Plume Trade During two walks along the streets of Manhattan in 1886, the American Museum of Natural History's ornithologist, Frank Chapman, spotted 40 native species of birds including sparrows, warblers, and woodpeckers. But the birds were not flitting through the trees -- they had been killed, and for the most part, plucked, disassembled, or stuffed, and painstakingly positioned on three-quarters of the 700 women's hats Chapman saw. The North American feather trade was in its heyday. Frank Chapman's 1886 Feathered Hat Census BIRD SPECIES # HATS SEEN BIRD SPECIES # HATS SEEN Grebes 7 Blue Jay 5 Green-backed Heron 1 Eastern Bluebird 3 Virginia Rail 1 American Robin 4 Greater Yellowlegs 1 Northern Shrike 1 Sanderling 5 Brown Thrasher 1 Laughing Gull 1 Bohemian Waxwing 1 Common Tern 21 Cedar Waxwing 23 Black Tern 1 Blackburnian Warbler 1 Ruffed Grouse 2 Blackpoll Warbler 3 Greater Prairie Chicken 1 Wilson's Warbler 3 Northern Bobwhite 16 Tree Sparrow 2 California Quail 2 White-throated Sparrow 1 Mourning Dove 1 Snow Bunting 15 Northern Saw-whet Owl 1 Bobolink 1 Northern Flicker 21 Meadowlarks 2 Red-headed Woodpecker 2 Common Grackle 5 Pileated Woodpecker 1 Northern Oriole 9 Eastern Kingbird 1 Scarlet Tanager 3 Scissor-tailed Flycatcher 1 Pine Grosbeak 1 Tree Swallow 1 Modified from Strom, 1986. Throughout the preceding 30 years, general economic prosperity of a growing middle class had provided opportunities to purchase nonessentials. Emulating the fashionable elite, men selected fedoras with feather trim and women adorned their hair, hats, and dresses with "aigrettes" (sprays) of breeding plumage taken from a variety of birds. Accordingly, women's hats became larger, hat ornamentation (reminiscent of that found on dress military headgear) became more lavish, and the feather trade expanded its enterprise to include marketing the remains of some 64 species from 15 genera of native birds. Herons were favored. The Great Egret and especially the more plentiful, more widely distributed, more approachable, and more delicately plumed Snowy Egret, suffered great losses. These birds had evolved extravagant breeding plumage as sexual advertisements to attract their mates. The feathers, apparently, had such a similar effect on 19th-century men that sources of supply began to disappear. So extensive was the decoupling of egrets and their skins that egrets were adopted as the symbol of the bird preservation movement. Writers such as Herbert job began to focus their protests on the robbing of heron rookeries:   Here are some official figures of the trade from one source alone, of auctions at the London Commercial Sales Rooms during 1902. There were sold 1,608 packages of... herons' plumes. A package is said to average in weight 30 ounces. This makes a total of 48,240 ounces. As it requires about four birds to make an ounce of plumes, these sales meant 192,960 herons killed at their nests, and from two to three times that number of young or eggs destroyed. Is it, then, any wonder that these species are on the verge of extinction? There was no question that plume trading had become a very lucrative business. "In 1903," job continued, "the price for plumes offered to hunters was $32 per ounce, which makes the plumes worth about twice their weight in gold." (Later they were to bring $80!) It should not be surprising that the millinery trade, an industry employing 83,000 people (1 of every 1,000 Americans) in 1900, stood fast against claims of cruelty and exploitation and offered the public false assurances. It was carefully explained, for instance, that the bulk of feather collection was limited to shed plumes -- those found scattered on the ground within rookeries. In truth, those "dead plumes" brought only one-fifth the price of the live, unblemished, little-worn ones. To counteract the charges of cruelty, claims were circulated that most feather trim was either artificial or produced on foreign farms that exported molted feathers. The demand for egret feathers, nonetheless, began to slip. No sooner was the public weaned off egrets than it fixed its attention on seabirds of the Atlantic coast. And harvesting did not stop there. Hunting of West Coast terns, grebes, White Pelicans, and albatrosses for ornamental feathers also expanded. By the turn of the century many millions of birds were being killed by plume hunters each year. Preservationists struggled to enact laws to prevent the killing, possession, sale, and importation of plume birds and ornamental feathers. They disseminated their information through numerous periodicals (including Bird Lore and Audubon Magazine), many books, and the campaigns of the American Ornithologists' Union (founded in 1883), the Audubon Society, and other conservation organizations. The Audubon Society offered public lectures on such topics as "Woman as a bird enemy" and erected Audubon-approved millinery displays. It also selected regulatory committees to audit the millinery sold in key areas. These actions helped more women to recognize their role in the issue and more men in the millinery trade (whose livelihoods had come from encouraging those women into that role) to change their orientation as interest in feathered fashions subsided. Thus ended the "Age of Extermination," and by World War I, embellishing attire with breeding plumes had become a thing of the past. How much this change was due to the effects of hunting and trade regulations and how much was the result of rising prices for dwindling supplies is still not clear. Nor is it evident whether changes in the everyday lives of women simply eliminated opportunities to wear oversized, constraining hats, or whether a growing inclination toward promoting humanitarian ideals reduced the allure of feathered garb. Regardless, displaying feathers became, once again, an avian trait. SEE: Birds and the Law; Metallic Poisons; Helping to Conserve Birds -- National Level. Copyright ® 1988 by Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye.