WOMAN’S ADORNMENT

Forest and Bird, Issue 53, 1 August 1939, Page 6

WOMAN’S ADORNMENT

(By the Wild-Life Preservation Society of Australia.)

THE TRAGEDY OF THE “OSPREY” PLUME

EVERY woman knows the “osprey” plume, hut few who wear these plumes are aware of the manner in which they are obtained. The Wild-Life Preservation Society of Australia wishes to place the actual facts before every woman who is now wearing, or is ever likely to wear, an “osprey.” The egret, which at breeding time carries these graceful plumes, is a shy wading bird. Through nine months of the year it is scattered in pairs over the watercourses of the country. At nesting time it gathers into rookeries for mutual protection, and many hundreds of the birds nest together in the trees round swamps and rivers. When the young are hatched, plume hunters, knowing that the birds will not leave their young, visit the rookeries. They shoot the parent birds in the act of tending the nestlings, tear from their backs the small patch of skin

which bears the fatal plumes, and leave their bodies to rot in the waters of the swamp. The helpless young die of slow starvation in their nests, save a few which, driven frantic by hunger, manage to scramble from the platforms to a more merciful death in the water below. Our illustrations show that this statement is not in any way exaggerated. They are actual photographs taken by Mr. A. H. E. Mattingley, C.M.Z.S., in the swamps on the Murray River. What is shown here as taking place in Australia has gone on in North America and Eastern Asia until there are practically none of the birds left. Hundreds of thousands of egrets are being killed each year in the northern parts of South America. Soon there will be none left there. These plumes are not always white. The millinery trade dyes them in all shades, and frequently represents them as imitations. There is no imitation made that looks in the least like the real plumes. Milliners will also say that the

plumes are collected when dropped by moulting birds. This is absolutely untrue. Every plume that is displayed on a woman’s head costs ..the lives of an adult bird, and of its helpless young. Every woman, who purchases or wears one of these plumes, is as directly responsible for the tragedy depicted below as the gunner who fires the shot. Can feathers obtained in such a way make any woman fairer? Can true womanhood sanction such barbarous cruelty?