Birds and the fashion world have had a long history together. Throughout the 1800’s all manner of bird was hunted and killed just for their feathers. The Great Egret, a large, all white heron-like bird with long white plums was nearly hunted into extinction just so their feathers could adorn women’s hats. In fact the name “Egret” comes from the French word aigrette, which means “ornamental tufts of plumes”. The plumes grow near the tail of the bird during the breeding season and are very attractive.

Many species of bird were heavily hunted for the fashion industry. However during the early to mid-1900’s several laws were passed to protect non-game species and we have seen a return of many of these species.

Bird watching has also been fashionable over the years. For example in the early 1900’s, putting up a Purple Martin house became the new trend. People would build a martin house out of wood and put it up in their yards and farms. There were huge advertisement campaigns which extolled the virtues of having martins, the largest member of the swallow family, around your home. These ads said that martins would eat thousands of mosquitoes each day. Who wouldn’t like to have a mosquito eating machine flying around their home? (By the way, it turns out that only 10 percent of their diet consists of mosquitoes.)

People responded by put up thousands of martin houses. These multi-compartment homes popped up all across the U.S. They became so fashionable that companies started to manufacture martin houses. Attracting and watching martins became a national obsession. It was so successful that all of these new homes actually changed the behavior of the entire species. By the mid 1900’s it was estimated that the entire population of Purple Martin in the eastern half of the country, which for thousands of years had nested in natural tree cavities, switched over to man-made nesting cavities.

Read the rest of the Stan's column in our July issue...