By the end of the 1800s, it became quite fashionable for a woman to not only don hats bearing feather plumes from a variety of exotic bird species, but also to wear the entire bobbing bird atop her head. 
&ldquo;They hunted birds by the tens of thousands and wanted the breeding plumage because those feathers were the coolest,&rdquo; said Debbie Corbett, an archeologist with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. &ldquo;They were killing them while they sat on their nests. The heads would bob and the wings would flop.&rdquo;
A famous account has it that an ornithologist had only to stand on a busy New York City street corner to count dozens of bird species in a single day. 