The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  Rothschild never escaped the overweening attention of his mother, and he never moved out of Tring Park. He never won the respect of his father, from whom he went to great lengths to conceal his enormous spending. After two live bear cubs were deposited on the front steps of N. M. Rothschild and Sons, his incensed father tried to put a stop to Walter’s collecting, but not before his son managed to arrange for another delivery of cassowaries from New Guinea. When his father cut him out of the will and removed his portrait from the walls of the bank, Walter admitted to his sister-in-law, “My father was absolutely right—I can’t be trusted with money.”

  Little did she know that among the many expenses Walter had concealed from his family was a blackmail attempt, made by a British peeress with whom he’d once had an affair. Cut off from the family coffers and desperate to keep the potential scandal hidden from his mother, he raised the funds the only way he could: by offering up the bulk of his bird collection for sale. In 1931 his collection of 280,000 skins was sold to the American Museum of Natural History for $250,000, in the largest accession of specimens in the New York museum’s history. In the final stage of negotiations, Rothschild extracted a promise that a signed photograph of him would hang in perpetuity near his collection. “He was as jubilant over it as a schoolboy on the ‘honor roll,’” wrote a bird curator at the museum: “Although he always carries the front of a Lord, he is also an extraordinarily simple man.”

  According to his niece, Miriam Rothschild, “Walter seemed to shrink visibly in the period following the sale. . . . He felt tired and distrait, and spent only about two hours before lunch in the Museum. It was winter—the birds had flown.” When he died in 1937, what remained of his beloved collection was bequeathed to the British Natural History Museum. Upon prying open his padlocked wicker baskets, his niece discovered the blackmail demand and the identity of his blackmailer, but she never disclosed it. On his tombstone was inscribed a verse from the Book of Job: “Ask of the beasts and they will tell thee and the birds of the air shall declare unto thee.”

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  Before it all came to ruin, Walter Rothschild’s obsession had brought him the greatest private collection of bird skins and natural history specimens ever amassed by a single person. The collectors he employed risked life and limb in the pursuit of new species: one had his arm bitten off by a leopard, another died of malaria in New Guinea, three from yellow fever in the Galápagos, and still others succumbed to dysentery and typhoid fever. According to a visiting cartographer, a map depicting the locations of the Tring’s collectors resembled “the world with a severe attack of measles.” Alfred Newton, one of his professors at Cambridge and a champion of Wallace and Darwin’s theory of evolution, chided his former pupil: “I can’t agree with you in thinking that Zoology is best advanced by collectors of the kind you employ . . . No doubt they answer admirably the purpose of stocking a Museum; but they unstock the world—and that is a terrible consideration.”

  But if Rothschild’s collectors were measles on a map, another class of hunter was the gangrene: no matter how many specimens were scooped up for the Tring, nothing compared to the widespread slaughter of birds that had begun to unfold in the world’s jungles, forests, swamps, and bayous. In 1869, when Alfred Russel Wallace first expressed his fears of the destructive potential of “civilized man,” he couldn’t have imagined how swiftly they would materialize, in what historians have described as the Age of Extermination: the greatest direct slaughter of wildlife by humans in the history of the planet.

  In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, hundreds of millions of birds were killed, not for museums but for another purpose altogether: women’s fashion.

  3

  THE FEATHER FEVER

  Before the Hermès bag or Louboutin heel, the ultimate status indicator was a dead bird. The more exotic, the more expensive, and the more expensive, the more status conferred upon its owner. 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. After millions of years, the birds had grown too beautiful to exist solely for their own species.

  If there was a patient zero for the feather fever, it was Marie-Antoinette. In 1775 she took a diamond-encrusted Egret plume, a gift from Louis XVI, and wedged it into her elaborately piled hair. Although Marie-Antoinette wasn’t the first to don feathers, she was an indisputable fashion icon, at a time when new rotary printing presses enabled the proliferation of magazines, which promoted the latest styles to subscribers around the globe.

  Within a century of Marie-Antoinette’s death, hundreds of thousands of women subscribed to feather-filled fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Vogue. On its December 1892 inaugural cover, Vogue depicted a debutante surrounded by a gauzy cloud of birds and butterflies and ran advertisements for Madame Rallings’s “elegant assortment of Paris Millinery” on Fifth Avenue in New York, and for Knox’s Hats: “Riding Hats—Walking Hats—Driving Hats—Hats for the Theatre—Receptions—Weddings—Hats for every social function.” The January 1898 issue of The Delineator, another popular American fashion magazine, announced the latest millinery trends: “Stiff wings are in high vogue for the ordinary walking hat. . . . Spangled wings, aigrettes and feather pompons from which a Paradise aigrette emerges are admired for either bonnets or hats.”

  The ideal Victorian woman, enshrined in these magazines, had milk-white skin to make clear that she didn’t work outside the home under the sun, and she dressed in bell-shaped crinolined cages made of steel hoops that hung from waists pinched by suffocating, tight-laced corsets. She wore stiffened, heavy petticoats and chemises, and strips of whalebone were tethered to her back and sides for structure. “A large fraction of our time was spent in changing our clothes,” one such woman wrote: “You came down to breakfast ready in your ‘best dress’ . . . after church you went into tweeds. You always changed again before tea. . . . However small your dress allowance, a different dinner dress for each night was necessary.” If one wanted to go for a walk, a special outfit was required. Shopping required still another.

  And thanks to the ever-changing laws of fashion, there were unique hats for every occasion, each demanding different species of bird for decoration. Women in America and Europe clamored for the latest plumes: entire bird skins were mounted on hats so ostentatiously large that women were forced to kneel in their carriages or ride with their heads out the window.

  In 1886 a prominent ornithologist conducted an informal survey of the extent of the feather fever during an afternoon stroll through an uptown New York shopping district. He counted seven hundred ladies wearing hats, three quarters of them sporting whole skins. They weren’t poaching birds out of Central Park; ordinary backyard birds carried little status in the hierarchy of feather fashion. The species in vogue were Birds of Paradise, Parrots, Toucans, Quetzals, Hummingbirds, the Cock of the Rock, Snowy Egrets, and Ospreys. And while hats were the main graveyard for these birds, other articles of clothing were frequently festooned with them as well—one merchant peddled a shawl made from eight thousand Hummingbird skins.

  In the early years of the trade, according to the historian Robin Doughty, “plume merchants purchased stock by the individual plume; however, as millinery interests, particularly in Paris, changed over to buying by weight, bulk purchasing became everywhere the rule.” Considering the weight of a feather, this meant astonishing tallies: commercial hunters had to kill between eight hundred and one thousand Snowy Egrets to yield a kilo of feathers. Only two hundred to three hundred larger bird skins were required to yield a kilo.

  As the industry matured, the numbers only grew: in 1798, around the time Marie-Antoinette displayed her diamond plume, there were twenty-five plumassiers in France. By 1862 there were 120, and by 1870 the number had skyro
cketed to 280. So many people were working in the feather-plucking and bird-stuffing business that trade groups sprang up to protect its workers, such as the Union of Raw Feather Merchants, the Union of Feather Dyers, and even a Society for Assistance to Children Employed in the Feather Industries. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred million pounds of feathers were imported into France. In the auction houses of London’s Mincing Lane, 155,000 Birds of Paradise were sold in a four-year stretch, part of a $2.8 billion industry (in today’s dollars) that imported forty million pounds of plumage over the same period. One British dealer reported selling two million bird skins in a single year. The American feather industry was no different—by 1900 eighty-three thousand New Yorkers were employed in the millinery trade, for which some two hundred million North American birds were killed each year.

  As the number of birds in the wild dwindled, the value of a feather doubled, tripled, then quadrupled. By 1900 a single ounce of the Snowy Egret’s finest plumes, which emerge only during the courtship displays of mating season, fetched $32. An ounce of gold was worth only $20. A kilo of Egret feathers, in today’s dollars, was worth over $12,000, driving plume hunters into Florida rookeries to wipe out generations of birds in an afternoon.

  With demand for birds like Herons and Ostriches far outpacing supply, entrepreneurs around the world set up feather farms. Since Herons weren’t predisposed to life in a cage, farmers blinded the birds to make them more docile, running a fine filament of cotton thread through the bird’s lower eyelid and tugging it over its upper eyelid. There were riches to be harvested from their backs—indeed, when the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers, second only to diamonds in the commodities market.

  Darwin and Wallace had scoured the mountains and jungles for clues to explain the emergence and disappearance of species, but many in the West derided the very concept of extinction as folly, in part due to the assurances of religion, and in part due to the bounty of the “New World.” The fate of the vanished species revealed within the fossil record could be explained away as the work of the great flood: those that survived must have made it onto Noah’s ark. In the early days of the American colonies, salmon ran in such great numbers that they could be speared from the riverbanks with a pitchfork. So common were they that they were ground up and used as crop fertilizer. The skies were darkened with great clouds of migrating birds—in 1813 John James Audubon once traveled for three straight days under a single eclipsing horde of Passenger Pigeons. The plains rumbled with bison herds so vast that it took one soldier six full days to pass through them on horseback.

  As Americans looked westward toward their “manifest destiny,” they took God’s commands to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” quite literally, a divine sanction for the industrializing society. In this fantasy, all the copper, iron, and gold blasted out of stone would never run out, the fish and fowl were limitless, the oak in the forests infinite. Never mind the fact that the resource-hungry human race, which numbered only one hundred million at the time Genesis was written, was hurtling exponentially toward 1.6 billion in 1900: all that was needed were machines to extract and harvest the raw materials of nature more efficiently.

  Armed with repeating revolvers and a blessing from God, they razed a path to the Pacific. After Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831, he concluded that its citizens were “insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature . . . their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the American people views its own march across these wilds, drying swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.” By the end of the century, the sixty million American bison were hunted down to three hundred, fired upon by tourists from train windows for sport. By 1901 billions of Passenger Pigeons had been hunted to the point of extinction. In the Everglades, steamboat pilots loaded their decks with shotgun-toting sportsmen who fired at alligators and Egrets in “an orgy of noise, gunpowder fumes, and death.” In forests across the continent, trees older than Shakespeare were chopped down and sent to the mill. Meanwhile the feather fever spread.

  As the twentieth century arrived, America’s manifest destiny had been fulfilled. The 1890 census found so many settlements as to declare the extinction of the frontier. Having reached the Pacific, our forebears looked back and saw a denuded landscape: mountains demolished and rivers fouled by the Gold Rush, and species vanishing as cities grew larger and their smokestacks taller. 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.

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  BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

  In 1875 Mary Thatcher wrote a piece for Harper’s entitled “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” suggesting that tenderhearted women “would shrink from inflicting needless pain on any creature had not the love of ‘style’ blinded their eyes.” She assailed “the widespread belief that birds and animals were created only for the use and amusement of man” as “unworthy of Christendom.”

  Five years later the great suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton condemned the social consequences of placing women in corseted, crinoline cages to pine after the latest fashions instead of developing their bodies and minds. “Our fashions as you all know are sent us by the French courtesans, whose life work it is to study how to fascinate man and hold him for their selfish purposes,” she said in a famous lecture. “God has given you minds, dear girls. . . . Your life work is not simply to attract man or please anybody, but to mould yourselves into a grand and glorious womanhood.” Stanton lamented the sedentary, unstimulated life of the Victorian woman and urged her audiences to “remember that beauty works from within, it cannot be put on and off like a garment.”

  Simultaneously, British women were rising up against the feather trade. In 1889 Emily Williamson, a thirty-six-year-old woman from Manchester, founded a group called the Plumage League, dedicated to curbing the slaughter of birds. Two years later she joined forces with Eliza Phillips’s Fur and Feather meetings in Croydon in what was soon rechristened the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The society, composed entirely of women, had two simple rules for its members: to stop wearing feathers, and to discourage others from doing so. It swiftly became one of the largest membership organizations in the country.

  In 1896 a Bostonian Brahmin named Harriet Lawrence Hemenway, outraged by an article on the brutality of the feather trade, enlisted the help of her cousin, Minna Hall, to convene a series of tea parties to discourage their friends from wearing plumes. After nine hundred women joined, the two formed the Massachusetts chapter of the Audubon Society. Within years newly formed Audubon Society chapters had tens of thousands of members throughout the country.

  In the United States and Britain, these women fought to educate others and to stigmatize the use of feathers in fashion. In London’s West End, they passed out pamphlets and marched with signs illustrating the slaughter of Egrets and calling feathered hats “The Badge of Cruelty!” In America the Audubon Society held public lectures, maintained “white lists” of milliners who did not use birds, and pressured Congress to act. In one such call to arms, at an 1897 Audubon lecture held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the ornithologist Frank Chapman spoke of the Birds of Paradise piled up in milliners’ workshops: “This beautiful bird is now almost extinct. The species fashion selects is doomed. It lies in the power of women to remedy a great evil.”

  The press joined the fight. In 1892 Punch, a British weekly best known for coining the word cartoon, published one of a woman with dead birds on her hat. Her arms are stretched out menacingly, large plumes extend from her back, and she has talons instead of feet. Ospreys and Egrets are wi
nging away from her in terror. The caption reads: A BIRD OF PREY. In another cartoon, entitled THE EXTINCTION OF SPECIES, a woman sporting a dead Egret on her head is branded as the “fashion-plate lady without mercy.” In the United States, the editors of Harper’s Bazaar declared in 1896 that “it really seems as though it were time a crusade were organized against this lavish use of feathers, for some of the rarest and most valuable species . . . will soon be exterminated if the present craze continues.” Ladies’ Home Journal followed suit, offering up fashion alternatives to wearing real birds and publishing photos of bird slaughter with a warning: “The next time you buy a . . . feather for your hat think of these pictures.”

  In 1900 one of the first major victories for conservationists in the United States arrived with the passage of the Lacey Act, which prohibited interstate trafficking of birds (though it did nothing to halt the imports of foreign birds). In 1903, when it became clear that the Snowy Egrets of the Everglades had been hunted to the brink of extinction, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the first federal bird refuge at Pelican Island in Florida—one of fifty-five reserves set aside during his presidency.

  Queen Alexandra of Britain soon entered the fray, declaring, via an aide’s 1906 letter to the president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that she would never wear Osprey or other rare bird feathers, “and will certainly do all in her power to discourage the cruelty practiced on these beautiful birds.” The queen’s letter was printed in numerous journals and fashion magazines.