Spotted a pretty feather on the ground? It might be tempting to pick it up and pop it in your pocket, but that’s not as innocent an idea as it seems – you'd be committing a crime. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The reason why takes us all the way back to the late 1800s, in the Gilded Age. In those days, hats extravagantly decorated with feathers , or sometimes even parts of or entire dead birds, were the height of fashion among women in the US. Yep, you read that right – actual dead birds, and the more ostentatious, the better.

“Some women even wanted a stuffed owl head on their bonnets and a full hummingbird wrapped in bejeweled vegetation as a brooch,” wrote history professor Douglas Brinkley in The Wilderness W

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