How the extinction of a species affected whiskey production

on September 1st 1914 an elderly widow named Martha passed away in the home where she had been taken care of for the later years of her life named after Martha Washington she was truly extraordinary she lived nearly twice as long as the rest of her family as she aged her caretakers had to rebuild her home because she became too old to climb stairs and yet she continued entertaining her many guests despite a palsy that made her quiver and when she finally died peacefully of a stroke in her sleep the world mourned because Martha was one of those very rare creatures called an Ender meaning that she was the very last of her species not forty years before Martha had had billions of brothers and sisters but when she died in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo it represented the end of an era because Martha was the last passenger pigeon on earth and her death represented the startling extinction of what had only recently been one of the world's most profligate creatures you can't say that passenger pigeons are forgotten history everybody knows what passenger pigeons are as a cautionary tale of human hubris but they're passing changed the world in ways that people don't understand the life when passenger pigeons was around is different in ways that are forgotten today the time of the passenger pigeon is history that deserves to be remembered their numbers were of course amazing the famed ornithologist John Jay Audubon documented a time in 1813 when giant flocks of passenger pigeons passed him for three days straight he tried counting the number of flocks that passed and finally gave up as so many flew by that keeping up was not practicable on his first attempt he counted a hundred and sixty three flocks passing in a period of just twenty-one minutes in 1866 one flock in southern Ontario was described as being one and a half kilometres wide and five hundred kilometers long the took 14 hours to pass and held in excess of three and a half billion birds there were so many birds that one American writer suggested that if all the world's passenger pigeons flew single-file they would have stretched around the earth twenty-two times these are more than just numbers they represent a truly dominant species researchers assert that when their population was at its height passenger pigeons may have been the most numerous bird on earth one researcher contended that this one species accounted for between 25 and 40 percent of the total land bird population in the United States and so in the cautionary tale about the birds extinction there is another story how was life different in the time when passenger pigeons blotted out the Sun pigeons are of course a common sight today an estimated 1 million live in New York City but the pigeon experience was rather different in the era of the passenger pigeon a terrifying account from 1855 had residents of Columbus Ohio so startled by a kit the term for a group of passenger pigeons that blocked out the Sun that women and children screamed and ran for home and some people dropped to their knees in prayer after the kit passed the scene was described as ghostly as the bright Sun illuminated a town turned white by being covered in pigeon poo and while the image of a poo covered Columbus Ohio might be startling it's it's really more important than just some level of astonishment the pigeons in their poo were so prolific that they literally changed the environment of North America take for example the white oak before European settlement Oaks dominated the forests throughout much of what is now the eastern United States and among the Oaks the white oak reigned supreme it's range once included every state east of the central plains early botanist claimed that vast areas of the eastern forests were nine-tenths white oak by contrast its cousin the red oak jelly made up only a small percentage of Eastern forests around maybe 5% and the red maple was almost unknown in the forests of the Northeast this was important economically white oak is a particularly valuable wood in fact in terms of the quality and quantity of saw timber white oak was arguably once North America's most valuable hardwood species used extensively for construction flooring and cabinetry because of its ability to resist a cave white oak is often used in boat building and is particularly good for outdoor use such as decks moreover due to its cellulose structure the lumber of white is particularly impervious to liquids making it particularly valuable for the making of barrels and tasks using the making of barrel aged spirits like wine and whiskey but there is more liquid spears interact with the wood in their casts and the seasoning and heating treatments during the barrel making process resulting the production of a pleasant tasting oak lactones the process for the creation of cask is a closely held secret by barrel makers called Cooper's and is part of what instills the character of each distilleries unique creation white oak commonly referred to as American oak is the most commonly used variety in whiskey cooperage worldwide and by US regulation bourbon whiskey must be aged in charred American white oak barrels put simply if you have a favorite scotch or bourbon or you like a particularly aromatic wine you like the taste of white oak but American white oak is disappearing as a one 2003 study noted the white oak declined throughout its range has been dramatic and in response to this decline it is largely being replaced by less valuable red oak and red maple so what you may be thinking does this have to do with passenger pigeons well actually quite a lot the bird is believed to played a significant ecologic Alinta composition of the forests of eastern North America and especially the former prevalence of white oaks white oaks germinated in the fall therefore making it seeds almost useless as a food source during the spring breeding season while red oaks produced acorns during the spring where they were devoured by the pigeons the effect of the massive amount of pigeons resting on forest was dramatic they would lead massive amounts of broken foliage that were flammable encouraging both the frequency and intensity of forest fires which then favored fire tolerant species such as white oak over less tolerant species such as red oak and maple and the same pigeon poo that turned Columbus Ohio ghostly was produced in such quantities that at nesting sites a destroyed surface level vegetation while adding huge quantities of nutrients to the soil this favoured the white oak which requires a sunlight to thrive by contrast the forest today without the natural clearings that the passenger pigeon helped to produce favorite trees like red maple that thrive in shade selective logging and fire suppression have had their effect yet the extinction of the dominant bird species of the forest has undoubtedly had an effect one surprising effect of the change is that the colours of the forest have changed eastern deciduous forests used to turn yellows oranges and russets in the fall because of the increasing percentage of red maple the fall colors have turned increasingly red the extinction of the passenger pigeon has literally changed the color of the forest and another effect of the extinction of the passenger pigeon was the end of the era when in America we very commonly ate pigeons pigeon was a common staple of the nineteenth-century American diet while in the same era chickens were mostly raised for eggs and chicken tenders were rare that is to do with developments in chicken technology which radically changed chickens and especially their availability year-round that occurred largely around the turn of the 20th century pigeons however were a critical part of frontier survival where spring flocks returning North offered a ready supply of cheap protein as winter was ending people survived in winter mostly on preserved food so fresh meat would be a cause for rejoicing French naturalist Benedict Henry revile wrote in his 1865 book shooting and fishing in the rivers prairies and back woods of North America that when a kit descended on the town of Hartford Kentucky in 1847 the population was under arms men and boys all carried double or single guns and they hid behind woods rocks and wherever there was a chance of shot prodigious quantities were killed by these means and that during his three-day stay at the time nothing was eaten but pigeons people on the American frontier often preferred a rustic pigeon pie but revile noted that they were also eaten boiled broiled stewed or baked as important as pigeons were to the frontier a key technology the era changed the way they affected the American diet railroads allowed pigeons to be shipped in quantity to Eastern markets encouraging commercial hunting and the demand was huge a 1917 report to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture noted that at one point the New York market alone would take a hundred barrels a day for weeks without a break in price Chicago st. Louis Boston and all the great in little cities of north and eastern United States joined in the demand the or concluded need we wonder while the pigeons have vanished the day when pigeon was on most everybody's diet is one of the cheapest and most available proteins is almost unrecognizable today today the commercial squab industry produces less birds for consumption in a week then the single chicken company produces every hour and the single bird cost as much as $25 a squab producer noted in an article in popular science in 2018 a hundred years ago everyone was eating them now you can't find them unless you're filthy rich meanwhile according to the National chicken Council in 2018 Americans are on pace to eat ninety two point five pounds of chicken per capita on a sidenote popular science suggests we not look towards the cheaper alternative of urban pigeons while they are not has some assume particularly carriers of avian disease their diet of essentially trash means that they likely ingest things like rodents I'd battery acid and lead but it was of course the demand that eventually spelled the passenger pigeons demise and in that two of the great technologies of the 19th century conspired against them not only did railroads allow barrels of pigeons to be shipped Eastern cities they allowed hunters to travel to the flocks having been alerted to their locations along the new telegraph lines in 1871 the Wisconsin newspaper the Kilbourne City Mirror described the commercial pigeon hunting industry at a Wisconsin roost hardly a train arrives that does not bring hunters or trappers hotels are full Cooper's are busy making barrels and men women and children are active in packing the birds or filling the barrels in 1871 a single seller of ammunition provided three tons of powder and sixteen tons of shot to supply hunters at one pigeon roost during a nesting season just one town in New York was estimated to have shipped 1.8 million pigeons to larger cities in the year 1851 alone passenger pigeons were hunted and trapped for food for sport to a limited and agricultural past to their their habitat was chopped up cut down for timber cleared for farmland so that the patchwork of wilderness that we have today would be unrecognizable to a mid 19th century American how such a profligate species could be driven to extinction in such a shore period of time is still a point of scientific study and national debate it should be but that's the story everybody knows but there is another story as well because in Martha's passing came the passing of a different time of the era when the nation was still new when nature's bounty seemed unlimited an era before supermarkets when if you wanted to eat it depended upon what you could grow or catch or kill an era when we looked at the sky instead of at our cell phones an era when we didn't think that we knew everything even the forest today blush a different color as if they don't quite recognize themselves the passenger pigeon is known in popular culture for good reason but there is another reason to remember them because passenger pigeons show us how very different life was just a hundred fifty years ago so different that we might not recognize it today it represents a different a more optimistic and naive era that no longer exists but that deserves to be remembered I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets a forgotten history between ten and fifteen minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do is subscribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 306,301

Keywords: history, the history guy, american history, passenger pigeon, extinct, us history

Id: b8BPANZzsyU

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/tomcat_tweaker]

Learned about this in school. We read a first hand account of how hundreds of people would go out into a field that was a known migration path, and just start blasting away with shotguns at the river of carrier pigeons that would fly overhead. Not for food or any other particular reason. It was just a "fun pastime".

[u/Zeerid_Korr]

One of the last Carolina Parakeets died in that same cage in 1918.

[u/RickNashtag]

The Constant (A Podcast About Getting Things Wrong) did a good episode on these pigeons

https://www.constantpodcast.com/episodes/archives/05-2019

[u/Shishire]

Endlings are a fascinating subject.

[u/tuscabam]

Look up punt guns. Fucking horrible people out there.

[u/Pepineros]

Humans suck, man.

[u/IamREBELoe]

Superman and Batman - "Martha??"

[u/ManHands_]

Can science not resurrect using DNA???? Caution: ignorant person asking a question

[u/caughtatdeepfineleg]

Theres a great song by John Herald about Martha

https://youtu.be/2GuI_KpQqWM