Women who saved the birds
How three women saved millions of birds and founded Britain’s biggest nature charity – whose reserves are a joy to walk wideeyed among.
It started by looking at hats...
IN THE BREEDING season, male egrets grow snow-white, gossamer-delicate feathers to tempt the lady birds. But in Victorian Britain you’d have been more likely to see the display on a woman’s head on Bond Street than on a living bird in the wild. Between 1870 and 1920, feathery hats were all the rage and the bigger the better: they could be two feet wide, and just as tall. Some even sported tableaus featuring entire taxidermied birds, perhaps mounted on springy wire to mimic natural movement. Exotic birds of paradise, hummingbirds, lyre birds and quetzals were prized, as were native British species like the kittiwake, with its striking black-tipped wings.
It was a brutal trade, both in scale and detail.
At its height, it’s estimated 200 million birds were killed globally each year. The striking rusty-brown ruff of the great crested grebe saw it hunted from a common sight down to 32 pairs in Britain in just nine years. Feathers could fetch $80 an ounce, five times the price of gold, and the trade in this country alone was worth £20 million – £2.5 billion in today’s money. Some birds had their wings torn off while still alive, and hunting often happened during the breeding season to catch plumage at its most striking, leaving eggs and chicks to perish with no parents.
But three women were having none of it. Unable to join the male-only British Ornithological Society and unable to persuade them to do anything about the trade in birds, Emily Williamson founded The Plumage League in Didsbury, Manchester, in 1889, while Eliza Phillips and Etta Lemon set up the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk in Croydon. Both organisations only permitted women to join and in 1891 they merged to form the Society for the Protection of Birds.
The mission was simple. ‘Members shall discourage the wanton destruction of Birds, and interest themselves generally in their protection... Lady-Members shall refrain from wearing the feathers of any bird not killed for purposes of food, the ostrich only excepted.’ Volunteers wrote to ladies seen wearing feathered hats – a practice Lemon started as a girl in church when she penned letters to women of the congregation to educate them about ‘murderous millinery’. The women talked to owners and managers of shops, and they recruited the rich and famous to their campaign, including Margaret, Lady Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak and Winifred Cavendish-Bentinck, Duchess of Portland who became the first president of the SPB (which gained its Royal Charter to become the RSPB in 1904). They even campaigned against berries on hats, emphasising the need to preserve birds’ winter food sources. In 1921, after decades of pressure, The Plumage Act was passed by parliament, prohibiting the import of bird skins.
But there’s still a lot of money in plumage. In 2009, the Natural History Museum at Tring (see p58) was the scene of a million dollar feather heist, when a man called Edwin Rist broke in and stole 299 rare bird skins – quetzals, cotingas and birds of paradise, some of which had been collected by the eminent 19th-century biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. Rist stuffed them into a suitcase and dragged it down to Tring station to wait anxiously for his getaway vehicle: the morning train to London. He was later caught selling them into ‘the feather underground’ of salmon fly-tyers – enthusiasts keen for exotic plumes to create angling flies to historic ‘recipes’ – thus foiling Rist’s plan to raise enough money to buy himself a golden flute.
MORE INFO: Discover all about the RSPB’s current work and find a reserve to walk near you at rspb.org.uk
“Members shall discourage the wanton destruction of Birds, and interest themselves in their protection…”