This is CBSI in the world.

I'm with Stephen Moss.

I'm John Batchel.

His new book is 10 birds that change the world.

First, the snowy egris, a beautiful bird to look at photographs.

The plumage wars.

This had to do with fashion, maybe from Marie Antoinette,

but certainly by the 19th century in Europe and in

America. Ladies hat. Stephen, there's a part of the story that's hard to tell about the abuse

of birds with beautiful plumes like the snowy egret. We've changed, Stephen. There's no

toleration for this kind of cruelty today.

I hope not. I mean, people still shoot birds, certainly in Europe and America, you know,

but what happened here was, as you say, this was driven by, I suppose, what you'd 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 their on their dress and the demand for feathers

was huge and of course where there'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 egress

that live 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.

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