One night in March 1900, the Pennsylvania alumni of Yale University gathered in the genteel quarters of the Scranton Club to host a visit by Yale President Arthur T. Hadley. A sumptuous feast was served, including courses of salmon, chicken, beef, and a wild game entre: Broiled Plover on Toast.
The bird on Dr. Hadley’s china plate undoubtedly came from somewhere on the prairies. It was a specimen of the upland plover (which ornithologists now wish us to call an “upland sandpiper,” but being a historian, I live and talk in the past). The plover winters in South America and breeds in a long grassland range extending from the Osage Hills of Oklahoma to the tundra’s edge in Manitoba.
While observing the fall migration of fowl this fall, I commenced an investigation of the settler experience with upland plover on the plains. It is not, overall, an edifying story. Market hunting, we are informed by ornithological writers, nearly eradicated the plover in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commentators at the time feared the prairie bird would go the way of the passenger pigeon, succumbing to excessive shooting and habitat loss.
This beloved bird of the grasslands, so meek and sleek, so picturesque atop a fencepost, was heavily hunted for market. Western newspapers quoted prices for plover shipped east in refrigerator cars--from 75 cents a dozen in the 1880s to over a dollar in the early 1900s. Local meat dealers took the birds from market hunters--and one of my grandfathers, in western Kansas, was one of them.
On the central and southern plains the hunters took a deadly toll, cruising around in buggies, later automobiles, locating migratory flocks on the ground and blazing away.
Judging from my search of the evidence, however, such was not the case in North Dakota. Here settlers and townsmen freely harvested plover in spring and fall — fall birds, taken before migration, rather than spring birds, depleted by the long flight from South America, were considered better eating.
I have not, however, found any record of local butchers taking plover in trade, or of market hunters arriving in country to harvest plover. I think there was a practical reason for this. Market hunters shot transitory plover at rest, in flocks. North Dakota was at the northern end of the flyway, where the birds were not yet flocked up. Harvesting individual plover was not worth the cost of shotgun shells. So, on the contrary, I find the upland plover occupying a more interesting place in the sporting, culinary, and intellectual life of Dakota.
Here, then, is your homework between now and the next time you hear from me. Go to the Cornell University website, All About Birds, and find the page providing recordings of the call of the upland sandpiper. You will find one made in 1988 by Geoffrey Keller at Long Lake National Wildlife Refuge, south of Driscoll. Have a listen, so we can talk about it.
Now, as for all those eastern dudes enjoying broiled plover on toast. I found a hotel recipe from Pennsylvania in 1906. After cleaning the birds carefully, it says, “Cover the breast with fat bacon, and roast in a hot oven twelve minutes. Set on slices of toast. Add a glass of white wine and a little rich, concentrated broth to the drippings, and strain this over the birds. Garnish the lower end with watercress and quartered lemon.”
This does not sound that sophisticated to me. I think there are guys in the Buffalo Wildlife Club who could handle this. Except they probably don’t have any white wine in the house. I figure the watercress is optional. But fellows, please don’t shoot a plover. Maybe a turtle dove or a jacksnipe.
~Tom Isern
