Mexico affords legal protection to raptors, but it is a paper law only, poorly enforced and widely ignored in the field. - Scott Weidensaul

You won’t find the cerulean warbler on the federal Endangered Species list; it is not so far gone as to rate that kind of last-gasp governmental life support, which is usually withheld until it is too late to do much good.

Some of these observations of “prairie pigeons” were made incidental to blasting them out of the sky; curlews, golden-plovers, godwits, and other shorebirds were treated much as passenger pigeons back East had been, with no-holds-barred slaughter. There are a number of accounts of gunners filling wagon beds with heaps of dead birds—then dumping the birds out to rot and filling the wagons all over again because the shooting was too good to stop.

It is a prairie’s gentle deceit that you think you see everything there is in a single, sweeping glance, when in fact you see very little at all, even if you spend a lifetime looking.