by Beeline / IndyBay
On a fall day in 1813, Jean Jacques Audubon left Henderson Kentucky in route to Louisville. It was on this trip that he described a flock of passenger pigeons so large and vast that “the light of noon day was obscured as if by an eclipse”.This September 1st is the 100th anniversary of the death of the very last passenger pigeon. A species that people belieived could never go extinct but went from billions to zero in a few years.
Audubon estimated that in just three hours 1,115,136,000 pigeons passed overhead. The entire flock took three days to pass over. What is more staggering, is that a flock of 1 billion pigeons would consume the amount of nuts, seeds and berries which would fill a container 120 feet high with the length and width of two football fields-each day.
North America with its huge forests and fertile prairies was a very productive place. Unfortunately for future generations, preserving the long term natural productivity of the U.S. meant nothing to the Anglo Centric business culture.
Passenger Pigeons were killed by market hunters in every way possible. The lust for a few dollars more drove “pigeoners” to burn sulfur under roost trees, chop them down or even use explosives to blast the trees at night. Nestlings were killed in mass on the nesting grounds and shipped to the east coast for a few pennies per bird. It’s documented that one “Pigeoner” shipped at least 3 million birds to market. In this grim business pig farmers even herded their pigs to the killing grounds so that the pigs could eat pigeon entrails left by the pigeon hunters.
A reporter for the Chicago Field magazine in 1889 noted that ” Destroying the game meant that Indians became dependent upon the American government policies of food annuities”. Thus, when a few conservation minded people ask for protection for passenger pigeons they were ignored by most of the state legislatures and federal government. Law makers of the time used the excuse that such a plentiful species could never go extinct while knowing that at the same time Indians were being pressured to give in to government repression.
This September 1st marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the very last passenger pigeon named Martha that died in the Cincinnati Zoological Park in 1914.
The billions of passenger pigeons along with the vast and extremely productive forests and prairies are now gone-but the relentless procession of economic self interest continues crushing one species after another.
There are those who are hopeful that passenger pigeon DNA can be used to clone and revive the species. But how does one clone 500,000 acres of prime hard wood forest for them to live in?
I have always hoped that Americans would have learned from what was probably the largest biological crime in history but as I watch our north coast and Sacramento River salmon and Native American culture getting perilously close to extinction, I am not so sure.
So here’s to Martha the last of her kind-may she not have died in vain.
from Wikipedia
The passenger pigeon or wild pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is an extinct North American bird. Named after the French word passager for “passing by”, it was once the most abundant bird in North America, and possibly the world.[2][3] It accounted for more than a quarter of all birds in North America.[4] The species lived in enormous migratory flocks until the early 20th century, when hunting and habitat destruction led to its demise.[5] One flock in 1866 in southern Ontario was described as being 1 mi (1.5 km) wide and 300 mi (500 km) long, took 14 hours to pass, and held in excess of 3.5 billion birds. That number, if accurate, would likely represent a large fraction of the entire population at the time.[6][A][7]
Some estimate 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons were in the United States when Europeans arrived in North America.[B] Others argue the species had not been common in the pre-Columbian period, but their numbers grew when devastation of the American Indian population by European diseases led to reduced competition for food.[C]
The species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world during the 19th century to extinction early in the 20th century.[1] At the time, passenger pigeons had one of the largest groups or flocks of any animal, second only to the now also extinct Rocky Mountain locust.
Some reduction in numbers occurred from habitat loss when European settlement led to mass deforestation. Next, pigeon meat was commercialized as a cheap food for slaves and the poor in the 19th century, resulting in hunting on a massive and mechanized scale. A slow decline between about 1800 and 1870 was followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890.[8] Martha, thought to be the world’s last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo.