Passenger pigeon

In the 1870s, the passenger pigeon was one of the commonest birds in the world. By 1 September 1914, it was extinct.

J.G. Hubbard, 1898 via Wisconsin Historical Society

You might well ask how could this happen. The answer, as it so often is with these things, is us. In very simple terms, we killed and ate them into extinction. Of course, there is usually more than one contributing factor to an extinction. In the passenger pigeon's case, habitat loss also played its part. But it would be fair to say that human greed in one form or another was entirely responsible for the complete annihilation of a most extraordinary bird.

John Audubon, 1824

Extraordinary, you say? But it's just a pigeon. A rather pretty pigeon, if Audubon's illustration is anything to go by (which, of course it is), but still a pigeon.

In fact, the incredible thing about the passenger pigeon was not its appearance. It was the mind-boggling numbers it flocked in. One report from Canada in 1866 described a flock of pigeons one mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point. The estimated number of birds in this one flock was 3.5 BILLION!

A shooting party

With numbers like that, you can excuse a hungry pioneer bagging a few birds for the pot. But humans don't like to do things by halves. We have a singular inability to take just what we need. By the mid-1800s, there was a lucrative commercial pigeon meat industry up and running, with millions of birds being killed and processed every year. According to Wikipedia, slaves and servants in 18th and 19th century America often saw no other meat. In 1878 at Petoskey, Michigan, 50,000 birds were killed each day for nearly five months.

H. T. Phillips' Store, a typical game store of the 1870s
by William Butts Mershon

This grotesque industry continued until the mid 1890s, by which time the passenger pigeon had all but disappeared. Various conservation attempts and closed seasons failed. Too late, zoologists realised the birds could not breed successfully in smaller groups - they were so gregarious that they needed to be in huge flocks to initiate courtship and mating.

Martha, the last ever passenger pigeon
via http://godwin.bobanna.com

On this day, 98 years ago, the last known Passenger Pigeon, died in Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha (after America's first First Lady). Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned, dissected, photographed and mounted. An inglorious end to a species that once dominated the skies of the eastern USA.

Of course, the story of the passenger pigeon is a very familiar one, not least here in New Zealand where over 50% of native bird species have gone extinct since human settlement. Whether it was the giant, flightless moa, eaten into extinction by Polynesian settlers, or the hauntingly-voiced huia hunted out of existence because an English king 20,000 miles away once wore its tail feather in his hat, humans have had an unbelievably devastating impact on our fellow creatures and the places they live.

What is, perhaps, most remarkable about all this is that we have hunted a five billion-strong species into oblivion in a matter of decades and still haven't learned from our mistake! Ever ashamed to be human?

Find out more about the passenger pigeon here:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon
• www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm
• www.eco-action.org/dt/pigeon.html
• www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/passpigeon.htm

Help to make sure this doesn't happen again here:

• www.nature.org
• www.conservationfund.org/
• www.wwf.org
• www.forestandbird.orgnz
• www.rspb.org.uk