Ire ee UD Ur BrOpNe BU L Tre IeN 27 
Man's Dominion of the Green Earth 
by BETTY GROTH 
Vice President, Conservation 
SINCE 1897, the colorful, violent years of the diamond lifespan of Illinois 
Audubon Society have painted the grim destruction of our country’s 
natural resources. Let’s take a shocking look at what we have lost... seen 
partly through the mirror of research by the distinguished Frank Graham, 
Jr... . partly through our family histories. 
IN THE YEAR 1879, the year my father was born in Illinois, three 
men killed 9,000 alligators in Louisiana. In the 1870s and 1880s, during my 
father’s boyhood in Kansas, the railroads shipped 300,000 tons of buffalo 
bones from Kansas alone to fertilizer plants in the East. In the terrible 
westward march of civilization, known as the “age of extermination,” mil- 
lions of buffalo crossed streams of settlers to their disaster ... “most 
bison shot in sheer lust by hunters already gorged and overladen with 
buffalo meat. . . herds cut off from one another by the advancing railroad 
tracks, shot for sport by tourists firing from windows of trains.” Specialist 
market gunners slayed thousands just for their tongues. 
THE AMERICAN ELK, once the most widespread hoofed animal on 
our continent, at first slaughtered for fun and food, was finally slaughtered 
for its teeth for gentlemen’s watch chains. In the East, a dangerous de- 
cline in species followed forests that were felled, swamps that were 
drained, habitats wiped out. . . victims of “progress.” Taxidermy flourished, 
American parlors boasting stuffed wild birds approximating small museums. 
EGGING WAS POPULAR — fathers and sons pursuing their collec- 
tions together with enthusiasm. One noted ornithologist collected 235 
different sets of robin’s eggs alone. Unexpected pressures fell on bird 
populations when outstanding scientists and ornithologists ran a fever 
to collect rare bird skins. When the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker went down 
to 20, there were over 200 in American museums. Naturalist Frank Chap- 
man himself collected 46 Bachman warbiers along Florida’s Suwannee 
River, a bird not seen in Florida since 1909. 
MANY AN AMERICAN MEAL was furnished with herons, whooping 
cranes, and tender young whistling swans... “All went into the pot at 
one time or another.” In the midwest in 1873, Chicago markets bought 
600,000 prairie chickens at $3.25 a dozen, brought in by hunters in Illinois, 
Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana... a glut in the butcher shops. In the 
South, robins were “hunted relentlessly well into this century, for inclu- 
sion in pies and stews.” At one place, market gunners “grossed $500 per 
year, selling robins at five cents a dozen.” In market stalls, robins were 
hung up for sale in strings like onions, hanging beside meadowlarks, 
thrushes, warblers, vireos, yellow-headed blackbirds, and even woodpeckers. 
