In the fall of 1813, John James Audubon, the great ornithologist and painter, witnessed passenger pigeons flying overhead for three days; he estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by every hour. “The light of noon-day,” he wrote, “was obscured as by an eclipse …” He was stunned by the beauty of the aerial twists and turns when a hawk took after them. “Like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder,” he continued, “they rushed into a compact mass… they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.”
Now, fast forward to the Cincinnati Zoo: September 1, 1914; there, one hundred years ago today, at 1 p.m., the last surviving passenger pigeon died. Her name was Martha - after Martha Washington - and she was 29 years old.
A passenger pigeon had last been seen in the wild in 1900, ironically at the advent of a new century that promised great advances in knowledge and global progress.
Passenger pigeons migrated from Canada in summer to the American south for winter; their habitat was the mixed-hardwood forests; they dined on beechnuts, acorns, berries, insects, and worms. But as Americans cleared the eastern deciduous forests, including Vermont’s green mountains, the passenger pigeon’s migratory route moved westward, and increasingly, their food became farmers’ fields of grain. One flock - documented to be more than a hundred miles long and six to eight miles wide - ate an estimated six million bushels of grain a day - each bushel weighing about sixty pounds!
Understandably, farmers shot as many pigeons as they could. Pigeon shooting was promoted as a sport, and birds were slaughtered in a variety of other ways, including being fed alcohol-soaked grain, which made them drunk and easy to catch; they were also suffocated by smoky fires lit under their nests. Birds were eaten or sold to the poor in cities as a cheap source of protein.
In the late nineteenth century, some states passed laws to protect the pigeons, but the laws were often ignored - either due to the financial incentive to continue killing them or because people couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe they really were in danger of extinction.
No one knows for sure why the most abundant bird on earth became extinct in less than a century. Dramatic changes in the country’s landscape and loss of habitat surely contributed. Perhaps they required huge nesting colonies to reproduce. Certainly humans failed to see, understand, and act in time to save them.
I wish I could say that their extinction had at least taught us a valuable lesson, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson estimates that by the end of the century half of all species on earth will be extinct.
