The egg craze is one of the many afflictions chronicled in James H. McCommons’s “The Feather Wars,” an exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — history of the early conservation movement. A professor emeritus of journalism at Northern Michigan University who has spent decades amid the forests and shorelines of the Upper Peninsula, McCommons recounts how a loose coalition of naturalists, sportsmen, artists and politicians mobilized to halt what he portrays as an avian massacre.