"… It used to be that if you liked birds, you shot them. In any case, that's what gentlemen in England did after the country start to industrialize, in the early nineteenth century. Cities were getting big and polluted, and people were longing to reconnect with nature. The rich, who had lots of free time, began going to the woods to collect plants, bugs, and rocks. If you were a man, you might also collect birds—bloodily, with your shotgun. Once you'd shot a bird, you’d figure out what it was, then skin, stuff, mount, and display it. The idea was to amass as big and varied a collection of bird skins as possible. A few decades later, when the United States started industrializing, took hold among the upper class here."