Feather-brained folly?

If you look round a typical Sunday congregation, I suspect you won’t see many women wearing hats.

Although you would never have seen my granny in church without a hat, with changing fashions, and perhaps a more relaxed interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11: 13, it’s a rare sight other than at weddings. But in the 1880s hats were de rigeur for women, and the latest millinery fashion that was storming polite society was hats with feathers. Feathers of birds like grebes and egrets, and in more extreme cases even whole birds, adorned voluminous headgear in late Victorian and Edwardian society.

The result of this fashion craze was a complete industry ‘harvesting’ wild birds around the globe and transporting them to huge warehouses in the fashion centres of London, Paris and New York. This harvesting was completely unsustainable – the population of great-crested grebes in Britain, for example, was almost completely wiped out. It also sparked a reaction from some society ladies who joined together to campaign against the plumage trade and ended up founding the Society (later Royal Society) for the Protection of Birds. The young but redoubtable Etta Smith (later Lemon) would sit in church on a Sunday morning, noting which ladies were wearing plumage in their hats. A hectoring letter would follow on Monday demanding they forgo the feathers. You can read more about it in Tessa Boase’s excellent book, Etta Lemon: The Woman who Saved the Birds.

Last month I wrote about the four horsemen of the ecological apocalypse, the destructive forces that are damaging Creation – habitat destruction, over-exploitation, pollution, and invasive species. This time it’s the turn of over-exploitation.

Humans have, of course, exploited nature from the very beginning. We farm the land, fell forests for timber, catch fish and hunt wild animals. We have domesticated many wild animals for a whole variety of purposes – meat, milk, wool, leather, eggs and, yes, feathers too (goose down and quills being just two practical uses in former times). All this is part of our Creation mandate. But problems arise when things get out of balance and we greedily take too much. To use a financial analogy, it’s one thing to live off the income that Creation supplies, but sort-sighted to draw down on the natural capital.

I’ve previously discussed several other cases of over-exploitation. Beavers, almost exterminated in North America and Europe for their fur and oil, now happily starting to make a comeback. The passenger pigeon, once the commonest bird on the planet but driven to extinction by hunting (although habitat destruction also played a part). More recently, the turtle dove’s numbers have precipitously declined. Many factors play a part, but shooting for sport on its migration route in Mediterranean countries takes a huge toll. It’s good news that hunting of turtle doves has recently been banned in Spain, Portugal and France, which has saved the lives of more than a million birds in one season alone.

I hope you’ve been able to watch the latest – and possibly last – David Attenborough series, Wild Isles. After a globetrotting career showing us the wonders of nature on every continent, he’s finally come home to show us that nature is no less amazing in the British Isles. While mating slugs might not be everyone’s cup of tea, who could not be amazed at the scenes of hunting orca, duelling butterflies or the murmuration of a million starlings?

I was particularly struck by the footage of black-headed gulls trying to steal sandeels from the puffin taking them to feed hungry chicks. Which brings me back to over-exploitation, since sandeels, an important food source for many seabirds, have been seriously overfished in the North Sea, mostly for the pet food industry, with impacts on birds like puffins and kittiwakes. The UK Government has recently proposed closing the sandeel fishery, which would be a welcome step towards recovering nature that’s under pressure.