{"id":15217,"date":"2013-05-12T07:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-12T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=15217"},"modified":"2013-05-12T11:09:36","modified_gmt":"2013-05-12T17:09:36","slug":"a-mothers-day-tribute-to-two-women-who-saved-many-of-our-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/12\/a-mothers-day-tribute-to-two-women-who-saved-many-of-our-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mother’s Day Tribute To Two Women Who Saved Many Of Our Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snowy Egrets\u00a0are spectacularly beautiful birds that we came very near to losing.\u00a0 In the early 1800s birds in North America were so numerous\u00a0that John James Audubon insisted that no act of man could ever wipe a species out, including the Snowy\u00a0Egret –\u00a0yet by 1913 the Snowy Egret was\u00a0flirting with extinction.\u00a0 The cause? – lady’s hats.<\/p>\n

It had become all the rage for fashionable women in North America and Europe\u00a0to wear fancy hats adorned with the feathers, wings and even entire taxidermied birds.<\/p>\n

The feather trade was a sordid business.\u00a0 Hunters wanted only mature birds for the\u00a0trade which were most efficiently\u00a0hunted at rookeries so hatchlings were left to starve.\u00a0 It was common for hundreds of birds in a rookery to be wiped out in a short time.\u00a0 The\u00a0London market alone consumed over 130,000 egrets (of several species including the Snowy) in a single\u00a09 month period.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"snowy<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Snowy Egret in flight over a pond, 1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 400, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

But in 1896 two Boston women, Harriet Lawrence Hemenway (a passionate birder)\u00a0and her cousin Minna Hall became disgusted with the sordid business and started a revolt by urging women to stop wearing feathered hats.\u00a0 The same year they organized the Massachusetts Audubon Society and within a short time there were Audubon Societies in many states and those organizations would eventually be called the National Audubon Society.<\/p>\n

Pressure from these groups\u00a0resulted in the passage of the Weeks-McLean Law in 1913\u00a0which effectively ended the feather trade and in 1920 the Migratory Bird Treaty\u00a0Act which protected over 800 species of migratory birds including egrets and others used in the plume trade.<\/p>\n

So thank you Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall.\u00a0 Your passion and\u00a0hard work left us your legacy – many species of birds that otherwise would most likely\u00a0no longer be with us.\u00a0 I actually don’t know if you were mothers but if not you\u00a0certainly had some of their best instincts –\u00a0including the\u00a0nurturing and protection of the weak and defenseless.<\/p>\n

Hats off to Harriet and Minna!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snowy Egrets are spectacularly beautiful birds that we came very near to losing. In the early 1800s birds in North America were so numerous that John James Audubon insisted that no act of man could ever wipe a species out, including the Snowy Egret – yet by 1913 the Snowy Egret was flirting with extinction. The cause? – lady’s hats.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,375],"tags":[1444,1445,1448,1449,1021,1446,1451,1454,1447,1450,1452,287,1453],"class_list":["post-15217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-snowy-egrets","tag-egretta-thula","tag-extinction","tag-feather-trade","tag-harriet-lawrence-hemenway","tag-john-james-audubon","tag-ladys-hats","tag-massachusetts-audubon-society","tag-migratory-bird-treaty-act","tag-millenary-trade","tag-minna-hall","tag-national-audubon-society","tag-snowy-egret","tag-weeks-mclean-law"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/snowy-egret-6025-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3Xr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}