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 eekrant.

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 eagret. 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 wear things like

a hummingbird as a brooch on their, you know, a dead one 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 eagrets 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

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