I've been reading through some of Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds, and it's fairly wrenching how often the accounts (from the late 19th to early 20th century) combine these matter-of-fact descriptions of almost unbelievable natural abundance with just as matter-of-fact violence
I dunno what the cleanest way to handle this is, but the twitter solution where anybody could anonymously kick or exclude anyone else from a group chat via the block was also fairly bonkers in practice
"All the forenoon [great blue herons] came from the west in flocks of from 2 to 60. I counted 40 in one flock and 60 in another that were in sight at one time. The life savers said these were all one flock until their shooting divided them."
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"We found a colony of about 15 or 20 nests on Skull Creek, near Crane Lake [...] We visited this colony the following year and found that it had been shot out; the dead bodies of the herons were lying on the ground under the trees and the nests deserted."
