In The Feather Wars, the journalist profiles the hunters, naturalists, and socialites who pioneered the bird conservation movement.

Before industrialized poultry farming, Americans ate a lot of wild fowl. What surprised you most about the birds that filled late-19th-century pots?

They were birds we wouldn’t consider game today, like songbirds and wading birds. Many immigrants had grown up killing birds in their home countries. It was subsistence hunting, a way to get more protein. People also gathered wild eggs.

Bird hunting was often astonishingly cruel. What methods did you find most unsettling?

Pigeoners—people who captured passenger pigeons—would sew a bird’s eyelids shut to lure other birds in with its fluttering. They would net 200 or 300 at once and then wring all their necks. This was industrialized killing, done to order—barrels of pigeons were shipped on trains to cities. It was gruesome.

America’s earliest ornithologists were wealthy young men with leisure time. Would avian conservation have taken off without their involvement?

They were the scientists of the day. They started off shooting birds to identify and classify them, and then they became concerned. They shared their concern with people who were sentimental about birds, many of whom were women socialites. Eventually, ornithologists, bird sentimentalists, and hunters all came together to help pass conservation laws. The pushback was from the lower classes who said, “These are animals we grew up eating, it’s part of our heritage,” and “We get hard cash killing birds and selling their feathers.”

In 1889, Florence Merriam published a book encouraging the study of birds through opera glasses and was labeled a sentimentalist. Was this misogyny?

Certainly so. But she became influential; her book encouraged learning through observation, through watching behaviors. She pioneered the move from shotgun ornithology to sight recognition.

It’s eye-opening to realize that wild birds were once regarded as a renewable resource. What turned the tide of public opinion?

It was the recognition that there were limits. First, people saw the American bison almost go extinct. Then, passenger pigeons—they were the most abundant bird on the planet. Their migrations were among the great wonders of the natural world. When they disappeared, people couldn’t imagine where they’d gone—the thinking at first was genuinely, “They must have flown over the ocean, they’re going to be back.” I thought it was worth telling this story to see what conservationists did to reach people, to explain what was happening. It was a moral argument, more than anything.