From Billions To None: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction

[Music] let's imagine a flock that's a mile wide and 200 miles long and the front birds are coming down to glean from the field and imagine being ahead of this crashing wave of biology working its way up the center of the continent and the eruption of wings was so loud that these men with guns were terrified there were tens of millions hundreds of millions billions of passenger pigeons and we lost it from billions to none in a matter of a few decades it was us we're the ones who made that happen incomprehensible that's something we think can't happen we are killing about 100 million sharks per year that means about 11 000 every hour is absolutely unsustainable it can happen to the bluefin tuna it can happen to the polar bear it can happen to the wolf the extinction of passenger pigeon species was pretty well marked it was september 1st 1914 this abundant bird um ceased to exist it's my job to bring the passenger pigeon back to life if extinction isn't forever a lot changes i live every day thinking about how could this go wrong in today's world we could never recreate the natural phenomenon that was the passenger pigeon let's remember what we once had and use that as a way to think about today and to think about tomorrow meet naturalist and author joel greenberg a man in his element i've been birding since i was 12 over 40 years ago and in my own lifetime there's areas i've gone that simply have changed that no longer so support the birds that i once knew there the passenger pigeon touches on so many elements of things that i care deeply about i care about history i care about the fact that this continent has changed that probably triggered trying to recreate what this region was like and how it changed in the 300 years since europeans first arrived [Music] the passenger pigeon so named because it was a bird of passage always looking for food and once a year for a place to nest its latin name ectopisti's migratorius or wandering migrant says it all it filled the skies over the united states and canada from the atlantic coast to the great plains the earliest archaeological evidence of the bird states from about 12 000 bce for millennia the people of north america incorporated the pigeons in their social and religious life because it was a popular food source the seneca people called the bird big bread in 1534 as he explored the atlantic coast of canada jacques cartier penned the first written account of the passenger pigeon he described an infinite number flying over prince edward island in 1625 a dutch writer on manhattan island noted that passenger pigeon flocks shut out the sunshine these early manhattanites shot at the birds from their front porches around the 1750s some observant english colonists voiced concern that passenger pigeon flocks were smaller than in past years the first expressions that the species was not immune from human actions in 1857 in response to a proposed bill seeking protection for the passenger pigeon a select committee of the ohio state senate filed a report stating the passenger pigeon needs no protection wonderfully prolific it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow and no ordinary destruction can lessen them in 1900 after years of relentless hunting the best way that most people could now see the bird was by looking in boxes of arm and hammer baking soda the vanishing pigeon was included in a bird collector card series 12 years later a national search to find even a single bird in the wild ended in failure today joel has brought a very important package to show some colleagues we received him two days ago from louisiana so here it is isn't it beautiful so we will follow you thank you to tlc thank you so much i appreciate it there are probably between sixteen hundred and two thousand passenger pigeon specimens that we know about more than that of any other extinct bird which makes sense because there were more of them than any living bird back in the day we're going to see what's in the box you've met cindy kirchner's high school area i'm in back with my hands it's not one of my strengths um i guess i could open up i mean if you've got i guess i would leave this up to you guys there you go this is like cutting the cake [Applause] when you finish it a taxidermist in maine had it for 50 years he conveyed it to a woman in new hampshire who had it for eight years oh it's got nice feet i mean feet are difficult to do who sold it to gary landry of franklin louisiana who had it for a week before sending it on to me [Music] there's been an insect that's come straight down the shaft and just eaten this but it is in pretty good condition it's city here see so we lose the iridescence because it's got soot oh oh right across here my goal of course is to put it in something where i can move it you know to show it two on two per side sexy part yeah this gives a little bit of drama you need to do two per side yeah i like the i like the aesthetic i like design yeah thank you both very very much you know there's this little still anxiety about uh you know the risks of that that come with with something that's been dead for a hundred and some years so i mean i feel good i mean i've taken the next when joel starts a job and you can tell that he's got that passion in his eye you just kind of say okay you just kind of wave goodbye because you know that it's it's going to he's going to put a lot of time and energy to it i find that when i start really getting involved in a project it's almost like a relationship with somebody there's this this passion you feel about it my interest in passenger pigeons the story is compelling and powerful and heartbreaking i see this opportunity to share the story it's as if you have a secret that means a lot to you and you want others to learn about it anybody raise your hand if you know what the word extinct means whose hand are you in the corner there uh like no longer living there's no more of that kind that's correct um passenger pigeons um were the world's most abundant bird okay in 1800 there were probably between three and five billion this is the bird now [Music] people talked about you know there were big clouds in the sky they look at the clouds and they were birds and as they stood under them it got cold because you know you had all these birds beating their wings and the draft would come down and people would get cold and dogs and horses would like you know start getting fidgety because they didn't know what this was you couldn't talk because of the sound of the wings go ahead what if all song they needed a bathroom break and when the cloud passed all the buildings were plated with white it was like snow was falling and it's poop so over a very short time with non-stop killing unrelenting taking they weren't able to reproduce i mean would you guys be happy if all of the squirrels disappeared and all the snakes and all the dogs no there's no wild animals you'd be sad can everyone say thank you to mr greenberg for talking to us all about passenger pigeons thank you pigeons all right [Applause] so i thought about writing a book about passenger pigeons for quite a while unlike the extinction of most species the passenger pigeon's death was pretty well marked we know the individual bird it had a name it was called martha we know the date that she died on it was september 1st 1914 in the cincinnati zoo the fact that the centenary of the bird's extinction is approaching it seemed to me to provide a unique opportunity to both tell the story of this bird and then use that story as a portal into consideration of current issues related to extinction and biodiversity i learned that there were other people trying to mark this anniversary so out of that came project passenger pigeon a range of people really amazing people that i had met my goal was to produce memorials to birds driven to extinction in modern times they're bronze sculptures that loosely represent the birds and i've been placing them at the sites where the birds were last seen in the wild to make it possible for people to see the landscape both as beautiful as many of these landscapes continue to be but also as a site that was once occupied by these lost birds birds that were forgetting when i go and talk to people outside of my field the museum community or science people nobody knows about it and that notion that something that was so ubiquitous that was so an integral part of so many people's lives is lost the average north american doesn't know what a passenger pigeon is by any means if anything they mistake it for the common homing pigeon or a carrier pigeon the story of how the most abundant land bird in north america if not the planet could disappear entirely completely extinct in a matter of less than a century just seemed incomprehensible and so i was interested in trying to understand how the pigeon lived and why it died as a young boy i read in books about these marvelous species that had gone extinct that i would never be able to see and i was honestly quite upset and i made it a youthful pledge that when my time came to have something to say and do about this that i would give it my best shot and true to my youthful pledge i became a conservation biologist and devoted my entire career to saving the world's endangered species the story of the passenger pigeon isn't over it actually is still ongoing because the lessons that we take from the experience of the extinction event are still relevant and more relevant than ever one of the issues for today why the passenger pigeon extinction matters we can look at fisheries with many of the species of fish that are commercially captured for our consumption are in very precarious states hello professor worm hi joel i'm just madly in love with the ocean and uh i've always been from from day one the first word i ever spoke with was water uh because it gave me so much happiness and basically i'm still that child that tries to get back in the water and i'm recognizing that i'm sharing the water with all these incredible creatures and a lot of them are under threat and that's just something that's not acceptable to me the problem with modern fishing is that there's really no refuge left for the fish now we're fishing all parts of the ocean we're also increasing in depth fishing deeper and deeper and habitats that have never seen a fishing net before a lot of new technology like gps location or sonar those kinds of technologies are now used to locate fish schools and being able to target the fish schools very efficiently so that technology has just revolutionized over the past 50 years and so in both space and time there's no refuge for the fish cod is a good example for species that like the passenger pigeon have been fantastically abundant and was feeding a whole region for hundreds of years in newfoundland and all over the north atlantic really it was the mainstay it was something that was sustainably fished using hand lines and fairly selective gear and then the technology changed and large dollars came in that were able to scoop up whole schools of fish and spawning fish and catches the increased and increased and there was a strong belief that it would never end and even in the scientists studying the cod they could not imagine the collapse that happened what was even more surprising than was that there was no recovery after so everybody thought it's such a strong species will come back in no time maybe two to three years and now here we are you know almost 20 years later and it's still not really happening except in a few small pockets any perusal of the historical record reveals the presence of passenger pigeons spanning 300 years written in at least four different languages about the sheer massive numbers of these birds these flocks of tens of millions if not more were a product of this of this this region of of this world that that was so so rich passenger pigeons were an important if inconsistent food source for native americans and later european settlers the birds were sold at local markets flocks could destroy harvests but their arrival also helped save many settlers from hunger when crops failed and while the birds left the landscape looking like a tornado had come through in following years due to the prodigious pigeon droppings these regions produced the richest farmland around in kennebunk maine in the mid-1700s multitudes of passenger pigeons feeding on local berries brought out everyone with guns wealthy men the elderly women children and slaves passenger pigeons were such a fixture of life in the east and midwest that there were rhymes written about them when i can shoot my rifle clear at pigeons in the skies i'll bid farewell to pork and beans and live on pigeon pies passenger pigeon flocks could take on every imaginable configuration [Music] the early american ornithologist alexander wilson saw many flocks throughout his life once he saw a single column of birds eight or ten miles in length form a huge bend in the sky the birds wilson wrote marked a space on the face of the heavens resembling the windings of a vast and majestic river [Music] so the pigeons left a mark on the consciousness of people john audubon witnessed big flocks several times the one that's probably most spectacular was a trip he took from henderson kentucky to louisville [Music] i observed the pigeons flying from northeast to southwest in greater numbers than i thought i had ever seen them before the light of noon day was obscured as by an eclipse the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses the pigeons pass an undiminished number and continue to do so for three days so the chicago academy of sciences scientific collections were founded in 1857 we have biological specimens that were collected as far back as 1840 1840s almost predates science i mean certainly biological science this is the cabinet where we have a few species that are extinct and before we look at our focal species wow carolina parakeets this is gorgeous and of course here's our ivory-billed woodpecker this is a bird uh that honorable people can disagree as to whether they still exist or not and of course here are passenger pigeons so these are some of our study skins these were collected in the latter half of the 1800s of course by people who wanted to collect these specimens for scientific preservation you can see these are mostly prepared as study skins some of these came from illinois others came from places like florida i really love this particular label william h baloo april 11 80 which of course was 1880. one thing about this collection it has these two birds shot in oregon county missouri in 1896 so these were among the very last that were shot yeah these are particularly beautiful individuals oh look at the iridescence this is what a lot of the early writers talked about it's a bird of transcendent beauty [Music] in terms of the people who say well it's just a pigeon what does it matter we don't really know what the relationship of any one species is to the whole of life [Music] how many fibers can we tear out from the tapestry of life before the whole tapestry unravels of course nature is much more complex than a tapestry and one of the things that ecology teaches us is that everything really is related to everything else and that there are consequences in everything we do this is a little bit speculative but relates to lyme disease where it is carried by ticks but it also depends on having deer and mice feeding on acorns my hypothesis is that when the passenger pigeons were there eating those acorns that local populations of deer and mice would not be able to increase and so therefore the outbreaks of lyme disease wouldn't have been happening and so here's a speculative case where our health today is affected by an extinction that happened nearly a century ago [Music] thank you all all for coming so what i was hoping we could do is go around the table and have each person talk about what their institution is thinking of doing honestly i i still believe it's probably one of the biggest things we're going to have in conservation you know it's everything so you can pinpoint the exact it's very and if that book that animal wouldn't expect martha died six seven years earlier right you could not say with with the certainty that she was the last one the average person i think sometimes wonders so how can i get involved why is this important to me and those are the stories which need to be told and everybody has a different reason of why that's important so why is this important to us do you want a sentence yes absolutely as a cautionary tale to the proposition that no matter how common something is water oil something alive if we're not careful with it we can lose it we have facebook but uh i'm not gonna uh i've got a real deep respect for the work that joel's doing and the passion he has for this passenger pigeon project really kind of rubbed off on all of us and we really wanted to say hey look what can we do to bring to life this this story of the passenger pigeon and get kids to be more aware of the history of what happened back in the late 1800s and but also what's going on today and make those connections from yesterday to today and moving forward what we do to ensure that habitat is still here so when you're inside no tapping on the cages i've had this thought that hey you know maybe we could just do a pilot program on the passenger pigeon project we have a school nearby doing a unit on extinction about 115 eighth grade students we have in this room the massasauga the eastern massachusetts this is our endangered species of rattlesnake that's found in this in the chicagoland area now if i were to say go out and find a massive saga rattlesnake right now are you going to find one no no but if that same snake had a little radio inside it and was giving off a signal we could actually follow its movements around to find ways to protect the animal and we do that by using this thing called radio telemetry so what we're going to do is we're for the rest for the remaining few minutes we have we're going to go out and try and radio track a hidden massive saga a model where's it loudest okay bike dollars have a good trail right here [Music] [Music] who says i see it i see it okay go ahead let's go ahead and see if you can pick it up obviously i'm not gonna pick up a real rattlesnake this is the model yes all right so we got our master saga okay and you know what's really significant besides you guys found this animal is that you know what these are still alive today now even though they're not doing great they're still here and unlike the passenger pigeon which is long extinct we have a chance to save these animals because they're not doing well they need our help so keep enjoying the the recreational areas we have here these beautiful trails but also take good care of them too [Music] as time went on once technology reached a point particularly the telegraph and the railroad the passenger pigeon could land in a woods in the ozarks and now with the telegraph that word was sent out to people that chased them all year the passenger pigeon became a commodity that was sent east to help feed the burgeoning population of the united [Music] states [Music] joel imagine these trees with dozens of passenger pigeons nesting in each tree there were reports of hundreds of nests on between some trees and bigger trees the largest passenger pigeon nesting on record took place in central wisconsin during the spring of 1871 in central wisconsin around 136 million birds nested in an area of about 850 square miles enough to cover 37 manhattan islands it's a real kind of privilege to be standing at this iconic place kind of like going on hajj to mecca or or someplace um almost uh holy in your in your consciousness so so this is quite quite remarkable [Music] i've wondered you know is there a place that looks like it did back then and i'm so thankful that you took us to perhaps the place that still does look like that well it's true they're not many places that have escaped being cut or converted to agriculture and this place was really very special so when the major conservancy had the opportunity to protect it it was obvious this was a sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity here in central wisconsin there's an account of a group of hunters who engaged a local guide and he brought them here at dawn and the eruption of wings it was so loud that these men with guns were terrified they threw the guns away and went to the ground and held held their their heads with their hands i mean it was just a spectacular sight the birds were killed in a variety of ways they would try to asphyxiate them they would burn sulfur under the nest people would go into the colonies and they would cut trees downfield with nests which would knock down other nests people would go out at night with fires they would burn areas it sounds like a scene of absolute chaos which is on top of a scene of absolute chaos when you're talking about hundreds of millions of birds hunters devised an ingenious way to lure flocks down to traps a live bird used as a decoy was called a stool pigeon the term lives on today referring to a person who betrays his own group [Music] a rare photo of pigeon hunters with their stool pigeons during the hunting season the pigeon's eyes were sewn shut to make it more docile on the job the bird was fixed to a movable perch or stool which the hidden hunters manipulated causing the bird to mimic feeding which attracted the attention of hungry flocks above the wild birds flew down to feed on grain scattered near the hidden nets a single netting could capture hundreds of pigeons millions of birds were packed in barrels sent by boat or train to urban markets during the 1871 nesting in wisconsin 100 to 200 barrels were sent daily 300 pigeons in a barrel for 40 days over 2 million birds were killed in cities like new york and boston pigeons were sold as a cheap source of protein but the birds weren't just sought after as food before clay pigeons were shot at as targets there was the real thing at popular mid 19th century sportsman competitions half a million captured passenger pigeons were killed in trap shoots every year but while many sporting clubs held shooting matches they also engaged in serious conservation work attempting to protect game species and fish stocks in 1878 in an unprecedented action two michigan sportsmen's associations sent several representatives to petoskey michigan to what would later become known as the last big passenger pigeon nesting in history the men asked the authorities to enforce existing laws that restricted hunting too close to nests the group publicized that due to the uncontrolled hunting the pigeon is threatened with extinction edward martin a chicago pigeon dealer angrily defended the pigeon hunters in an article he wrote the pirates and bombers left some 35 000 in good greenbacks right among the most needy of these people honest hard-working homesteaders it increased trade and if sent by a special act of providence could not have done more good the pigeon never will be exterminated so long as forests large enough for their nestings and food remain in the late 19th century and early 20th century in north america people were presented with extraordinary abundance of wildlife species from providing feathers from beautiful birds for ladies hats to providing fur to providing food and it just seemed inconceivable that our activities could bring an abundant species like the passenger pigeon or the american bison to extinction as for the passenger page and it was two things it was direct hunting and habitat loss cutting down all the trees and we see the same happening in the ocean [Music] there's direct hunting and there's a lot of other things going on that are threatening marine life pollution and climate change whereas the very chemistry of the environment is being changed in a way that's hurting fish and other marine [Music] life we've shown that we are killing about 100 million sharks per year about 11 000 every hour absolutely unsustainable a lot of species particularly larger sharks are threatened with extinction these large predators are often caught just for their fins so the fins are sliced off the rest is discarded often while still alive in that practice is still widespread in the world and it's feeding a large demand for shark fin soup if you remove sharks out of the picture things can cascade down from the top of the food chain and really change the big picture as something that hasn't happened in 400 million years that's how long we have sharks around so they are adaptive but now they found that maps in new top territory that's humans that's driving a lot of species towards extinction in 1871 we could have been standing here watching tens of millions of passenger pigeons flying up the mississippi valley taking a right turn at the wisconsin river and flying upstream and eventually settling at places like quincy bluff in central wisconsin where we were yesterday for the largest passenger pigeon nesting ever recorded that volume of concentrated life is just so hard to imagine today and obviously the location and the setting inspired the wisconsin society for ornithology to erect this monument in 1947 dedicated to the last passenger pigeon shot in wisconsin in 1899 figure that's 28 years after the largest nesting on record occurred in wisconsin it didn't take long that collapses still boggles the mind today there's different notions of exactly what caused the extinction these were birds that survived in huge numbers whether they reached a tipping point their ability to breed reproduce was compromised [Music] my hypothesis is from about the time of the civil war for the next couple of decades people came in killing birds every time the pigeons gathered the birds got so skittish that they were unsuccessful in having a nesting it doesn't take a population biologist to realize what happens if a species is unable to reproduce for longer than the lifetime of any one individual bird [Music] passenger pigeons could survive and breed in captivity a few people like professor charles otis whitman of the university of chicago bred the birds along with other species but he wasn't concerned that passenger pigeons might go extinct in 1902 one of whitman's female pigeons was sent to the cincinnati zoo [Music] it's rare that a species extinction is marked as well as the passenger pigeon there was a pair of them martha and george navy after washington george died in 1911. [Music] and it was september 1st 1914. probably around one o'clock in the afternoon at that moment when the life force finally sputtered out this amazing uh force this abundant bird i'm ceased to exist i think she has a special place in the history of the bird martha becomes famous because she is the last of the species so she's a bit of a star and she has some of the same compelling qualities that that the tragic star has she's the last beautiful iconic image of the species the bird was encased in a 300 pound block of ice to stay preserved for the train trip to washington dc arrangements had been made for her to be put on display in the smithsonian institution it is intrinsically a downer of a story and i don't think we'll ever get away from that that emotion that goes with it but i do think that emotion is also something that you can harness so remember martha lived here this actually was her home in the last 100 years of their existence it was human activity that quickly wiped them out what we do makes a difference it impacts the other organisms that are around us and right now is the time that you need to be learning about things like this because now is the time when you're going to be interested in changing how you live your life so that you can really make a difference in the future since 1914 zoos have changed dramatically we've gone from menageries where we have collections of animals and plants to actual conservation centers to be quite frank uh many species are in peril in the wild and we couldn't get them anymore so suddenly we found that we held individuals and species we had an obligation to try to help save them we have our research division that helps work to save species and preserve their genetic material in our cryobio bank for future generations emily that's great another powerful dimension of the passenger pigeon and it's story is how it was a turning point it helped bring us from the point where we were in thinking about our relationship with the natural world to something like the modern conservation ethic the extinction of the passenger pigeon the near extinction of the american bison provoked in the american public a reaction to enact protection the lacey act that prevented the interstate commerce of species taken illegally the migratory bird treaty somewhat recently the endangered species act of 1973 was a major turning point in conservation history for the very first time we made a national pledge that we would not allow species to go extinct but there are lots of species that are facing extinction today the driving force is now humanity changing the forces of nature and one of the consequences of the way that we are driving everything on the planet is that we are driving so many of the other species our fellow inhabitants of spaceship earth we're driving them to extinction and the rate is unprecedented there have been mass extinctions in historical times but essentially we are like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and the impact that we have is as swift and as overarching as that asteroid that killed the dinosaurs but there are some scientists who think that extinction is not forever in the spring of 2013 a group called revive and restore was in the news in a big way with their own bold take on the concept of extinction or de-extinction as they called it the members were working to bring back a variety of extinct species including the passenger pigeon [Applause] hello well it's my job to bring the passenger pigeon back to life not just as a science novelty not as a zoo attraction but back into the skies above where we actually stand right now even washington dc this is native passenger pigeon habitat but the concept of d extinction had some people worried like stan temple and conservation biologists are a bit concerned that de-extinction might indeed have a destabilizing effect on our efforts to protect conserve and restore extant biodiversity if extinction isn't forever a lot changes to put it as simply as possible usable dna from museum passenger pigeon specimens will be cut and pasted into the dna of band-tailed pigeons a close living relative this dna will be introduced into band-tailed pigeon embryos which will hatch as hybrid passenger pigeon chicks which will then be grown in bread to create more passenger pigeons ben was in chicago for a bird conference so joel invited him to the field museum to talk about his work the field had been a big help to ben in his efforts you know my journey in studying this dna started with this specimen right here big male and this was shot in troy new york in 1860. i end up using a tissue the size of a pinhead and we're going to get the entire genome out of that the entire set of dna with all the resources that are going in to resuscitate the lost species would it make sense to put those resources into preserving extant species the majority of the work we do is not going to even be in the realm of taking conservation money or resources it's in a situation which we which we will actually benefit conservation the things we do for this will revolutionize how we approach biotech and conservation um from the genetic enrichment of endangered species to the recreation of an extinct species extinct species provide us with essentially the test subjects for the biotech that can save endangered species whenever you do something there are always unintended consequences what do you see are some of either the likely consequences and things you've done to minimize the possibility of those being very severe we are addressing concerns i live every day thinking about how could this go wrong why could this be bad and it's to do the work responsibly and consciously and if something starts going wrong we can pull the plug the band tail pigeon the bird that we will engineer to make the passenger pigeon already lives in small colonies this is not going to be a nightmare or a pest and it's a low breeder they only produce one chick a year per parent so it's you know it would be 200 years or more before anyone saw a flock of really large size if biotechnology does allow us to bring back a passenger pigeon or something that resembles a passenger pigeon that may bring back a species but in today's world we could never recreate the natural phenomenon that was the passenger pigeon of the primordial forests of the eastern united states that is a phenomenon that will never be recreated who knows if the passenger pigeon will be revived by mixing dna but in downtown cincinnati martha and her flock are most definitely being recreated by mixing paint and a lot of it john ruthvin a renowned naturalist and painter has been called the 20th century audubon today one of his paintings of martha and her flock is being transformed into a six-story mural by a local arts organization i was contacted by artworks they've heard about my opinion they said would you mind if we put this on this wonderful wall in downtown cincinnati they said we had a staff of young artists that we've selected and they will be doing most of the painting then they said would you mind doing martha not only is an honor to have my painting represented on this wall i said but to do martha would be a distinct honor the artists are all young people what people have told me about them blocking out the sky and everything it amazed me that that could actually happen even though i didn't get to see them at least i get to help recreate those moments for others i think it's really important what we're doing to bring awareness of the extinction of animals and how to prevent it i never thought of the pigeon as a beautiful bird i always thought about it as this you know fat ugly city bird with nasty gnarly claw feet i've come to realize the passenger pigeons are really beautiful it's a real shame that they're not around anymore to do a painting such as this and have these young souls around i'm 89 and i can't tell you what an experience it is if the ordinary person comes by and sees this and gets interested in it it's a wonderful thing i think my job has been done [Music] [Music] we don't live on this planet by ourselves we live here because all the other species are here too they produce the oxygen we breathe the soil that we grow our food on the water we drink all of that is done by species these species all have value for our life and our quality of life if we want to preserve that we have to keep these species around it's just as simple as that [Music] i've been coming to illinois beach since 1967 soon after i started birding it is perhaps my favorite place in the region and there's several reasons one is it's physically beautiful next to the lake having the dunes second these are sanctuaries where some truly rare things very close to a huge metropolitan area can flourish underneath the black oak savannah where we're standing there's the yellow false fox glove there's blazing stars it's an array of colors throughout the season it's because of the support of people who vote for referenda to help forest preserve districts taxes that go to the department of natural resources there's a lot of people at all levels who are all really invested in the proposition that biodiversity is important to all of our lives you know this is about as close a surviving example perhaps of what chicago looked like in the early years the passenger pigeon's extinction is not just something living in the past it's happening in the present and we still are not addressing the issue in an adequate way we have to control human population densities we have to control our consumption of resources and we have to put limits on the damaging technologies that do so much harm to the environment what makes me really hopeful is to see that we've done it before because we've done it for wales whales were in the exactly same position that sharks were in or the passenger pigeon was in and for whales we turn it around we've avoided the extinction of more whale species we're rebuilding populations we have a moratorium on commercial railing and a lot of the species are increasing just because we made a decision we're not wanting these pieces to go extinct these chicks will be about six weeks old one story that has some parallels to the passenger pigeon but also has some more positive ending to it is that of the sandhill crane and other species of the upper midwest that went through near complete decline but the now is the most abundant crane species on earth so one of the things we learned from the passenger pigeon is we don't have to accept this as inevitable but that we do need to put into place programs above all motivate the public to care and this poor little creature the passenger pigeon definitely you has the power to unite a large group of people even if it is around a very sad subject people often lose sight of the fact that small individual efforts writing a letter to your politician supporting an organization collectively make a big difference if you want to eat wild fish or farm fish you can get these seafood cards that tell you which fish are sustainable which are not threatened by extinction which are not each and every one of us can vote with our wallet and make sure that we're not contributing to this problem but we're contributing to the solutions the other way to look at the passenger pigeon and other extinctions is is a very non-scientific very personal way think of anything in nature that gives you pleasure think about eating cod think about bow hunting think about taking your dog for a walk in a woods in spring and seeing wildflowers and now imagine that that's gone life's a little less rich and culture is a little poorer for it so it was a world of which we're apart and um it's it's now been diminished we're doing the same thing to our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren that our ancestors did to us and we don't have the same excuse of ignorance that they did [Music] [Music] is [Music] will run [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Bryan Museum

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Length: 57min 56sec (3476 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020