Passenger Pigeons

"The story of Martha the passenger pigeon elicits both nostalgia and remorse for Cincinnati, the city that protected this bird, the last of her species, in a place where conservation is key . . . But now, these wistful tales are evolving. More Marthas may be on the way. Credit a new field of science called de-extinction biology. A group of scientists in Sausalito, California, are working on bringing back the passenger pigeon as part of a larger effort to enhance biodiversity through new techniques of genetic rescue of both endangered and extinct animals . . . The de-extinction efforts underway don't really re-create the bird's entire DNA. Instead, scientists start by decoding DNA from extinct passenger pigeons and, through bio-technology, change the DNA code of living band-tailed pigeons to match the passenger pigeon's code. By changing enough of the code, and through tried-and-true conservation practices, scientists hope the new birds look and behave the same way that their historic counterparts did."

"In her final days, Martha lived alone. Her wings drooped and she trembled. Keepers had to rope off her cage to prevent visitors from throwing sand to make her move. She died in the early afternoon of September 1, 1914. Her body was packed in ice and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned and mounted."

"On March 24, 1900, 14-year-old Press Clay Southworth shot a 'strange bird' that was eating corn on his family's farm in southern Ohio. His quarry turned out to be the last undisputed passenger pigeon taken in the wild."

"The hunters and trappers and netters knew very well that they were scarce, of course. Last year was the first year in their memory that not a single nesting of passenger pigeons had been reported and their nets and barrels and wagons and traps had lain unused. But the birds would be back, they reasoned. You simply couldn't kill off a creature that had numbered in the hundreds of millions, even billions, as short a time as ten or twenty years ago."

"The last significant passenger pigeon nesting in the U.S. took place in the spring of 1896 near Bowling Green, Ohio. Yet as these 250,000 birds came together, the call went out over telegraph lines to relentless pigeoners, who quickly arrived by rail and descended on the flock. In just one April day, they finished off the species - 200,000 carcasses collected, 40,000 birds mutilated, and more than 100,000 newborn chicks, too young to fend for themselves, left to die. The 5,000-10,000 birds that survived quickly dispersed into couples, small bands, or as individuals."

"When one remembers that thirty years ago the skies were almost darkened by flights of pigeons across Indiana and Illinois, and that branches of trees were broken by their weight and numbers, and that the other day a wild pigeon shot in Southern Indiana was regarded as rare a curiosity as a white blackbird, it can be realized how rapidly game birds are disappearing. The game birds which are not migratory are also hunted down in spite of game laws, and every year grow scarcer and dearer in the markets. If nothing is done to protect the migratory birds there will soon be an end of game birds. The greed of gain will end their existence."

"The passenger pigeon was doomed by its inherent urge to associate in huge masses, and by the fact that it laid but one egg annually. Several million pigeons, often many times more, would begin a nesting and would deposit their eggs almost on the same day. For thirty days thereafter, or until the parents normally abandoned their as-yet-helpless fledgling, if either the adult male or female were killed, the egg or nestling would likewise perish. In other words, for every adult bird shot or trapped, another potential adult bird was condemned to die."

“The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.”

"By 1874, at the very peak of commercialized slaughter in the Middle West, a Frenchman visiting in Michigan boldly predicted that 'if the world will endure a century longer, I will wager that the amateur of ornithology will find no pigeons except in select Museums of Natural History.'"

"A family in Wawarsing were terribly scared the other day. While sitting quietly in their domicile the air suddenly became dark and filled with a loud, roaring noise. They imagined all sorts of things, including the day of judgment, but recovered when they found the source of their terror was an immense flock of pigeons which happened to pass over the house."

"Every tree, some of them quite low and scrubby, had from one to fifty nests each. Some of the nests overflow from the oaks to the hemlocks and pine woods. When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding places they sometimes cut the timber from thousands of acres . . . I there counted as high as forty nests in scrub oaks not over twenty-five feet high; in many places I could pick the eggs out of the nests, being not over five or six feet from the ground."

“. . . In other words, the woods, and fields, in this and two or three adjoining counties, are filled with millions of the passenger pigeons. Twenty years ago it was no uncommon thing to see great flocks of these birds passing over, so thick, as, like the Persian arrows at Thermopylae, to darken the sun; while thirty years ago, those great pigeon-roosts, covering miles of forest, with the birds breaking down the limbs of the trees with their crowded weight, were well known to our farmers. But as our woods have been cut down and thinned out, and the country settled up, the pigeons have been disappearing westward, though we still hear of their great flocks and roosts in Kentucky and Indiana. This year, however, they seem to have returned to us, in greater force, than at any time within the last twenty years. And though pigeons do not usually alight much in this region in the Spring, they are frequently seen, this Spring, settling on old corn and wheat fields, looking for subsistence to carry them to 'pastures new.'"

"Sportsmen in this county are having fine times just now shooting pigeons. Old hunters say they never knew these birds to be as numerous in this locality as they are this Spring. From every section come accounts of flocks of untold numbers being seen, while the stories told of the masses at their feeding and sleeping places are marvelous...The weight of the masses which congregate upon the trees is sometimes so great that huge limbs break off and fall to the ground, carrying with them and crushing to death many of the birds. To hunt them it is only necessary to go into the woods after nightfall, and pointing a gun upward, blaze away; each discharge is sure to bring many fluttering victims to the ground. The roaring sound made by these immense flocks when they come to settle down at night or take their flight in the morning, resembles thunder, while the light of the sun is darkened as if a thick cloud floated between it and the earth...I fear that in the eagerness of the hunt many sportsmen forget the State law which provides that no person shall kill, catch or discharge any firearms at any wild pigeon while on its nesting-ground . . . "

"So great were the harvests that from 1857-85 an active New York passenger pigeon commodity market developed for up to five months each year. Interestingly, wholesale pigeon prices over the period averaged $1.55 per dozen, with an average shipping cost of 36 cents per dozen."