“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. 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. 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. 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. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 48). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (pp. 45-46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 45). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief (p. 45). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
