Some women joined and some who preferred to wear feathers would not join.”īuoyed by their success-some 900 women joined this upper-crust boycott-Hemenway and Hall that same year organized the Massachusetts Audubon Society. “We sent out circulars,” Hall later recalled, “asking the women to join a society for the protection of birds, especially the egret.
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The cousins consulted the Blue Book, Boston’s social register, and launched a series of tea parties at which they urged their friends to stop wearing feathered hats. In 1896, after Hemenway read an article describing the plume trade, she enlisted the help of Hall. A passionate amateur naturalist, she was known for setting out on birding expeditions wearing unthinkably unfashionable white sneakers. Washington as a houseguest when Boston hotels refused him), would live to 102. Hemenway, a Boston Brahmin but also something of an iconoclast (she once invited Booker T. Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and her husband Augustus, a philanthropist who was heir to a shipping fortune, lived in a tony section of Back Bay. The law, a landmark in American conservation history, outlawed market hunting and forbade interstate transport of birds. Their boycott of the trade would culminate in formation of the National Audubon Society and passage of the Weeks-McLean Law, also known as the Migratory Bird Act, by Congress on March 4, 1913. In 1886, it was estimated, 50 North American species were being slaughtered for their feathers.Įgrets and other wading birds were being decimated until two crusading Boston socialites, Harriet Hemenway and her cousin, Minna Hall, set off a revolt. And egrets were not the only species under threat. Hornaday, who described London as “the Mecca of the feather killers of the world,” calculated that in a single nine-month period the London market had consumed feathers from nearly 130,000 egrets.
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The main drivers of the plume trade were millinery centers in New York and London. “It was a common thing for a rookery of several hundred birds to be attacked by the plume hunters, and in two or three days utterly destroyed,” wrote William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Society and formerly chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian. Hunters killed and skinned the mature birds, leaving orphaned hatchlings to starve or be eaten by crows.
(A snowy egret specimen from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s ornithology collections, above, documents the bird’s showy splendor.) The egrets’ brilliant white plumage, especially the gossamer wisps of feather that became more prominent during mating season, was in high demand among milliners. The snowy egret-and its slightly larger cousin, the great egret-were similarly imperiled by the late 1800s, when fashionable women began wearing hats adorned with feathers, wings and even entire taxidermied birds. Yet little more than half a century after Audubon’s death in 1851, the last passenger pigeon-a species once numbering in the billions-was living out its days in the Cincinnati Zoo, to be replaced shortly thereafter by a final handful of Carolina parakeets, also soon to die in captivity. “I have visited some of their breeding grounds,” Audubon wrote, “where several hundred pairs were to be seen, and several nests were placed on the branches of the same bush, so low at times that I could easily see into them.”Īudubon insisted that birds were so plentiful in North America that no depredation-whether hunting, the encroachment of cities and farmlands, or any other act of man-could extinguish a species. The Feather of Mastery is only obtainable directly upon clearing all 6 Arena Quests with all weapons, and is not available for crafting via the Smithy.John James Audubon, the pre-eminent 19th-century painter of birds, considered the snowy egret to be one of America’s surpassingly beautiful species. Feather of Mastery Armor Set Forging Materials Cannot be Forged
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