The Passing Of The Passenger Pigeon (June 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 4)

The Passing Of The Passenger Pigeon

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Authors: Charlton Ogburn, Jr.

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June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4

On September 1, 1914, a bird named Martha died in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. In covering the news of the day the New York Times devoted half a column to the change in the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd and equal space to a defeat of the New York Yankees by the Detroit Tigers. Most of the first three or four pages were, of course, filled by news of the great war that had just begun: me Allied armies were lulling back toward Paris before the initial German offensive; a “daring aeronaut” from Germany had dropped lour bombs upon the French capital; and the American colony led by the American ambassador was petitioning the United States government to protest this inhuman innovation in the conduct of war. There was nothing about the death of Martha at the age of twenty-nine. And yet her demise was the final event in the history of a slaughter as massive in the annals of the animal kingdom as the slaughter then beginning in France was to be in human history. For Martha was the last of the passenger pigeons.

When the first European settlers arrived in the New World, the passenger pigeon in all probability out-numbered any other species of bird in the world. At that time it was found throughout the forest that covered eastern North America, breeding in the North and wintering in the South. It lived in flocks at all seasons, and these flocks were of such magnitude that nowhere had anything resembling them been seen before.

It requires an effort, and is perhaps impossible, to visualize the passenger pigeon’s numbers even from the circumstantial accounts that have come down to us. In the vast tract of hardwoods that extended over Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, some of the nesting sites were three miles wide and thirty long. From descriptions of the density of the nests, which sometimes numbered as many as one hundred to a tree, it has been computed that one such zone of ninety square miles must have contained fifty-seven million birds. The scenes presented by these nestings stupefied all who beheld them. James Fenimore Cooper, groping for words adequate to the spectacle, wrote that he was reduced to silence by “admiration of the works of the Creator.” In any case, he added, speaking would have been futile since human voices were inaudible in the pandemonium of the pigeons.

Unlike the notes of most other pigeons and doves, which are soft and muted, the cries of the passenger pigeon were loud, shrill, and scolding. Presumably, like the human city-dweller, it had to speak loud and often to gain a hearing above the din created by its fellows. Travelers approaching a nesting site would begin to hear the clamor at a distance of several miles and once upon the fringes of the flock had to bawl into one another’s ears to be understood,