蜂鸟（4）

许多剥制蜂鸟弥漫了市场，价格越来越低。人们用木屑从充满剥制蜂鸟里面，在不太高质的周六夜市把蜂鸟放在盘子，价钱是一只两便士。1894年，《泰晤士报》写蜂鸟“那么便宜，甚至来自周边的棚户区穿着破衣烂衫的姑娘能，想任何闲雅夫人一样，用社么花花绿绿翅膀的热带鸟类作装饰帽子。” 1875年，一位美国记者说：“Burdett Coutts夫人以个人知识为确认有一位巴黎做帽子的人每季用四万只蜂鸟。在他精彩的书《绿色中的闪耀：蜂鸟之搜寻》博物学作家Jon Dunn记载在1888年一所拍卖行在只一个血腥的下午之间卖了四十万蜂鸟皮。

As more stuffed hummingbird specimens flooded the marketplace, they became increasingly affordable. Stuffed with sawdust and displayed in trays in the less salubrious（意思：健康，有利，好看） Saturday-night markets at a cost of tuppence a bird, they were, the Times wrote in 1894, ‘so cheap that even the ragged girl from the neighbouring slums could decorate her battered hat, like any fine lady, with some bright-winged bird of the tropics’. An American journal noted in 1875 that ‘Lady Burdett Coutts certifies from personal knowledge that one Parisian milliner uses forty thousand hummingbirds every season.’ The natural history writer Jon Dunn, in his brilliant The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds, records that in 1888 an auction house in London sold 400,000 hummingbird skins in one single, bloody afternoon.