One day in the autumn of 1813, John James Audubon, the famous ornithologist and painter, made a trip by horseback from Henderson, Kentucky, to Louisville. Over his head the sky was dark, filled with passenger pigeons as far as he could see. The birds constantly streamed over his head throughout his entire 55-mile journey.
Audubon estimated that his flock of pigeons must have been comprised of at least a billion birds. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Another flock was sighted in 1866 in southern Ontario. That one was a mile wide and 300 miles long. It took 14 hours for the entire flock to pass a single point.
It’s believed that when the Europeans started settling in North America there were between three billion and five billion passenger pigeons in North America. They were extremely social animals: they lived together in huge colonies that stretched over hundreds of miles. More than a hundred birds might nest in a single tree. Sometimes the trees grew so heavy that they were uprooted, or their limbs would break. Sometimes the birds would perch — literally — on each other’s backs. Their droppings covered the trees and the ground underneath. When they flew overhead, some said you could smell them go by.
The birds would stay in their colony for about a month, first building their nests and then laying a single egg. The eggs would hatch, and the parents would care for the squabs for about two weeks, and then move on, leaving their young behind. The young birds would fall to the ground, feed on grubs and nuts, and in a few days they would teach themselves to fly. The cycle continued.
There were only a few of these enormous flocks in North America, and they flew over the eastern part of the United States and Canada, looking for good nesting sites. They needed trees, of course, good sturdy ones, and a healthy forest with plenty of nuts and seeds. They needed a water source, and soil that could support a good stock of earthworms. Once they had visited a site, they had essentially ruined it as a future nesting site for many years.
In less than a hundred years, these great flocks of birds were reduced to a single passenger pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha, and she was the last of her breed. How in the world did we manage to wipe these enormous flocks off the face of the world in so short a time?
The destruction of their habitat was a big part of the reason. When the European settlers began settling inland on the American continent, they began to eradicate the vast forests. And passenger pigeons need to roost together in large groups. If they break up into smaller groups, they seem to become too stressed to reproduce effectively.
Even more significant to the birds’ reduction were the hunting practices of the new settlers. Native Americans had hunted pigeons, but had taken only what they needed to feed themselves — they made scarcely a dent in the bird population. But by the early 19th century, commercial hunters were on the loose, and they were netting or shooting the birds for consumption in the cities. They were shipped by the boxcar-load to the East Coast, where they sold for pennies a pair. New York City was consuming 100 barrels a day, and each barrel contained 500 to 600 birds.
By the 1850’s, some had started to notice that the huge populations of pigeons seemed to be disappearing, but there wasn’t enough concern to stop the hunting. By the mid-1890’s, they were almost entirely gone. There were attempts to put a moratorium on pigeon-hunting until the population could recover, but it was already too late. The flocks were just too small by then for successful breeding.
By the early 1900’s, the only remaining passenger pigeons could be found in zoos. Between 1910 and 1912, the American Ornithologists’ Union offered a $1500 reward to anyone finding a nest or a colony in the wild, but to no avail.
When Martha, the last passenger pigeon in captivity died on September 1, 1914, her body was immediately frozen into a 300-pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian Museum. There, her skin was mounted by taxidermists, and her internal organs preserved for the “wet” collection of the National Museum of Natural History.
The stuffed and mounted Martha has twice left the Smithsonian for special events. In 1966 she attended the San Diego Zoological Society’s Golden Jubilee Conservation Conference, and in 1974 she returned to the Cincinnati Zoo for the dedication of a new building in her honor. She flew first class for both visits, attended by her own personal flight attendant.
Sources: Chase’s Calendar of Events, 2011 Edition: The Ultimate Go-To Guide for Special Days, Weeks, and Months, Editors of Chase’s Calendar of Events; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September 1; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon; http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/779939pass.html; http://www.mnh.si.edu/onehundredyears/featured_objects/martha2.html; http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/passengerpigeon.htm; http://www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/passpigeon.htm; http://fins.actwin.com/nanf/month.9811/msg00343.html; http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/passpig.htm.