Between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s, the United States witnessed the creation, rapid expansion and then disappearance of a commercial market for wildfowl. Wild birds were brought to cities in those years to be sold as food for customers’ tables, decorations for ladies’ hats, treasured pets and specimens for collectors’ cabinets. In “The Market in Birds,” Smalley and Reeves illuminate this crucial chapter in American environmental history. Touching on ecology, economics, law and culture, the authors reveal how commercial hunting set the terms for wildlife conservation and the first federal wildlife legislation at the turn of the 20th century.