A Great And Growing Evil

As his sloop rolled into the choppy waters of Florida’s Matlacha Pass, William Scott kept his eyes peeled for egrets. If any of the birds were roosting on the mangrove islands on either side of him, they would be easy to spot, with their brilliant white feathers contrasting sharply against walls of green. But there were no herons, and there were no egrets, just like yesterday, and the day before that.

A plume hunter had told Scott about an egret rookery in the area where he was now headed, and so he maintained hope that on this island, at last, some birds might be left alive. To get a closer look, he left his sailing ship in the hands of its captain and rowed a small boat over the rough waves to land. Above him, he saw giant frigatebirds circling effortlessly in spite of the screaming wind. But once he reached the island, all he could see was death.

This island had evidently been a vibrant rookery just days before, with herons and egrets incubating their eggs and expectantly awaiting the arrival of gangly and demanding chicks. But today, all of that was gone. The nests remained, but their eggs were all broken and strewn on the ground, with vultures and crows feasting on the remains. Everywhere he looked, Scott saw “dead, half decayed birds, lying on the ground which had apparently been killed for a day or two.” He counted more than two hundred adult birds whose plumes had been stripped from their back. Some were missing their wings as well. Writing in his diary that night, Scott had trouble finding words to describe the devastation: “I do not know of a more horrible and brutal exhibition of wanton destruction than that which I witnessed here.”¹

The destruction was sickening, but not at all surprising. Scott was one week into a month-long fact-finding journey to investigate the impact of the plume trade on the herons and egrets of Florida’s gulf coast. Back in 1880, Scott had traveled to this region and found the mangrove islands blanketed with the brilliantly white herons and egrets. “It fairly teemed with bird life then,” he remembered of one rookery. “Every tree and bush on this large area contained at least one nest, and many contained from two to six or eight nests whenever the size of the tree permitted. A perfect cloud of birds were always to be seen hovering over the island.” Now it was May, 1886, and he returned to see how the situation had changed.

Where once he had encountered one rookery after another, now days passed by without seeing anything more than solitary straggling birds. Every island and bay he visited, every town where he spent the night, every conversation he had with a long-time resident reinforced a familiar refrain. “I learned from citizens at Sarasota that the bird rookeries, once so characteristic of the bay, were all deserted by their former occupants, the birds having been pursued without mercy by the plume hunters.”

On a day where they sailed forty miles, Scott couldn’t find a single inhabited rookery, and only saw “a few stray Gulls, Pelicans and two Herons in the whole day’s cruise.” The captain piloting Scott’s boat, who had navigated the winding waterways for well over twenty-five years, pointed out island after island that had once hosted enormous egret rookeries, including one sixty-acre expanse so dense with birds that until recently “looked from a distance as if a big white sheet had been thrown over the mangroves.” Scott could still clearly see the impact that the birds had left on the land; their messy nests still adorning the trees by the thousands, their excrement still painting white splotches on the ground below. But the birds themselves were all gone. In an area once famous for its birds, now “birds were only conspicuous by their scarcity.”

All of them had been killed to put feathers on ladies’ hats.

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As he traveled up and down the peninsula, Scott met some of the people responsible for this devastation. Fort Myers served as the local market for the plume trade, where hunters could bring their skins to sell to northern buyers. But these millinery agents didn’t just purchase skins, they did everything they could to lubricate the trade. Many of them would employ hunters and provide them with guns, ammunition, and anything else they needed for the efficient slaughter of wildlife. Scott met a certain J. H. Batty in Tarpon Springs, for example, who employed sixty local hunters as part of his massive plume-hunting operation all along the Gulf Coast. The hunters, in turn, “reaped a very considerable income from this source.”

Freelance plume hunters too roaming the everglades looking to sell the skins they plundered. Plume hunters sold Great Egret skins for 40 cents, Snowy Egrets for 55 cents, Reddish Egrets for 40 cents, Tricolored Herons for 10 to 15 cents, Great Blue Herons for 75 cents to a dollar; and Roseate Spoonbills for between two dollars and five.

This hunting didn’t just happen in Florida. Milliners would set up shop in coastal towns up and down the Atlantic shoreline and offer locals attractive prices for the skins of dead birds. On the Jersey Shore, for example, terns and shore birds could be sold for ten cents each. For those prices, wrote William Dutcher, “many of the bay-men gave up sailing pleasure-parties, and became gunners, because this business was more remunerative.”² An enterprising hunter could net fifty dollars a week – if they could manage to slaughter five hundred birds.

Like these bay-man, killing birds was not the full-time job of most feather hunters. They were farmers and sailors, day-laborers, hunting guides, masons, and really anyone who lived along the coast or near the breeding grounds of birds valued for their feathers. With the high prices offered by hat makers for plumes, they could make far more killing birds than working their day jobs.³

Many hunters felt some ambivalence about the work they were undertaking. But the money was too good to pass up. One hunter named Frank Johnson told Scott that he “wished there was some law to protect the birds, at least during the breeding time, which would not be violated,” but explained that since “everybody else was ‘pluming’, he had made up his mind that he might as well have his share.”

But as irresistible as the rates for plumes might have been, few hunters were able to turn the pursuit into reliable long-term income. The work was seasonal, as colony-nesting birds only gathered in appreciable numbers during the spring breeding season. Likewise, herons and egrets only grew aigrettes — their long, wispy nuptial feathers that sold for more than their weight in gold — in the spring. A greater problem was that hunters took a strip-mining approach to plume hunting. They would wipe out a rookery or breeding colony in a few days or weeks, and birds would never again return to nest in that spot. Each year, hunters had to go further afield to find nesting sites that others had missed.

Some hunters traveled abroad to seek their fortunes. David Bennett, of Pomona, California, regularly cleared $3,000 a year hunting egrets in Mexico and Nicaragua, but could not maintain those earnings for long. He explained that “everywhere in the regions I have been in and have ever heard about a rapidly growing scarcity of egrets is evident.”⁴

For their fortunes, however great or small, plume hunters often had to endure serious hardship. Hunting egrets in Florida and the tropics meant spending months at a time in steaming wetlands and estuaries infested with malarial mosquitoes, alligators, and poisonous snakes. Articles like one in the Savannah Morning News, on January 24, 1904, tried to deepen the feather’s mystique by emphasizing (or perhaps embellishing) the risk faced by hunters to provide women with aigrettes: “For no other decorative feathers do men so imperil their lives… It is to feathers what the orchid is to flowers, something very rare, beautiful and procurable only with more or less risk to the hunter… It is no uncommon thing for scores of aigrette hunters to perish miserably in the jungle in the course of a year.”⁵

While the wispy white plumes from herons and egrets brought the highest prices, feather wholesalers paid for any bird a hunter could kill. Scott accompanied a crew of hunters employed by J. H. Batty for a couple of days, and from the time that they landed on an island until nightfall, “there was a perfect fusillade.” The hunters shot hawks and owls, Wilson’s Plover, Least Terns, Boat-tailed Grackles, Gray Kingbirds, Red Knots, Sanderlings, Ruddy Turnstones, “various kinds of Sandpipers,” and “any other small species that came in their way.”⁶ Any of these birds might get a hunter ten or fifteen cents, regardless of species, so the hunters did not discriminate.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of grebes were killed in Oregon and northern California every year, and their skins were shipped to New York “in bales, like the peltries of the furrier, or the ‘robes’ of the bison.”⁷ On Long Island, “every bird of bright plumage, such as warblers, woodpeckers, thrushes, orioles, etc., is shot for millinery purposes.”⁸

An article in an 1886 issue of Science emphasized that there was no bird who was safe from slaughter: “But scarcely a bird can be named – from the rarest to the commonest, from the plainest of the sparrows to the most gorgeously arrayed denizens of the orchard and forest, from the tiniest warblers and humming-birds to jays, kingfishers, cuckoos, and the larger woodpeckers… that is not met with as an appendage of the female head-dress.”⁹

There’s no way of knowing how many birds were killed in the United States every year to supply the millinery industry, but the size of individual sales hints at its scale. One gunner told Audubon founder William Dutcher that he had single-handedly shot more than a thousand cedar waxwings during the winter of 1883. Dutcher also spoke to a South Carolina dealer who prepared 11,018 skins for sale over a three-month period, and another dealer who handled 30,000 bird skins each year. Frank Chapman once heard one plume hunter boast that he killed three hundred herons in one afternoon, while another claimed that he and his crew had killed 130,000 terns, egrets, and herons in one winter.¹⁰

A woman from New York once contracted with Parisian milliners to complete an order for 40,000 skins at forty cents each. She went to Cobb’s Island on Virginia’s coast for its gulls and terns that nested there in large numbers, and “engaged young and old to kill birds of different kinds and paying them ten cents for each specimen not too much mutilated.” Another coastal village on Long Island reportedly supplied 70,000 birds to New York City dealers annually.¹¹

America’s far-flung territories also lost their birds to the plume trade. Two small, uninhabited islands on the Hawaiian archipelago were targeted by poachers who completely devastated their breeding bird populations. At least 300,000 terns and albatrosses were killed on Lisianski in 1904, and another 300,000 were taken from Laysan in 1909.¹²

Records from plume auctions also suggest the size of the plume trade. In 1898, the New York Tribune reported the contents of single sale at a quarterly auction held in London: “Osprey feathers or aigrettes, 6,800 ounces; peacock feathers, 22,107 bundles; peacock neck feathers, 878 pounds; parrots, 35,497 skins; hummingbirds, 24,956 skins; jays, 16,107 skins; bee-eaters, 2,216 skins; Impeyan pheasants, 1,317 skins; kingfishers, 1,327 skins; trogons, 1,403 skins; argus pheasants, 122 skins; paradise birds, 15 skins; orioles, 32 skins; thrushes, 73 skins; owls, 108; toucans’ breasts, 29; various birds, 7,595.”¹³

In 1902, auction houses in London sold 1,608 packages of heron plumes, each of which weighed thirty ounces. It took four herons to yield one ounce of feathers, meaning that at least 192,960 herons were required to supply one year’s demand in London alone.¹⁴ But these numbers represent only a fraction of the birds that ultimately gave their lives for each order. Only skins in good condition could be sold, and many birds were too mutilated to be used. A far greater death toll resulted from juvenile birds orphaned when one or both parents were killed before they were old enough to fend for themselves.

Some conservationists hazarded a guess at the total cost of the plume trade in bird lives. In 1886, the American Ornithologists Union estimated that five million North American birds were killed every year for the plume trade. In 1896, it upped the estimate to ten million. Of course, the frenzy for feathers was an international trend, and slaughters like these were taking place in every country whose birds had feathers. In 1901, the Massachusetts Audubon Society proposed numbers accounting for the international nature of the trade. They claimed that England alone imported twenty-five million birds each year, and put the annual imports to Europe at one hundred and fifty million birds. Globally, they guessed that the trade in feathers cost the lives of two to three hundred million birds each year.¹⁵

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The feather trade destroyed the heron rookeries of Florida. It demolished the breeding grounds of gulls and terns along the entire Atlantic seaboard. The number of birds killed could probably be measured in billions. As William Scott completed the devastation he’d seen, his outrage at the indiscriminate slaughter poured palpably from the page. “It is scarcely necessary to draw any conclusions or inferences. This great and growing evil speaks for itself.” Scott wasn’t the only writer speaking out against the ravages of the feather trade. But words were proving insufficient to stop the destruction. “The price paid for [feathers], notwithstanding the efforts made to create sympathy for the birds,” wrote Scott, “is each year becoming higher.”¹⁶

Outrage alone wouldn’t save these birds. It would take a war.

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In my last post, I kicked off a series on how America started protecting its birds. It all started with feathers on ladies’ hats – you can read the first post here. This is the second post in the series.

1. Scott, W. E. D. “The Present Conditions Of Some Of The Bird Rookeries of the Gulf Coast of Florida.” The Auk, Vol. 4 No. 4, October 1887. ↩︎
2. Dutcher, William. “Destruction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 197–99. ↩︎
3. Graham, Frank., Buchheister, Carl W.. The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society. United States: Knopf, 1990. ↩︎
4. Doughty, Robin W.. Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection. United Kingdom: University of California Press, 1975. ↩︎
5. “The Romance of the Aigrette.” The Savannah Morning News. (Savannah, Ga.), 24 Jan. 1904. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89053684/1904-01-24/ed-1/seq-21/> ↩︎
6. Scott, W. E. D. “The Present Conditions Of Some Of The Bird Rookeries of the Gulf Coast of Florida.” The Auk, Vol. 4 No. 4, October 1887. ↩︎
7. “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 196–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1760349. ↩︎
8. Dutcher, William. “Destruction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 197–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1760350. ↩︎
9. “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 196–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1760349. ↩︎
10. Dutcher, William. “Destruction of Bird-Life in the Vicinity of New York.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 197–99; “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 196–97; Palmer, T. S. “A Review of Economic Ornithology in the United States.” Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture for 1899, p. 259-292. ↩︎
11. “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 196–97. ↩︎
12. Doughty, Robin W.. Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection. United Kingdom: University of California Press, 1975. ↩︎
13. ‘The Traffic in Birds’, New York Tribune, 4 September 1898. Referenced in Cowie HL. Murderous Millinery. In: Victims of Fashion. Science in History. Cambridge University Press; 2021:17-54. ↩︎
14. Job, Herbert Keightley. Wild Wings: Adventures of a Camera-hunter Among the Larger Wild Birds of North America on Sea and Land. United Kingdom: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905. ↩︎
15. Babcock, Charles Almanzo. Bird Day: How to Prepare for it. United States: Silver, Burdett, 1901. ↩︎
16. Scott, W. E. D. “The Present Conditions Of Some Of The Bird Rookeries of the Gulf Coast of Florida.” The Auk, Vol. 4 No. 4, October 1887. ↩︎