The Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) is a small species of heron.
Snowy Egret plumage was so prized for women’s hats that, at one point, 130,000 birds were killed in a single nine-month season. Harriet Lawrence Hemenway leveraged a sense of noblesse oblige, and her Brahmin connections in the Boston Social Register, to organize a boycott. This boycott led to the founding of the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1896, the seed of the National Audubon Society, and helped drive the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
Photo notes
My first bird photograph with the new Fuji XF 70-300mm lens. Not as sharp as I’d hoped — it’s heavily cropped. I’d mounted the camera on a cheap Sirui tripod hoping to catch a spoonbill on the water, and I got appropriately distracted.