The Feather Thief

During the 19th century, there was a push for a “back-to-nature movement” (15), driven by the previous century’s focus on industrialization and urbanization. Prior to the 19th century, city-dwellers were confined because trips to the coast or countryside were too expensive and uncomfortable due to the lack of roads. The invention of the steam engine allowed city-dwellers to travel outside of cities. Johnson notes, “Embracing the biblical proverb that ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop,’ the Victorians promoted natural history collecting as the ideal form of recreation, and stalls at train stations were packed with popular magazines and books on building a private collection” (15).

People were especially obsessed with rare bird feathers, which fueled the catastrophic plume trade. There were several main drivers of the plume trade. The first were museums and private collectors, who both wanted rare bird skins for their collections. Naturalists, like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and collectors traveled all around the world to find the most beautiful and unique birds, which they then killed, skinned, and preserved. Wallace brought back over 8,000 bird skins from the Malay Archipelago, many of which ended up in the British Museum of Natural History—a museum created by aristocrat and naturalist

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