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Hats were a big deal in the late 19th/early 20th century. They were a way of showcasing status and wealth: if you had rare, expensive, gaudy feathers on there, you were important.

So they were in high demand, such high demand that many rare native species were hunted to extinction, or near it. This isn't purely a North American issue, but the law we're discussing is specific to North America.

For that reason, it's not "there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name," as a previous poster said, but "there are such strict laws written to protect native species, with a carve-out for religious purposes that are most common to indigenous peoples." Indigenous peoples got a loophole in honor of their historic practices, but the law was very much about the birds. The eagle feather law, which is the part that mentions indigenous tribes, is the exceptions clause, not the migratory bird act as a whole, and there are also international treaties for this.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service issues permits for otherwise prohibited activities under the act. These include permits for taxidermy, falconry, propagation, scientific and educational use, and depredation, an example of the last being the killing of geese near an airport, where they pose a danger to aircraft. (src)

I know people hate econ/business theory on the hellsite, but consumer psychology is CRUCIAL to understanding shit sometimes. This law was in response to excesses of the gilded age! Now, in a time of microtrends that are picked up by millions of people at a time, is like the WORST time to remove it!

Let me tell you about the Great Auk.

Once in a while, people ask why there aren't any penguins in the arctic, the way they are in the antarctic, what would happen if they introduced penguins to the arctic, how long would it take for penguins to evolve to fill that role?

The real answer, mostly, is that there was. That niche in the arctic used to have a species to fill it, which was called the Great Auk.

It was similarly sized to a penguin, similarly shaped. It had very, very good down for pillows: see here.

If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize. - Aaron Thomas of HMS Boston from 1794, via wikipedia

The bird went extinct by 1850. It's not the only one to have been specifically hunted to extinction (as opposed to the more common habitat destruction), but along with the passenger pigeon, is one of the most notable and obvious examples of that. Plume hunting for just feathers and not the actual meat or other attributes is a whole thing

So that's the cause of the act: past overhunting in pursuit of, mostly, plumage.

But why the phrasing?

In the world of the wealthy, there is a general love for expensive, rare goods as status symbols. There is a trade for the eggs and meat and skin of endangered species, wanting to say you ate or wore something so rare that it was illegal, but you had the money to make it happen, had the money to pay the fines.

Imagine there is a bird with plumage as vibrant and identifiable as a peacock, but infinitely rarer. Just a few dozen in the wild. Just one feather sells for a thousand dollars.

You could go out, spend days trying to find dropped feathers... or you could catch and kill one, and get a good two dozen feathers out of it. Almost twenty-five thousand dollars, right there, and without the act, then so long as nobody knows that you killed the bird, it's perfectly legal to have, and sell, that feather.

Poaching is hard to prove. You can say you found the feathers on the ground. You can say you found an already-dead bird half-eaten by the predator that killed it. It's easy to lie.

Or... you can make it illegal to even have the feather. You don't need to prove poaching if it's straight up illegal to have; you just have to prove ownership.

There are exceptions to this rule: if the animal is domesticated and farmed, then you can buy and sell the feathers all you want. This is why you can get goosedown pillows and feather quills, quail eggs and pheasant tails for hat plumes, peacock feathers at the fabric shop, or turkey breasts on the market. You can also collect as many feathers as you'd like from invasive species, like house sparrows, common pheasants, or starlings. Sometimes you get the double-wammy of the species being both domesticated and invasive, like rock doves/pigeons. You can jsut grab one. Just grab an entire pigeon. I hear it's not that hard.

But there are some very pretty, very vibrant birds out there that are native to North America and could easily become endangered if it were legal to 'just happen to find and keep' the feathers. Top of mind for me are blue jays and cardinals.

Imagine if it was suddenly really hip to wear a fascinator with cardinal feathers. Imagine if a microtrend the size of labubus hit that was entirely about bluejay feathers. Imagine if that happened and you did not have protections in place for native species.

You, yes you personally, might genuinely find and want to keep a singular feather that you found. But you can't ignore that the market forces that have people poaching anything else will also apply to birds. Elephants and rhinos hunted for their tusks? We (general we for humans) made that illegal with narrow and heavily controlled exceptions. Beavers hunted for their furs? We made that illegal so that the populations could recover. Snowy egrets hunted for their feathers?

You make that illegal so it doesn't die out like the Great Auk did.