This is John Bachelor speaking with the author Stephen Moss, the new book's 10 birds that changed the world.

The bird here is many birds, birds that were massacred for their feathers, for hats at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

When you see the Gibson girls, when you see photographs from 1910, 1900, you'll often see women sometimes in crowds,

sometimes singly walking with their husbands, wearing elaborate constructions,ions hats and out of those hats come these

exotic feathers. Those feathers were farmed, mined, plundered by hunters the end of the 19th century and it came to a halt because of a

tragedy. Stephen Moss tells the story here.

The hat feathers were cruelty and it ended.

Stephen Moss

I suppose what you call posh rich women in New York, in Paris, in London.

They wanted to outdo their friends and they did so.

First, by wearing ostrich feathers, which were farmed, so that was less of a problem but then from feathers of

wild birds and not just feathers people would wear things like a hummingbird as

a brooch on their you know dead one on their on their dress and the demand for feathers was huge and of course

weather's demand there's money to be made and so men in Florida ordinary men

would go out and they would kill these birds like snow

egrets that nest in big colonies. You could go in with a boat and you could

perhaps kill hundreds of birds in one go. And then they would sell perhaps for a dollar or two, each pile of feathers, but those

feathers were ultimately sold at prices equivalent to the same weight as gold.

So this was a massive industry, huge industry. People were making big

profits. And then one day a young man called Guy Bradley who'd been a he'd

helped the shooters himself when he was young.

But in his, by his, I think his 20s, late 30s, he'd become a warden, become a ranger in the early days.

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