Backyard and Beyond

A Great Egret grooming.
And loosing its long breeding plumes.
People used to kill for these things. Game Warden Guy Bradley, for one, was gunned down by feather-hunters in 1905 in Florida. (The late Peter Matthiesen’s Shadow Country trilogy is a harrowing view of Florida’s psychopathic history.)
The plumes, called aigrettes, were used to decorate ladies’ hats.
I suppose they could have gathered them after breeding season, when birds lose their breeding plumage, but instead they killed everything that moved, condemning the year’s young to starvation. Aren’t people lovely? Of course, we put a stop to that, so there’s that loveliness, too: it’s now illegal to possess bird feathers (and eggs, nests, actual birds) etc.