys had the open fields doctrine and didn't need a warrant no because it was game it was a game by the way yeah yeah

“yeah so because you got in there under subterfuge they did they did yeah I don't know that much about”

that's exactly how they did so that's like this is if this could be a follow up like an adendum if you ever do one for your book because there's a there's a lively debate right now where if a game warden suspects there's a violation occurring on private property he doesn't need a warrant hmm okay sure so if a game warden standing on a public road and you're shooting away on your private property right he can walk on over sure in a way that

like a cop cannot do right right okay then there's this thing the open fields doctrine and it's like it gives game wardens a level of latitude on private property that normal police don't enjoy in terms of durability to go and check out what's going on right like like the if they know hunting to be taking place that gives them what they need to go on to the property and then see is there a violation occurring they don't need to be motivated by knowledge of it occurring

and this is being tested now on there's you know private property rights advocates are arguing why in the world would we allow wardens to violate what they proceed to be their constitutional rights and that you'd have like illegal search and seizure whatever why is that okay for a game warden and so it's being tested I would picture I'm an aspiring polymarket better

“if I was a polymarket bedding man I would go and create one about like in the future I think”

that we will see and I'm not saying I agree with this right in the future we will see a reduction in game wardens abilities to go and do their work on private property that's interesting like your body yeah if your body that caught the like your body that caught the bad guy we're considering how much private land there is and and right so you could only do it on public land yeah public land do whatever you want right but their their contesting is that uh you know

that they can go do what they want the game work can go over and be like what's up boys which happens all time yeah right you know right I've been sitting out there duck hunting and cornfields and you turn around and scares you because the game warden stand there and some people are like how could that be true like like a cop you know I mean sure like how could that but you're how can you be standing here all the sudden around my place where's your warrant

you know it's a robust debate right now interesting now so um once you book out it comes out

March 17th oh we're good mm-hmm yeah okay yeah you can basically get it now because you

you know yeah you can create pre-order now and day before that's right yeah and it's just like when you do that it just shows up lots as they ship early too congratulations I'm holding a good thank you for people watching I'm holding a ga- what's called a galley copy says um not for quotation not for resale uncrected proof in the vernacular we know these is galley copies sure so when you get yours you'll get a brand spickety nice hardcover book yeah and it's got some um um two inserts

of you know slick photos in there and and I find a lot of great uh historical photos as well you know oh they all call these advanced reader copies as it says right down the cover idea being just a little um publishing inside uh if you realize that there's a review for a book

out yet yeah so they sent them one of these advanced reader copies so that's what I'm holding

“I want people realize that they order the book they get like a like a legit book yeah you know”

this is just a attractive looking book to attract a looking book get it's called the feather wars

and the great crusade to save America's birds with James James H. McCommons Irish name

“absolutely all right thanks so much for coming I'm appreciate it thank you I appreciate it too it's been fun”

welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by multi-mobile and on-ex maps 12 of meat eaters

biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form

“episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in manitoba”

if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meat eaters youtube channel and be on the look out for more 12 and 26 in the coming months this isn't iHeart Podcast guaranteed human