The hunt for egret plumes had reached such a scale by 1886 that a New York ornithologist, tallying the dead birds on the hats he passed on his walks through the city, counted remains from 40 different species in just two outings.
Three out of every four hats were trimmed with feathers or whole birds.
The cause was fashion. The egret’s breeding plumes—white, weightless, impossibly delicate—had become the most coveted accessory in high society, and that demand nearly drove the species to extinction.
Five Million Dead Birds a Year
To understand how a bird so common today came close to disappearing entirely, it helps to look at the sheer scale the hat-making industry reached at its peak.
According to estimates cited by the National Audubon Society, roughly five million birds were killed each year by 1886 just to supply the North American hat market.
The snowy egret (Egretta thula) and the great egret (Ardea alba) topped that list, prized for their brilliant white breeding plumage.
Hunters shot adults during nesting season, when the birds displayed their most spectacular feathers.
That meant the chicks—dependent on both parents—were left to starve in the nest. Entire colonies vanished within two or three sustained hunting seasons.
Florida, whose Everglades held the largest wading-bird colonies in the country, bore the brunt of the slaughter.
By the late 1880s, no significant colonies remained near the state’s most populated cities, and hunters had to push ever deeper south to find birds.
Feathers Worth More Than Gold
What made all that carnage profitable was the price.
According to records cited by ornithologist Herbert K. Job, in 1903 the value of the plumes paid to hunters reached $32 per ounce—nearly twice the price of gold at the time.
Producing that ounce required killing an average of four herons or egrets.
A single transaction captures the scale of the trade: at a London auction in 1902, 1,608 packages of 30 ounces of heron plumes were sold, representing roughly 193,000 birds killed at once.
The hat industry was generating around $17 million a year in the United States alone.
Two Boston Cousins and the Birth of the Audubon
What finally reined in the industry was not a law. It was a campaign that began in a parlor over tea.
In 1896, Bostonian Harriet Hemenway read an article about the slaughter of birds for the fashion trade and was so disturbed that she turned to her cousin, Minna B. Hall, to work out what they could do.
Their answer was to invite upper-class Boston women to a series of teas, where they urged their guests to give up feathered hats.
They secured commitments from roughly 900 women. But in 1896, women had no political power—the 19th Amendment was still 24 years away—and Hemenway knew it.
So she sought out allies with real public clout, recruiting scientists and prominent Boston men, among them ornithologist William Brewster, who became the first president of the organization they founded that same year: the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the oldest of its kind in the country.
The Laws That Stopped the Trade
Pressure from the new society paid off quickly. In 1897, Massachusetts banned the commercial trade in wild bird feathers, the first law of its kind in the United States.
From there, protections expanded step by step, each going further than the last.
In 1900, the Lacey Act made it a federal crime to transport illegally killed birds across state lines.
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the executive order creating Pelican Island Reserve in Florida—the first federal wildlife refuge in the country, designed specifically to protect colonies of wading birds from plume hunters.
The Weeks-McLean Act followed in 1913, and in 1918 the Migratory Bird Treaty Act brought the legal trade in wild bird feathers to a permanent end.
The Egret Today: From Endangered to Emblem
The laws worked, and the numbers confirm it.
Both the snowy egret and the great egret are now listed as “least concern” on the IUCN Red List.
Partners in Flight estimates the global snowy egret population at 2.1 million birds, a figure that has held steady since 1966, according to North American breeding bird surveys.
The great egret, meanwhile, is now the official symbol of the National Audubon Society—the organization that grew directly out of those Boston teas.
The primary threat to these birds is no longer hunting but wetland loss.
In the United States alone, more than 100 million acres of wetland have been drained since the colonial era, steadily shrinking the feeding and nesting grounds on which egrets and other wading birds depend.
The Black-Crowned Night Heron: The Next Crisis, in New York Harbor
The egrets’ recovery has not reached all the wading birds that share their habitat, and the most recent warning comes from New York Harbor.
A study published in June 2026 by the NYC Bird Alliance in the journal Conservation Science and Practice documented a 55% decline in the black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) population since 2000, when roughly 470 active nests were counted on the harbor islands.
The study’s authors, Dustin Partridge and Shannon Curley, warned that if the trend continues, the species could disappear locally by 2037.
The black-crowned night heron nests alongside egrets and other waterbirds, and researchers consider it an indicator species: its decline may signal broader problems in the estuary’s health.
What’s driving the decline remains unclear. The possible causes the alliance is investigating include pollution and habitat loss on the nesting islands.
The bird is already listed as threatened in Pennsylvania and endangered in New Jersey, and the organization is now calling on New York to adopt similar protections.
