The passenger pigeon and their incredible extinction
Many of my readers may recall a column I did for The Californian a few years ago concerning skeet and trap shooting.
In the portion about trap I mentioned, that way back during the late 1800s, pigeons were often used for targets for the gunners of this sport. And not just your plain, old, common barn pigeon that are seen all over cities and towns across the United States. They were downing passenger pigeons, and it is hard to comprehend that just a few years later the most populous bird on the planet would become extinct.
Here is the prologue from one of the most fascinating books I have ever read, “The Silent Sky,” authored by Allan W. Eckert.
“It was around noontime on an autumn day in 1813 when the great artist and naturalist John James Audubon set out for Louisville, Kentucky from his home in Indiana. He had just began traveling when he heard a roar from the north and turned to see a tremendous flock of passenger pigeons coming his way. They stretched out of sight to the east and west and he could see no end to the flock to the north.
“They flew so close together that they blotted out the sun as if by an eclipse. Audubon followed the Ohio River road to Louisville, arriving there at sunset, and all this time the birds had continued flying past in undiminished numbers. The river banks were crowded with men and boys who were shooting the pigeons as they passed quite low. Curious as to how many birds might be in this flock, Audubon carefully calculated the number in a segment only one mile wide and three miles long traveling at the rate of 60 miles per hour. He arrived at the conclusion that from the time he had left his home until he arrived in Louisville, a total of no less than 1,115,136,000 birds has crossed the Ohio River and such a flock would require 8,712,000 bushels of food per day. . . .and this was only a small part of the flock which took three full days to pass, and was only one of dozens of migrating flocks across the eastern United States.”
You have to realize that during the early 19th century, almost all of the land area east of the Mississippi River was solid, dense forest. So dense that in some places the sun could not shine through. Imagine a flock of migrating passenger pigeons settling into the forest for the evening into an area one-half mile wide and more than 300 miles long. Every branch of every tree solid with birds. Word would immediately go out to every town and village along this route, and at first light the next morning thousands of men and boys would begin shooting into the flock. One old man shot twice with his 10 gauge double-barrel gun using extra fine shot, and 187 birds hit the ground.
In just a matter of minutes tens of thousands of birds would be killed or crippled. And this was just one flock. It was happening all over just to the west of the Mississippi and everywhere east. If you take numbers like this beginning in the early part of the century and then multiply them for all the years to the end of the 1800s, you soon realize the numbers of pigeons was being reduced from billions, to hundreds of millions, to hundreds of thousands, and finally by the end of the century just a few thousand were scattered here and there.
But the biggest threat to their existence was not the local hunters who followed these migrations. It was the market hunters who were killing the birds during their nesting season. The baby birds, or squabs, were in great demand throughout the east and were considered a real delicacy by restaurants. A good netter with a crew could capture upwards of 20 to 50 barrels of birds per day, and at 300 birds per barrel it was a real gold mine.
A single barrel of beheaded and gutted birds, iced down and shipped to Chicago, brought $25. And those taken alive for trapshooting could be sold right on the spot for 25 cents per dozen. A man could earn a year’s wages in just five weeks and take life easy the rest of the year. The best example of the slaughter was on a single day in Newaygo County, Mich.,where a crew killed a quarter of a million squabs and sent them to market.
On March 24, 1900, a lone passenger pigeon flew across the Ohio River from Kentucky and into Pike County, Ohio. While perched in a tree, he never noticed a boy sitting behind a log 50 feet away holding a Christmas present from three months earlier. . . a BB gun. The bird landed in the field below the tree and began feeding toward the boy. Forty feet. . .25 feet. . . 15. The boy’s finger pressed the trigger, and in that instant the last known passenger pigeon taken in the wild was killed.
The boy took the carcass to the wife of the county sheriff, Mrs. C. Barnes (no relation) who was a taxidermist. She mounted the bird and later donated it to Ohio State University at Columbus, where it remains today.
At the time this bird was killed there were only three remaining pigeons in existence, all living in the Cincinnati zoo. Two of these died thereafter, and the last one, a female named Martha, passed away on Sept. 1, 1914. The body was frozen in a 300 pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She was mounted and now perches behind glass in the U.S. National Museum, a perpetual reminder of the thoughtlessness and greed of mankind.