The Laborers of Nature: Economic Ornithology and the Role of Birds as Agents of Biological Pest Control in North American Agriculture, ca. 1880–1930

Abstract

Itriculture has been blamed, on occasion, for creating its own pests. In 1864 George Perkins Marsh wrote in Man and Nature that "[w]ith the cultivated plants of man come the myriad tribes which feed or breed upon them, and agriculture not only introduces new species, but so multiplies the number of individuals as to defy calculation. "1 Since early in the twentieth century, the solution to insect pests in North American agriculture has been the heavy use of insecticides. Although biological control techniques were important early in the century and have become a focus of attention more recently, the place of insecticides in the twentieth-century history of agricultural pest control is central and remains so. Over the past twenty years, environmental and agricultural historians have sought to analyze the origin and course of pest control regimes in modern North American agriculture.? They have placed particular emphasis on determining why over the course of the past century pesticides came to prevail in pest control regimes. Historians have proposed a variety of possible factors, including the role of agribusiness and statefunded science in institutionalizing and promoting pesticides, the cachet of pesticide research in entomological science following World War II, and the attractiveness of pesticides to farmers. Less attention within this overarching question has been given to the history of biological control, and even when it has been considered, the definition of biological control has been narrowly conceived.' With rare exceptions, biological pest control has been understood to be the use of insect predators (whether introduced into an ecosystem or emergent through habitat modification) in the control of insect or weed pests. This definition, although it covers the broad scope of biological control, ignores various other techniques on its margins. One of these other, marginal techniques is the role of birds as agents of biological control. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, scientific ideas about this method of pest control developed within the context of popular debates over bird preservation and conservation generally. These ideas, although predominantly generated in the United States, were diffused and debated in the Canadian and American agriculrural literature, with little respect for political borders. Avian agent biological control has long been used throughout the world in forestry and has received attention recently in the integrated pest management literature." But in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the notion of using birds to help control pests, among the gamut of methods that were proposed and debated within the agricultural literature, commanded significant attention.' Growing out of the natural historical concern for teleological design in nature and debates over bird importation, systematic studies of the potential role of birds as pest control agents were first produced