The Feather Thief

During the 19th century, there was a push for a “back-to-nature movement” (15), driven by the previous century’s focus on industrialization and urbanization. Prior to the 19th century, city-dwellers were confined because trips to the coast or countryside were too expensive and uncomfortable due to the lack of roads. The invention of the steam engine allowed city-dwellers to travel outside of cities. Johnson notes, “Embracing the biblical proverb that ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop,’ the Victorians promoted natural history collecting as the ideal form of recreation, and stalls at train stations were packed with popular magazines and books on building a private collection” (15).

People were especially obsessed with rare bird feathers, which fueled the catastrophic plume trade. There were several main drivers of the plume trade. The first were museums and private collectors, who both wanted rare bird skins for their collections. Naturalists, like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and collectors traveled all around the world to find the most beautiful and unique birds, which they then killed, skinned, and preserved. Wallace brought back over 8,000 bird skins from the Malay Archipelago, many of which ended up in the British Museum of Natural History—a museum created by aristocrat and naturalist Lionel Walter Rothschild, who amassed the largest private collection of bird skins in human history, comprising some 280,000 specimens.

The second and more impactful driver was women’s fashion. Johnson notes, “In one of the stranger intersections of animal and man, the feathers of brightly colored male birds, which had evolved to attract the attention of drab females, were poached so that women could attract men and demonstrate their perch in society” (43). Bird feathers, especially those that were rare and expensive, became the ultimate status symbol during the Victorian era. The birds that carried the greatest status included Birds of Paradise, Egrets, Parrots, Hummingbirds, and Quetzals. Bird plumes were primarily used in hats.

Feathers were also used in the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. These flies became flashy in appearance largely because “the ports of London were bursting with shipments of exotic bird skins intended to feed the feather fashion trade” (58). Aristocratic men could purchase unique feathers for their fly-ties. To ensure the practice remained pure, these men argued that dyed feathers were not the same as the real thing. This Victorian belief perpetuates the use of rare and often illegal feathers even today in salmon fly-ties.

The feather market was powerful by the beginning of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of people were employed in the millinery trade. Prices of rare fathers quadrupled as these birds disappeared in the wild. Part of what drove this obsession was the belief that nature was an inexhaustible resource. Yet, this was far from true.

The plume trade decimated the wild bird populations. To illustrate this point, Johnson describes how “between 1883 and 1898, bird populations in twenty-six states dropped by nearly half. In 1914, Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon on Earth, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Four years later her cage hosted the death of Incas, the last of the Carolina Parakeets” (48). Even today, many of these bird species have yet to truly recover.