In December 1900, Frank M. Chapman, the first curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, proposed the idea of the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in an article in his magazine Bird-Lore. He suggested replacing the Christmas side hunt tradition, in which families competed to see who could kill the most birds, with a holiday bird census. “We hope that all our readers who have the opportunity will aid us in making it a success by spending a portion of Christmas Day with the birds and sending a report of their ‘hunt’ to Bird-Lore before they retire that night.”
Bird-Lore later became Audubon magazine, and the Christmas Bird Count became one of the world’s largest and longest-running citizen science projects. During the CBC, birders gather in groups to count all the birds they see or hear along specific routes within an established 15-mile circle. Afterward, they meet to tally their counts and submit the results to the National Audubon Society. Last year during the 124th edition, more than 80,000 people from the United States, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands observed and documented 40 million individual birds from over 2,380 species. Landmark studies, such as the 2019 study that found approximately 3 billion birds have disappeared from North America, rely on data from the Christmas Bird Count to draw their conclusions.
Over its 125-year history, data collected through the project have been used in hundreds of articles, peer-reviewed publications, and government reports — and, in one curious episode from the 1970s, inspired a five-year legal dispute, when three professors sued the Audubon Society, its vice president, and the New York Times for defamation.
Like the Christmas Bird Count itself, the conflict started with Audubon’s interest in stopping a destructive tradition — in this case, the use of DDT. Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane had been first synthesized by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler in 1874; in 1939 Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller discovered its potential in staving off insects, and it was deployed during World War II to combat diseases like malaria and typhus among soldiers and civilians. Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with the pesticide in 1948, and in the 1960s the World Health Organization promoted its use around the world to fight malaria.
Scientists had first found evidence of the pesticide’s harmful properties in the 1940s. In May 1948, Audubon asked its readers to document and report DDT’s effects on “the normal bird inhabitants of orchards.” And in April 1949, it published an article titled, “Are The New Insecticides Dangerous To Other Wildlife?”, which documented the DDT’s cumulative effects and the way it provided a “fatal diet for adult birds and their young.” Among the most effected were birds of prey. The chemical led to thinning of their eggshells, resulting in mothers crushing their young during the incubation period. All across the country, their populations collapsed. For example, observations from CBC before the 1960s suggested there were between 40 and 50 breeding pairs of peregrine falcons in New York state; by 1965, there were none. (The species was reintroduced in the 1980s, and its numbers have gradually increased since then. There is even a breeding pair nesting in the George Washington Bridge.)
Marine biologist Rachel Carson was pivotal in raising public awareness about the dangers of DDT. In 1962, she published the book Silent Spring, first serialized by the New Yorker, which exposed the environmental harm caused by DDT, brought the debate to the national stage, and helped catalyze the environmental movement. The title of the book was inspired by a letter to the editor Carson published in the Washington Post, where she describes the silencing of bird voices due to the decimation of bird populations across Britain and North America. She ended her piece with a question: “If this rain of death has produced an effect on birds, what of other lives, including our own?”
In July 1962, months before the book was published, the New York Times reported that the “pesticides industry has been highly irritated by a quiet woman author.” Carson was called a hysterical, a communist, and a witch. Chemist Robert H. White-Stevens argued that if DDT was banned because of Carson — something she did not advocate — humanity would return to “a Dark Ages, and the insects, and the vermin will once again inherit the Earth.”
Scientists continued to gather evidence of the effects of DDT not only on wildlife but also in humans. In 1969, the National Cancer Institute published a report on the long-term effects of DDT on mice, which suggested the chemical could lead to tumor development in other mammals, like humans. Three years later, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT, citing evidence that DDT’s toxic properties were magnified across the food chain. The first administrator of the agency, William D. Ruckelshaus, stated that the data was “a warning to the prudent that man may be exposing himself to a substance that may ultimately have a serious effect on his health.”
A year before DDT was banned, American Birds, a journal of ornithological records published by the National Audubon Society, dedicated an issue to the latest CBC’s findings. In his foreword, editor Robert S. Arbib Jr. warned fellow birders to be cautious of scientists who were using CBC data to defend the use of pesticides like DDT. These researchers claimed that the increasing number of bird sightings was evidence that the pesticides were safe for wildlife. Ornithologists like Arbib, on the other hand, argued that the total number of birds was higher because the more people were participating in the Christmas Bird Count each year, but that birds higher on the food chain were facing particularly notable declines.
Arbib wrote:
It is important that Count spokesmen reiterate the simple and truthful fact that what we are seeing [more birds reported in the CBC] is result of not more birds, but more birders. Any time you hear a “scientist” say the opposite, you are in the presence of someone who is being paid to lie, or is parroting something he knows little about.
A few months later, a New York Times reporter caught wind of the story and contacted Arbib for more information. During the call he asked for the names of the scientists that were paid to promote false claims. Arbib consulted with Roland C. Clement, a biologist and vice president of the Audubon Society, who had several documented cases of scientists misusing CBC data to defend DDT. Clement provided Arbib with the names of several scientists but cautioned him that there was no evidence these individuals were “paid to lie.” Rather, he believed the scientists were using “crude summations” of CBC data to promote incorrect claims about bird populations.
In August 1972, the Times published a story titled “Pesticide Spokesmen Accused Of ‘Lying’ on Higher Bird Count,” which named five prominent scientists. One of the named researchers, Donald A. Spencer, an ecologist and lecturer at the National Agricultural Chemical Association, said to the newspaper that the accusations were “almost libelous.”
In April 1973, just a few months after DDT was banned, three of the five industry-friendly academics named in the Times article — the aforementioned Robert H. White-Stevens, J. Gordon Edwards, and Thomas H. Jukes — sued the National Audubon Society, Arbib, Clement, and the New York Times for defamation in April 1973. They argued that the accusations of “lying” were false and damaging to their reputations.
The trio had been defending the safety and benefits of DDT for more than a decade, while attacking the Audubon Society, Carson, and other environmentalists. White-Stevens, who taught at Rutgers University and was assistant director of the Agricultural Research Division at the fertilizer company American Cyanamid, wrongly claimed that American robin populations had increased by 1,200 percent in just two decades, and bird populations overall by at least 700 percent. Edwards, an entomologist at San Jose State University who once ate DDT to prove its harmlessness, had called the ban “deliberately genocidal.” Jukes, a biologist at Berkeley who had a regular column in Nature during the 1970s, wrote that Audubon and Carson had created “a new mythology — the extermination of wild birds by agricultural pesticides.” He also accused members of the wildlife society of “underlying resentment of human beings and all their works, including cities, farms, highways, and especially private industry.” The plaintiffs argued in court that the statements published by the New York Times were “actual malice” and an assault on “their good name.”
Journalist and historian Elena Conis argued in her 2022 book How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT that the story of this chemical compound reflects how science can become a battleground for opposing different worldviews. Conis explores the mindsets of scientists like White-Stevens and Jukes, who valued nature and its conservation but believed mankind had the right to manage natural resources for its own benefit — a belief that clashed with the emerging environmental movement. For example, while Jukes recognized that pesticides caused harm to wildlife, he argued that “so do agriculture, freeways, and human beings.” To him, the benefits of DDT for controlling malaria and other insect-borne diseases outweighed any of its potential harms. The scientists who joined him in defending the chemical believed it was a triumph of human ingenuity over the natural world. Meanwhile for environmentalists like Carson, the harms of DDT were not only tragic for birds and the environment, but they also posed a great danger to humans.
The New York Times chose not to publish a letter to the editor from Clement defending his statements to the paper. The letter, which was unearthed during the case’s three-year-long discovery phase, stated that neither he nor Audubon “like to call people liars, but those who have most consistently misused our data … certainly have had time to learn from our patient explanations of their misinterpretations of our data over the several years of the DDT controversy.”
The case was tried by the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. In 1976, a jury ruled against Clement, the Audubon Society, and the New York Times and awarded the professors $61,000 in damages. During the trial, the judge described the reporter from the Times as “reckless” for not soliciting responses from the professors who defended the use of DDT. Arbib, who had sparked the controversy with his foreword, was acquitted, as the jury believed he had acted on Clement's counsel.
The defendants appealed the decision in 1977 to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, which unanimously repealed the decision from the lower court. The opinion was written by Chief Judge Irving R. Kaufman, appointed to the court in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, and asserted that the researchers defended DDT “in good faith and from humanitarian motives.” But it goes on to explain that neither Clement nor the National Audubon Society can be guilty of statements they did not make. They also argued that the New York Times was protected by the First Amendment for accurately reporting newsworthy information from a prestigious organization, and clarified that the scientists’ denials, no matter how vehement, did not constitute “clear and convincing proof” of malice from the Times reporter. “[T]he interest of a public figure in the purity of his reputation,” wrote Kaufman, “cannot be allowed to obstruct that vital pulse of ideas and intelligence on which an informed and self-governing people depend.”
The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving the appellate court’s ruling in place and bringing the five-year legal dispute to an end. Despite the ruling, the scientists continued to defend the use of DDT and attack its critics. In 2004, Edwards published an article defending the chemical and describing the evidence of its toxicity as “scientific fraud.” In the article, he again misused data from the Christmas Bird Count.
Most press coverage of the case discussed it as a press freedom issue. But in 1978, Bird Observer, a bimonthly magazine for birders, published a different take: “Burled in this legal entanglement over who has the right to say what about whom are the more important underlying questions over the use of pesticides, scientific ethics, population trends of North American birds, and about the use and usefulness of the masses of data we all cheerfully collect each year on Christmas Bird Counts.”