![]() ![]() Their young could be picked from the ground. Flocking in such large numbers, they were easy to hunt. One theory is that passenger pigeons were an outbreak species with Native Americans as their primary predator. During their heyday, more than than one fifth of all birds in North America belonged to this single species. In fact there are relatively few vertebrate species who thrive in such large numbers. ![]() To discover why the passenger pigeon’s numbers dropped to zero we should first investigate why their numbers rose to such– dare we say, unsustainable numbers. But for an extinction that happened after Charles Darwin published “Origin of the Species” and after the world’s first national parks were founded, we know remarkably little. We have witnesses we even have photographs. What the #*^% happened?! There are people living today who might have seen one in a zoo or standing on a telegraph wire. If you didn’t feel a chill run down your spine or hear some swear words escape from your lips at that thought, maybe you should read that again.įrom five billion to zero over the course of a short human lifetime. Seventy years later, a childless 29 year-old passenger pigeon named Martha, died in an Ohio zoo. That’s what a mile wide, 300 mile long cloud of more than three billion birds would have looked and sounded like as it darkened the skies of southern Ontario for fourteen hours in 1866: Watch this murmeration of about 100,000 Starlings flying over Istanbul Turkey and imagine their number multiplied by 30,000. Starlings disappeared from the skies over Jordan and Israel in the 1990s and just as mysteriously returned in recent years. The European starling is North America’s most prolific living bird. For comparison, the stockier mourning dove which bears the closest resemblance to passenger pigeons, number only about 250 million worldwide. Schorger wrote that a single nesting site in the state of Wisconsin contained 136 million breeding adults. Their weight had caused trees to collapse. The famous ornithologist John James Audubon wrote that they had darkened the skies for days as during a total eclipse. Surely someone must know what caused them to go extinct.Ī quick internet search told me that passenger pigeons lived in Eastern North America and were at one time the most populous bird species on earth, numbering as many as five billion. They lived during the enlightenment and the age of scientific discovery. John Muir, Charles Darwin, even my own grandparents were alive when these birds flocked over Midwestern American skies. This one didn’t die of an asteroid sixty-five million years ago. “Brachiosaurus, woolly mammoth, passenger pigeon.” I moved from cetaceans to insects to endangered species and finally to extinct animals. It had to be something cute but completely unsuitable as a pet. The next night I would choose a different animal. “What is your favorite animal?” She would ask, hoping that I would agree that we absolutely must adopt a dog, a cat or a pony. How did this happen? Read more as we attempt to solve this extinction mystery.Įach night after her bedtime story my daughter would quiz me. She was the last of what had once been the most numerous bird in the world – the passenger pigeon. One hundred years ago on the first of September 1914, a bird named Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo. ![]()
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