Reading old naturalist essays as I frequently do, I have come to accept certain anachronistic ideas or pronouncements as simply to be expected. However every so often I stumble upon one that stops me cold and leaves me aghast at just how mistaken it was. Such was my first – and later discovered to be mistaken – reaction to this recently read passage from a well-known book written by one of my favorite writers, Mr. John Burroughs:
Indeed, what would be more interesting than the history of our birds for the last two or three centuries. There can be no doubt that the presence of man has exerted a very marked and friendly influence upon them, since they so multiply in his society. The birds of California, it is said, were mostly silent till after its settlement, and I doubt if the Indians heard the wood thrush as we hear him. Where did the bobolink disport himself before there were meadows in the North and rice fields in the South? Was he the same lithe, merry-hearted beau then as now? And the sparrow, the lark, and the goldfinch, birds that seem so indigenous to the open fields and so adverse to the woods,—we cannot conceive of their existence in a vast wilderness and without man. (John Burroughs, Wake-Robin, Chapter 1: The Return of the Birds)
While it is indeed true that certain bird species such as House Sparrows and American Crows are synanthropic, ornithologists are now observing that many others are most certainly not benefiting from the changes humans have wrought to the landscapes. However, at the point in time that Mr. Burroughs wrote this passage, his cited Bobolink, a bird we now associate with a long downward population trend in grassland-dwelling species that began in the 1940s, was in fact then increasing in numbers due to the Nineteenth Century expansion of agriculture across the United States.
That’s the beauty of old books – they are a snapshot of the world as seen from the time of their being written. What we sometimes think we have found in them at first can be discovered to have a wholly different reason behind it that we can only come to understand through further inquiry.
