Great egret 



Scott D. Taylor 



ran up against a booming black market 

 in illegal game. And local juries proved 

 reluctant to penalize violators of the 

 new conservation laws. Resistance 

 might have been less ardent if the new 

 legislation had prohibited only market 

 gunning, not shooting for local 

 consumption. But the Audubon 

 activists were skeptical of halfway 

 measures. Then, in 1906, the Gunner's 

 and Fishermen's League in Currituck 

 County began to organize political 

 opposition to, in a local newspaper's 

 words, "the Honorable T. Gilbert 

 Pearson and his legion of women and 

 children backers." 



Responding to this backlash, the 

 General Assembly stripped the 

 Audubon Society's authority over bird 

 and game conservation in 1909. A few 

 years later, in 1916, North Carolina 

 was the only Southern state except for 

 Mississippi without such a regulatory 

 system. Not until passage of the 

 Enabling Act to the first federal 



Migratory Treaty in 1918 did conserva- 

 tion enforcement get real teeth. By 

 then, New York had cut off most 

 market gunning by outlawing any trade 

 in plumage across its borders. North 

 Carolina finally created its own bird 

 and game conservation agency, the 

 N.C. Game Commission (now known 

 as the N.C. Wildlife Commission), in 

 1927. 



Despite setbacks, the early 

 Audubon activists made important 

 conservation strides. In addition to 

 advocating stricter conservation laws, 

 they purchased key island rookeries as 

 preserves and nourished a growing 

 public interest in wise stewardship of 

 the state's natural heritage. By World 

 War II, most of North Carolina's 

 coastal birds had rebounded. Only 

 piping plovers seem never to have 

 recovered from the millinery trade. 

 Ecologists today rightly consider the 

 recovery of the Atlantic coast's 

 marshbirds, shorebirds and seabirds as 



one of the great triumphs of modern 

 conservation. 



Pearson devoted his life to bird 

 conservation. In 1937, near the end of 

 a long and fruitful career, he reflected 

 on the dark days of the great coastal 

 bird hunts. Pearson hoped lessons had 

 been learned. He hoped a new era of 

 respect for wildlife had arrived and a 

 new empathy for nature's frailty had 

 been reached. 



Pearson remembered, too, a bit 

 ironically, how much he used to enjoy 

 the market gunners' company. Many 

 an evening he enjoyed a gunner's 

 hearth. He had found them brave, 

 daring men. They brimmed with 

 feistiness, knew the wild and told 

 raucously good tales. He respected 

 many of them. In his eyes, a lifetime 

 spent in bird conservation cast no ill- 

 light on the gunners. "It is the sys- 

 tem," Pearson had always argued, 

 "which encouraged overkilling of the 

 bird supply, that must be changed." □ 



COASTWATCH 23 



