Best things I read this year

Birds are all just little guys

This is what a billion passenger pigeons could do to a forest:

If your man doesn't treat you like a white-breasted nuthatch, LEAVE HIM

The real reason Ben Franklin didn't want the Bald Eagle as the national symbol was so he could land a pun about kingbirds

Some personal news: I’m writing a book! I’ve signed with Holt to write a full-length history of birds and people in America. Birds have always been central to our economy, divisions, culture, and identity. If you want to understand America, you‘ve got to understand its birds.

the most ☺️ bird i've ever seen

I want someone to make a Merlin app but it's just Mark Catesby's descriptions of birds from 1732. "This Bird, by its ungrateful brawling Noise, seems at Variance and displeased with all others" is a great field mark

This feels important to me

Nighthawks nesting on an apartment roof in Brooklyn, 1914

Every day you don't go birding is a day closer to death

Birding is clearly having a cultural moment. What it would take to make this a political moment? Birds are declining at an alarming rate and the 100M birdwatchers w/ the $107B they spend on birding yearly haven't emerged as a political constituency. It's a hobby, not a movement.

This creed hasn’t changed: man above beasts, profit above life. We still trade extinction for “growth,” still justify destruction as destiny. This isn’t fringe—it’s mainstream, rooted in 10,000 years of monotheistic dominion.

This was written in 1879, just a few years before passenger pigeons disappeared from the wild. These people are still out there

Here’s a great little story from 1885 about a semi-wild stork? heron? crane? stalking around Memphis “exactly like Oscar Wilde” subsisting entirely on house sparrows, for which it was undoubtedly considered a public servant

Typical craigslist ad

After passenger pigeons disappeared people tried using house sparrows for their shooting contests instead, which they hoped would kill two birds with one stone

A list of birds that once frequented New York City, but had disappeared by 1923. It's encouraging that nearly every one that has not gone extinct can at least occasionally be spotted in the city.

To be a bobwhite in a potato field hootin with my bobwhite wife

Americans saw extinction as an inevitable consequence of progress, connected to native peoples' removal. "The passenger pigeon - the very image of exultant wildness - will soon be a rarity," having "departed w/ the disappearance of savagery in the land. " - Harper's Weekly, 1889

One candidate for best folk name is the Red-bellied Woodpecker, which apparently went by Chad

schnip schnap, they're eating my peas Incredible story from Alexander Wilson, America's first ornithologist, in 1812.

Having names for plants and animals is our starting point for interacting with nature. I think that's discouraging for a lot of people because they don't know the names for things around them (me included!) but instead why don't we just… make them up?

Another excellent piece here, this is the best bird writing in the biz right now

Americans used to know birds by thousands of unique local folk names. Ruddy Ducks alone were called dummy duck, dinky, dipper, dopper, dumb-bird, and god-damn. My latest piece is on the joy of folk names and losing them to the bureaucratic formalization of knowledge about birds.

If you're my enemy, this is how I'm regarding you

While "odd duck" and "silly goose" both began their rise to prominence in the 1990s, it seems like "odd duck" is of truly recent origin, while "silly goose" has enjoyed the periodic resurgence in popularity, most recently in the 1870s.

I wrote about the Reiser brothers and their hilarious, disgusting Listers documentary for Slate: slate.com/culture/2025...

Guano miners on Laysan Island, 1891.

The Pittsburgh/sooty bird one, of course, is real: Bird specimens track 135 years of atmospheric black carbon and environmental policy | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Some abysmal bird jokes from 1908

The Excitement Of Touching The Eccentric Woodcock On The Back

In other words,

My favorite side quest is eating foods at the place the food is named for. So far I've eaten: -buffalo wings in Buffalo, NY -key lime pie in the Florida keys -Nashville hot chicken in Nashville What else (in the US) am I missing?

As a niche bird history account I gotta share that there was a run on pet canaries after 9/11 because people thought they'd help protect against poison gas, one pet store owner said "I don't want to seem unpatriotic or anything but canary business has been great ever since 9/11"

This isn't how birding is supposed to work!

My 4 y.o. niece's favorite game is saying she wants to hear a bird that sounds "very scary" or "like a howl" or "funny" and then I have to find a bird that meets her demanding requirements on the Merlin app

can anyone confirm if this is true?

At least 25 species of parrots have become naturalized in the US, which are just a fraction of the 1,500+ kinds of wild birds that Americans imported as pets. We've mostly forgotten about the wild bird trade, but the 1950s-80s was an unprecedented shuffling of biodiversity.

People used to catch Cardinals and ship them to England as pets. Here's what they had to say about "Virginia Nightingales" in 1740.

The last passenger pigeon died 111 years ago today and not a day goes by that I don't think about how their flocks numbered in the *billions*, that their roosts covered 100+ square miles, that they collapsed trees with their nests. America is incomplete without them

Inside you there are two birds

“There’s lots of hawks, some FAT turkeys, some that are red blue black and yellow, some that are like the ones in England but different, plus a bunch where I don’t know their names.” -A guy writing down all the birds he saw in Maryland in 1635.

"log god" and "wood god" honestly describe it better than Pileated Woodpecker

One of the few folk names that birders still use is calling woodcocks Timberdoodles. But some of the other options are just as good! A personal favorite is "Labrador Twister."

Old folk names for American birds are just too good. We could have gone with Tweezer, Wheezer, Weaser, or Wooser for this guy but instead settled for Common Merganser. Major missed opportunity.

Robot is Czech for forced labor??

This statistic on US bird imports is insane

I'm confused that the existence of blood pheasants is not a more prominent part of our culture

So this note sent me on a bit of an etymology spiral and I learned some really fun things so it’s time to bring back my favourite trend: the gosh darn etymology thread