Martha was a very lonely bird. She had once been part of a pair, with her
male counterpart George, but he had died several years before. So, for the final years of her life, Martha
sat in her one-bird cage alone. The Cincinnati Zoo offered a thousand dollar
reward (about $23,000 today) to anyone who could track down a mate for Martha. Unfortunately, there were no mates left for
her. On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known
passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Just like that, a bird that numbered in the
billions about a half century before, was gone. The passenger pigeon once dominated the North
American skies. It has been estimated that when Europeans
first arrived to this continent late in the 15th century, there were three to five billion
passenger pigeons already here. To put that in perspective, its distant cousin,
the rock pigeon – the birds you see hanging out in courtyards eating bread crumbs – number
about 260 million worldwide. That said, it has been argued that passenger
pigeon population numbers may have been much less in North America, but after a huge percentage
of the Native American population died off from diseases introduced by the Europeans,
it may have caused a passenger pigeon population explosion, similar to what happened with the
American Bison during this time. But either way, not long after Europeans arrived,
this pigeon population numbered in the billions. Passenger_pigeonsLegends abound about how
these birds used to black out the sky when they moved en masse. John James Audubon, the famed naturalist and
ornithologist, once said he saw a flock create a full “solar eclipse” for three days
as it passed. While this is *probably* a bit of an exaggeration,
accounts from towns across North America, like Columbus, Ohio and Fort Mississauga,
Ontario, made it seem like a mass of passing passenger pigeons was something out of the
Bible, even apocalyptic in nature. In fact, it’s estimated that the largest
flocks of passenger pigeons were second only to the Rocky Mountain locusts in group size. For reference, the Rocky Mountain locusts
could potentially swarm an area the size of California, with an estimated 12.5 trillion
locusts in the largest such swarm ever recorded. As for the passenger pigeon, when the birds
nested, they formed colonies that were extraordinary in size. In 1871, a colony in central Wisconsin was
recorded to have occupied 850 square miles, a little larger in size than the entire country
of Georgia. In 1866, a passing flock of passenger pigeons
was estimated to contain 3.5 billion of the birds, with the width of the flock about 1.5
miles and the length about 300 miles. Needless to say, if you were traveling under
the flying column, an umbrella of some sort probably would have been a good idea. So, what happened to these birds? How, in such a short time, could the passenger
pigeon go from being more numerous than all other North American birds combined to extinct? If you guessed “humans,” you’re correct. According to a hunting journal in 1913, the
passenger pigeons were known to be “the gypsies of the birdom.” They traveled en masse to wherever they could
find food and nesting habitats. They were known to travel up to eighty miles
daily from their roost in search of food. And they ate… a lot. They had fondness for soft fruits like blueberries,
strawberries, and figs. They also ate acorns and chestnuts. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “It is a
wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do.” The plentiful chestnut, maple, oak, and pine
forests of North America not only provided food to the passenger pigeon, but a home and
a place to nest (or roost). Those trees also provided ample firewood to
humans. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the human
population on the continent was exploding — from under four million in 1790 to seventy-six
million by 1900. As human numbers grew, land was needed to
accommodate. Unfortunately, this was the same land the
passenger pigeons occupied. As much as human settlement deforested the
country, the pigeons did a pretty good job themselves in wreaking havoc in an ecosystem. An entire flock would pick an area to nest
and occupy that location like an army, often weighing down tree limbs so much that they
would snap right off. Further, the combined droppings of the mass
of birds ended up being toxic to certain trees and could kill them. In the definitive book about passenger pigeons,
“A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction” by Joel
Greenberg, he writes that if a “tornado had visited the forest before the occupation
of birds, the damage might have been less…” But deforestation was only a contributing
factor in the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The main reason they went from billions to
zero in about a half century was because they were just so darn tasty, or at the very least,
abundant and easy to kill. When the first humans started showing up fifteen
thousand years ago in the northern hemisphere, they immediately began including passenger
pigeons in their diet. When Europeans began settling, they quickly
figured out that passenger pigeons were a cheap source of food. The meat became quite popular with the poor,
simply because anyone could at least make a few kills among the heavily populated nests. Even children could knock out a few pigeons
and start clubbing away. Squabs- pigeon chicks- would get so chubby
on “pigeon’s milk,” a liquid high in protein and nutrients that was regurgitated
by both parents, that they would move very slowly, making them easy prey. By the mid 19th century, professional pigeon
trapping was a major industry. Trappers were making money hand over fist. By 1855, the number of passenger pigeons were
noticeably declining, though the flocks were still massive as noted above, so very little
was done about it. In 1857, a bill was presented to the Ohio
State legislature, but was quickly dismissed. A report was filed that read, The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests
of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is
here today and elsewhere tomorrow. A huge nesting area was found in Petoskey,
Michigan in 1878. Trappers flocked there and, according to the
Smithsonian, over a five month period 50,000 birds per day were killed. This turned out to be one of the last large
nesting areas in North America. As this fact became apparent, a bill was finally
passed making it illegal to trap pigeons within two miles of their nesting area. By 1890, the wild passenger pigeon was nearly
completely eradicated. In 1897, the Michigan state legislature passed
a bill putting a ten year ban on the killing of passenger pigeons. But it was too late. Seventeen years later, the last known living
passenger pigeon would die alone in her cage.
