Three days to go to Feather Fest! Looks like the weather will be in our favour so don’t miss what’s sure to be a fun day! A variety of family friendly activities are planned: enjoy a bird walk, learn bird ID, check out the live raptor display, get some bird-friendly gardening tips and more. You can even take a break at BPQ’s Boreal Café and enjoy a cup of shade-grown coffee or glass of lemonade! See the flyer for details and find location info here.
It’s all part of our 100th anniversary celebration, which is why today’s Feather Fact is drawn from bird conservation history.
Feather Fact #9 – Feathers worth more than their weight in gold.
The 19th and early 20th century plume trade resulted in the massacre of millions of birds for the sake of women’s hat fashion. For example, adult egrets were slaughtered while on the nest for their much admired “aigrette” feathers which only emerge in the breeding season. Whole rookeries of adults were killed en masse, the carcasses stripped for the feathers then discarded, and the nestlings left to starve. An account from 1900 notes plume hunters were paid 32$/ounce for feathers, which was almost double the price of gold at the time! Apparently it required the killing of 4 herons just to get an ounce of heron feathers. You can find more conservation history in this post.
