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Human beings have caused a lot of destruction in the natural world. We’ve torn the tops off of mountains to get coal. We’ve cut down rainforests to make room for dairy farms. We’ve hunted species after species to extinction, from the North American megafauna thousands of years ago to the passenger pigeon just last century. We’ve polluted the air and the water and the soil. Oh, and we’re in the process of making the planet’s climate less hospitable for ourselves and many other species.
We’ve justified much of this devastation by saying that we simply had to do it. We needed the coal to heat our homes. We needed the meat from the passenger pigeons. We needed the plastic forks to eat the food from our styrofoam containers. All the destruction was simply a byproduct of meeting our basic needs. Sure, maybe. But some of our acts of environmental destruction have been so senseless that it’s hard to fathom why and how we ever justified committing them.
We also seem prone to weird cultural crazes. We get obsessed with collecting tulip bulbs, say, or beanie babies. We all start wearing tight pants, and then baggy pants, and then tight pants again. We spend way too much money on pointless possessions to impress our frenemies and signal our status. Our obsession with fads and fashions keeps things interesting, I guess, but it’s always wasteful, sometimes financially ruinous, and often silly in retrospect.
Today, we’re going to look at the confluence of these two trends — when the human obsession with jumping on cultural bandwagons combined with our wanton disregard for the natural world. We’re heading back to the time when people killed an obscene number of birds so that they could put fancy feathers on their heads.
When I was a kid, the whole world was kind of baffling to me, so I didn’t think very hard about how weird things were. As I get older, I sometimes look back on stuff that I didn’t blink at when I was seven and wonder what the hell it was all about.
One example of this is the song “Yankee Doodle.” We all mindlessly sang it — it’s catchy! — but it made no sense whatsoever:
Yankee Doodle went to town,
Riding on a pony.
He stuck a feather in his cap.
And called it macaroni.
What an odd song to teach to every single American child. What’s going on in this song? Well, the first part isn’t so hard. Yankee Doodle is a personification of a stereotypical American simpleton — Europeans in the 1700s saw Americans as unsophisticated bumpkins.
But Yankee Doodle comes into town, puts a feather on his hat… and calls it a noodle?
Probably not. It turns out that “macaroni” (or “maccaroni”) was eighteenth-century British slang for an effete, fashionable man who spent a lot of money on clothes and tried to seem Continental.
Here’s a 1773 caricature of a macaroni, to give you an idea:
So Yankee Doodle is trying unsuccessfully to be a fashion plate, and his first instinct is to adorn his hat with feathers. It was true that fashionable Europeans had worn feathers in their hats, but — poor Yankee Doodle — the trend had largely died out by the 1700s.
Yankee Doodle was about a century too late. During the 1600s, feathers had been everywhere in European high society. The feather in the cap is ubiquitous in this period, as you can see in Rembrandt paintings from the early 1600s:
Why did feathers become fashionable during the 1600s? It seems to be connected to colonialism. As Europeans explored the Americas and Asia, they found large, colorful birds with showy feathers. As with so many of nature’s wonders, their first instinct was to commodify and sell them.
Feathers became an important social symbol — if you could afford a big and colorful but functionally useless feather, you must be rich. So the feather trade became a big deal in Renaissance-era Europe, and what better place to put your exotic feather than up on your head for all to see? Feathered hats became a signal that the wearer was not just rich, but that he was cultured and sophisticated.
Though this feather craze subsided somewhat by the end of the 1600s, feathers remained an important part of military headgear for a long time, perhaps because they made soldiers feel, in the words of historian Ulinka Rublack, “graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” In some military traditions, soldiers put a feather in their cap to commemorate a kill (hunters did this, too). We see feathers in Renaissance military fashion:
And during World War I, as you can see in this photo of Australian soldiers:
Some European noblemen wore feathers on their hats into the twentieth century — when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914, witnesses described the bright green feathers from his hat scattered all over the floor of the car.
But, outside of warriors trying to look gallant and noblemen clinging to old traditions, men weren’t wearing a lot of feathers by the early 1900s. In the nineteenth century, feathered hats became women’s fashion. And the exotic-feather industry became a bigger business than ever before.
In the seventeenth century, feathers were often too expensive for all but the wealthiest people. But by the 1800s, they had become a mass-market phenomenon. Middle-and-upper-class women took advantage of unprecedented amounts of disposable income and a globalizing trade network to put as many once-rare, exotic feathers on their heads as they could.
The feather trade peaked between 1870 and 1920 as hunters ventured deeper into tropical landscapes to meet demand. It was worth the effort — plumes from some birds were worth twice their weight in gold. An ornithologist named Frank Chapman took two strolls through Manhattan and cataloged all of the feathers that he could identify on ladies’ hats. He saw feathers on three-quarters of the hats that he passed, representing 40 species.
What did these hats look like? Well, here’s a 1906 issue of the Pensacola Journal showing us the finest ladies’ fashions from France:
Sometimes the hats would have feathers as an adornment, as on this hat worn by actress Rose Stahl:
But that often wasn’t enough. There was a kind of arms race to see who could pack the most feathers onto a hat in the most elaborate arrangement:
What could top a feather on a hat? Some designers just started putting whole birds up there:
Though birds had been hunted for their feathers for millennia, the feather craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was different. Global markets and industrialized transportation created a mass market for plumage.
As you might expect, the more exotic and showy the feathers, the more desirable they were. Some of the “best” feathers came from egrets, painted here by John Audubon:
And herons, shown here with a hunter in Florida:
Many of these birds were native to the swamps and wetlands of the American South, areas that had been mostly uninhabited and otherwise left alone until the feather craze. Suddenly, hunters swarmed these areas, killing astonishing numbers of birds. In 1886, the American Ornithologists’ Union warned that American hunters were killing more than 5,000,000 birds every year for the hat trade alone. Globally, the number may have been as high as 200 million.
In many cases, it was easiest for hunters to locate birds on their nests. They’d kill the mother bird, strip a few valuable feathers off of her body, and leave her to decompose while her eggs got eaten or her young starved to death. Thus, each feather on a fancy hat might represent the death of several birds.
Herbert Job estimated the toll on one species, herons, in a single year in a single city:
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?
Ornithologists weren’t the only people concerned by the slaughter. Wealthy ladies created the craze for feathered hats, and they helped to end it, too. Many of the early buyers of these hats had assumed that there wasn’t much cruelty involved in their making — surely, the birds were plucked and then released. When the truth got out that birds were being slaughtered in the millions for fashion, influential women began to raise awareness.
Some wealthy women used their resources and clout to form organizations to push for an end to plume hunting. In England, upper-class women formed the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889. In America, Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and Minna Hall formed the Massachusetts Audubon Society, named after the famous naturalist and artist. Many other state Audubon societies popped up, and they eventually coalesced into a national organization. The Audubon societies promoted “Audubonnets,” alternative hats that were cruelty-free.
Conservationists faced an uphill battle against the dictates of high fashion and a very profitable industry. They used the media to make their case to consumers, with cartoons like this one on “the cruelties of fashion.”
And this one, which shows Coco Chanel killing birds for French milliners:
Newspapers like the Los Angeles Herald publicized the issue:
The pressure eventually worked. The Lacey Act of 1900, the first wildlife-protection law in American history, prohibited moving poached animals across state lines. Individual states outlawed plume hunting altogether, as Florida did in 1903. People also began to reserve land for birds — one of the first examples was Bird City, founded by the McIlhenny family, which had made its fortune from selling Tabasco sauce. State and federal governments followed suit, protecting land in coastal Louisiana and Florida. This lessened plume hunting in the United States, but Americans continued to import feathers until 1918, when Congress passed the Migratory Bird Act.
Other countries passed similar legislation around the same time, and feathered heads slowly became a thing of the past. Other factors may have helped, as well — it was, after all, pretty difficult to keep a giant feather hat intact while riding in a car.
The human craze for feathered hats had a terrible effect on ecosystems all around the world. Conservationists managed to save many species from extinction, but the toll was heavy — one ornithologist estimated that hunters had killed 71% of Florida’s wading birds by 1908.
Has there ever been so much senseless destruction of natural beauty for such an ephemeral human activity? Well, knowing our species’ history, the answer is probably yes. But the plume trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an excellent example of how our consumer impulses can devastate the natural world if we’re not careful.
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The near extinction of the sea otter on the west coast of North America, for it’s incredibly soft pelt, was another such case. Fortunately a few survived and are now rebuilding. When they were obliterated, it changed the entire foreshore environment. Sea others love urchins. Urchins eat kelp. Massive kelp forests grew on the coast, prime habitat for many species. Otters vanished, urchins thrived, kelp forests almost disappeared, with enormous impacts to various marine life populations.