The great egret earned its spot as the emblem of the National Audubon Society the hard way
At the peak of it, an ounce of those feathers was worth more than an ounce of gold.
The great egret is on the letterhead. It is the logo. This is how it got there.
The hats
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the fashionable thing to put on a hat was a bird.
Not a ribbon shaped like a bird. A bird — wings, whole specimens, and above all egrets, the long lacy plumes that great egrets and snowy egrets grow across their backs. By 1886, the North American millinery trade was consuming somewhere around five million birds a year.
The plumes were worth a fortune, and that is not a figure of speech. An ounce of aigrettes sold for around thirty-two dollars at a time when an ounce of gold was fixed at twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents.
Here is the part that turned public opinion, and it is worth sitting with for a second, because everything that follows depends on it. Egrets only grow those plumes during breeding season. The feathers are a courtship display. Which means the birds were at their most valuable precisely when they were on the nest — so hunters shot the adults over their own chicks, took the plumes, and left the young to starve.
Rookeries that had held thousands of nesting birds went silent. By the turn of the century the great egret was close to gone in the American Southeast.
The hats
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the fashionable thing to put on a hat was a bird.
Not a ribbon shaped like a bird. A bird — wings, whole specimens, and above all egrets, the long lacy plumes that great egrets and snowy egrets grow across their backs. By 1886, the North American millinery trade was consuming somewhere around five million birds a year.
The plumes were worth a fortune, and that is not a figure of speech. An ounce of aigrettes sold for around thirty-two dollars at a time when an ounce of gold was fixed at twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents.
Here is the part that turned public opinion, and it is worth sitting with for a second, because everything that follows depends on it. Egrets only grow those plumes during breeding season. The feathers are a courtship display. Which means the birds were at their most valuable precisely when they were on the nest — so hunters shot the adults over their own chicks, took the plumes, and left the young to starve.
Rookeries that had held thousands of nesting birds went silent. By the turn of the century the great egret was close to gone in the American Southeast.
The two women who ended it
In 1896 a Boston woman named Harriet Hemenway read an account of the plume trade and did something that sounds almost too simple. She invited her cousin, Minna Hall, over. The two of them went through the Boston social register, identified the women most likely to be wearing aigrettes, and started holding tea parties.
The ask was not a donation. It was: stop buying the hats.
That series of tea parties became the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Within three years there were nearly twenty state Audubon societies. They lobbied, and in 1900 Congress passed the Lacey Act — sponsored by Representative John Lacey of Iowa and signed by President McKinley — which banned shipping birds across state lines if they had been killed against state law. It was the first federal wildlife protection law in American history.
The demand was in New York. The birds were in Florida. Cutting the route between them was the whole strategy.
Guy Bradley
Laws need someone to enforce them. In 1902, the American Ornithologists’ Union — pushed by Audubon — hired a former plume hunter named Guy Bradley to protect the rookeries of south Florida. He was deputized by Monroe County and paid thirty-five dollars a month to patrol hundreds of square miles of the Everglades, alone, by boat.
He was one of the first game wardens in the United States.
On July 8, 1905, Bradley heard shots from Oyster Keys, within sight of his own cottage. He rowed out to a schooner belonging to Walter Smith, a plume hunter whose son Bradley had already arrested twice, and asked for the son. Smith picked up a rifle and told him he would have to come aboard and take him. Bradley was shot and killed. His brother found the skiff the next day, still drifting, with his body in it.
In December, a grand jury dismissed the charges. Walter Smith walked free.
Bradley’s death did more for the birds than his patrols had. It ran in newspapers across the country, and it turned an argument about hats into something people could not look away from. Two more wardens were killed in the years that followed. In 1913, Congress passed the Weeks-McLean Act, which shut down the import of foreign wild bird feathers and put migratory birds under federal protection.
The trade collapsed. The rookeries came back.
Which is why it’s on the logo
The great egret became the symbol of the National Audubon Society because its story is the whole argument in one animal: a bird that was nearly erased for decoration, and a movement that grew up specifically to stop it, and then stayed to protect everything else.
It is a genuine comeback. Great egret populations recovered across most of their former range, and the bird you’ll see standing in our shallows is descended from the survivors of that period.
The bird that nearly disappeared became the one that saved the rest.
What you’re looking at
So when you see a tall white bird standing in the shallows down here, that is what you are looking at. Here is how to be sure.
Ardea alba. A little over three feet tall, with a wingspan close to four and a half feet. All white, with a yellow bill and long black legs — that last detail is the easiest way to separate it from the snowy egret, which is smaller and has bright yellow feet, as though it walked through paint.
It hunts by not moving. A great egret will stand in shallow water for minutes at a stretch, so still you stop watching it, and then it spears a fish, a frog, or a crawfish faster than you can register that anything happened. If you have ever tried to hold that still on purpose, you know it is harder than it looks.
They are here year-round on the Eastern Shore. Once you know to look, you will find one on nearly every quiet stretch of bank between here and Mobile Bay.
Come look
None of this is written on the bird. It stands on a half-submerged log at the edge of our water, looking like it has never had a difficult day, and it will let you watch it for as long as you are willing to be quiet.
Group Retreat Fairhope sits on a quiet tidal stretch that runs down to Weeks Bay, where the egrets work the shallows every morning of the year. Take a boat out and you’ll pass them standing on the logs and the old pilings, close enough to see the yellow of the bill.