Hope is many things, but it throws itself against fact and shatters. - Pete Dunne

But since it was birders he was dealing with, there wasn’t any harm just letting us in on the honor system. There was no question in his mind (or ours) that we would ante up when departing. That’s just the way birders are.

They were sport gunners, too—a class spawned by wealth and leisure who carried their “sport” to tasteless Victorian excess. Both professional and the sport hunter approached the killing of “game” with zeal and the conviction that North America’s wildlife was infinite. The faith was ill-founded. Not only is a continent’s wildlife finite, but, to the shock of many, by the turn of the century much of it was gone and a lot more was going fast.

In the free-for-all age before conservation, scientists were not the only ones “collecting” birds. Great numbers of birds were killed for sport and for market, and the myth of America’s inexhaustible resources sustained the slaughter past the point of reason.