During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a conservation movement coalesced around a campaign to save the nation's birds, whose populations were under pressure because of the fashionability of hats decorated with feathers. The Audobon Society and the American Ornithological Union both formed out of this campaign. The campaign was given renewed urgency in the early 1890s when a report appeared in various publications, including the
Northwest Sportsman of Oregon and the
Sportsmen's Review of Chicago, that millions of waterfowl eggs were being collected in breeding grounds in Alaska and then shipped east for sale. The eggs, it was said, were a source of dried albumen used in a variety of commercial applications such as photography, the manufacture of leather, and candy-making. The magazines warned that the collection of these eggs threatened the existence of the duck and geese populations of the entire west.
The duck egg scare soon reached congress. On January 26, 1895 Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon spoke to the Senate and declared that the egging was a corporate plot. He said, "It is a fact, that... certain corporations have been formed and large amounts of capital invested for the purpose of gathering in these breeding grounds and packing and shipping annually vast millions of the eggs of these ducks and geese." Mitchell also asserted that on the Canadian Pacific Railway "not infrequently as many as 1,000, 1,200, and as high as 1,800 barrels of these eggs are forwarded in one train of cars." He asked for an investigation into the egging, to pave the way for legislation designed to protect the eggs of wildfowl.
The
New York Tribune published Mitchell's speech, and the Oregon legislative assembly petitioned Congress to endorse his call for an investigation. But on June 22, 1895 the editors of
Forest and Stream exposed the duck egg scare to be nothing more than a hoax, or, in their words, "an unmitigated fake." They had conducted an investigation into the story and had found that neither the railways nor the custom collectors had any records of wildfowl eggs being shipped from Alaska. Furthermore, the nation's largest importer of albumen, Klipstein & Company, knew nothing about Alaskan eggs. They obtained their eggs from Europe.
Forest and Stream suggested the duck egg story may have been invented as a red herring to distract the American public from the real cause of the decline in bird populations—overhunting. If this was the case, then the diversionary tactic did not succeed, as in the following decades a large amount of legislation was passed regulating hunting and protecting the nation's wildlife.
Links and References
- Sherwood, Morgan. "The Great Duck Egg Fake". Alaska Journal 1977 7(2): 88-94.
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