In 1886, the young ornithologist Frank Chapman spent two afternoons wandering through uptown New York City. He had recently given up a career in banking for the sake of collecting bird migration data for the American Ornithological Union. A few years later, Chapman would originate the tradition of the Christmas bird count, the annual winter census of birds now administered by the Audubon Society.

On those two afternoons, however, he wasn’t counting birds, at least not live ones. Instead, he was scanning ladies’ hats. He must have gotten some odd looks from their wearers, but Chapman likely didn’t care. He was on a mission. For what he found, heaped high on these ladies’ wide-brimmed hats, was depressing indeed: pieces of dead birds, their wings, crests, and sometimes even entire birds, heads down, feathers sticking up, as if they had just dropped out of the sky.