Here is a picture of how they are got, and it can be verified by photographs:
"Notwithstanding the extreme heat and the myriads of mosquitos, I determined to revisit the locality during my holidays, in order to obtain one picture only—namely, that of a white crane, or egret, feeding its young. When near the place, I could see some large patches of white, either floating in the water or reclining on the fallen trees in the vicinity of the egrets' rookery. This set me speculating as to the cause of this unusual sight. As I drew nearer, what a spectacle met my gaze—a sight that made my blood fairly boil with indignation. There, strewn on the floating water-weed, and also on adjacent logs, were at least fifty carcasses of large white and smaller plumed egrets—nearly one-third of the rookery, perhaps more—the birds having been shot off their nests containing young. What a holocaust! Plundered for their plumes. What a monument of human callousness! There were fifty birds ruthlessly destroyed, besides their young (about two hundred) left to die of starvation! This last fact was betokened by at least seventy carcasses of the nestlings, which had become so weak that their legs had refused to support them, and they had fallen from the nests into the water below, and had been miserably drowned; while, in the trees above, the remainder of the parentless young ones could be seen staggering in the nests, some of them falling with a splash into the water, as their waning strength left them too exhausted to hold up any longer, while others simply stretched themselves out on the nest and so expired. Others, again, were seen trying in vain to attract the attention of passing egrets, which were flying with food in their bills to feed their own young, and it was a pitiful sight indeed to see these starvelings with outstretched necks and gaping bills imploring the passing birds to feed them. What a sickening sight!"
A like gruesome story is given by William L. Finley, agent of the National Association of Audubon Societies, after he had explored the region about Lake Malheur, Oregon, where formerly thousands of white herons bred, but now none are to be found—all absolutely exterminated by plume-hunters. In Florida an agent of this Association was lately murdered while trying to defend a rookery from plume-hunters.
Every aigrette—and almost every other wild-bird's feather you wear—represents a broken law, and in buying it you become a voluntary partner in crime.
The manufacturing milliners and dealers realize this, and consequently resort to all sorts of lies and disguises and subterfuges, which your buying encourages, for it sustains the bloody business of the illegal feather-hunters. Some dealers assert that none but imported feathers are now sold by them. This is not true, but if it were, the wearing of them is wrong, not only because it encourages the devastation of other countries, but also because it keeps up the general fashion. The same may be said in answer to the plea of the milliner that her ornaments were "made up" of chicken-feathers. You can't be sure of that, and you are setting a harmful example.
"Here, of course," remarks Reginald W. Kauffman, in the illuminative "Hampton's" article already quoted, "is involved merely a question of individual ethics, but if the trifling life of a bird is a matter of small moment even to the gentler sex—so long as the eyes of that sex are not outraged by an actual sight of the bloody slaughter—at least a matter of very great moment is the fact that the rise in the price of your foodstuffs, the yearly increase in your market-bill, is the direct result of those feathers in your bonnet, those plumes upon your daughter's hat....
"Difficult as the figures are to get, such as may be acquired are appalling. Surely you cannot read them and remain unmoved. England, by importing the bird of paradise at the rate of six thousand a year, has practically exterminated that species. In four months one London house disposed of eight hundred thousand East and West Indian bird-skins; the United States alone sends to the British Isles four hundred thousand humming-birds every twelve months, which helps bring the English grand total up to thirty million birds a year.
"And we keep a comfortable figure for home consumption. In one year a single Chicago dealer has been known to handle 32,000 humming-birds in one consignment, 32,000 gulls, and the wings of 300,000 other birds. In all, the National Audubon Association puts our total at about 150,000,000 birds a year. The European continent repeats this, and so you have the women of the 'civilized' world, with the omission of our South American cousins, wearing 300,000,000 birds every year.
"Legislation is here, as always, powerless in the face of fashionable womankind."
Another point of view is that of good taste. A single large feather or a shapely wing—in themselves beautiful objects and well adapted to decorative effect—may be so applied as really to adorn a lady's hat, or a man's for that matter, very pleasingly; and if it is the trophy of the skill of some friend, obtained in fair sport, it may embody a delightful sentiment as well. It was in this simple, wasteful, and unobjectionable manner that feathers were originally employed as trimmings. But fierce trade competition among milliners catering to the foolish cry for "novelties" regardless of becomingness in any sense, has developed absurdities of head-gear which often make their wearers utterly ridiculous.