During the first two decades of the twentieth century, hats decorated with bird feathers continued to be in style among women living in the international centers of Europe and the Americas. Demands of the feather millinery trade of London, Paris and Berlin were felt in the most remote and inaccessible corners of the world. It was the demands of fashion for plumes and feathers for hat trimmings which placed before the hunters the temptation to kill. With them there was no closed seasons. The birds which they were after gathered in large rookeries during the nesting season and were therefore much easier to capture then than at other times. Most of the plume-bearing birds were hunted and killed for the plumes alone, or, at most, for a very small part of the whole plumage. The part wanted was taken, while the bird’s body was tossed aside and never used for anything.It required six egrets to yield one ounce of “aigrette” plumes and egrets bore their best plumes in the breeding season, when the helpless young were in the nest and the parent birds had to be killed to obtain the plumes.As the birds were wiped out in one Gulf coastal area, the professional plume hunters traveled to another plumage site along the Gulf Coast and then, for some, on to Mexico and Central and South America. Sometimes, plumers, during five or six months of hunting, sold feathers and the plumes for $1600 and upwards to $2300.