The history of the now extinct PASSENGER PIGEON.......once the bird of abundance in North America with a range that spanned Southern Canada South to Virginia and from the Eastern Seaboard West to the Great Plains.................. knocked into extinction by the turn of the 20th Century due to overhunting and destruction of our Forests and key nut bearing trees

The Eastern Forests once harbored  millions of Passenger Pigeons      Ancient hardwood forests stretched  for thousands of square miles in eastern  NorthAmerica.  Massive oaks, chestnuts , hickories, walnuts and beech trees  dominated, some reaching  heights of more than 100 feet, with trunks 20 or more feet in circumference.  Giant hemlocks andmany kinds of pine dominated  some areas.  Thepassenger pigeon was the  most abundant denizen of these forests, and its range extended from  southern Canada, New England and the Great  Lakes west to the  Great Plains and south to Virginia.  The slim  bird was  somewhat smaller than the familiar rock dove  or common  pigeon found in cities worldwide, with a long,  pointed tail.   The male's plumage was beautiful; his back, wings and head  were bluish‑gray with black streaks and spots,  which contrasted with a rich, pinkish tinge on his lower  throat.  His breast feathers became paler on the belly,  and a patch  of pink or purple‑pink iridescence shone at  his neck.  His  eyes were bright red surrounded by purplish  skin, and his legs and feet were red (Goodwin 1983).  The female was a  duller version of the male, browner gray above,  light gray  on the breast, with a smaller iridescent pink patch  on the neck,  more profuse black spots on the wings and gray skin  surrounding her orange eyes (Goodwin 1983).        This is the only pigeon — living or extinct  — that flocked  and nested in vast numbers, darkening the sky  during their  migrations.  When Europeans first encountered  passenger  pigeons, they were dumbfounded by their  numbers.  One  immigrant, Pehr Kalm, described their passage  in the spring  of 1749:  "on the 11th, 12th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 22nd  of March . . . there came from the north an  incredible multitude  of these pigeons to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Their  number, while in flight, extended three or four  English miles  in length, and more than one such mile in breadth,  and they  flew so closely together that the sky and the sun  were obscured  by them, the daylight becoming sensibly diminished  by their shadow" (Fuller 1987).  When the pigeons landed on trees, their weight was sometimes so great that not only  would large  limbs break off, but entire trees would topple.   Prior to settlement of the continent by Europeans, as  many as 5  billion birds inhabited Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana alone  (Blaugrund and Stebbins 1993).        Passenger pigeons were migratory, as  their scientific  name, Ectopistes migratorius, suggested, but not in the  manner of most birds, who migrate from an  ancestral  nesting area to an ancestral wintering area.   Instead,  immense columns of birds flew as a unit at  speeds  estimated as high as 60 miles per hour in wide  areas  in search of nut trees and seeds.  John James Audubon,  famed illustrator of American birds, described  flights in the 1830s that covered the sky for days in some  areas, while in other years, none would be seen in the  same area  (Blaugrund and Stebbins 1993).  The forests  that once  stretched nearly unbroken across eastern North America  were crucial to the survival of the passenger pigeon flocks.   Nut trees (oaks, hickories and beeches)  produced  large  crops only every few years.  In order to  locate adequate  feeding supplies, the pigeons covered  great distances.         John James Audubon visited a roost in  Kentucky accompanied  by some pigeon hunters in 1831:    Many trees two feet in diameter, I observed, were broken off at no great distance from the ground; and  the branches  of many of the largest and tallest had given way,  as if the  forest had been swept by a tornado.  Every thing  proved to  me that the number of birds resorting to this part  of the forest \ must be immense beyond conception . . . Suddenly  there burst  forth a general cry of 'Here they come!' The noise  which they  made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard  gale at sea  passing through the rigging of a close‑reefed vessel.   I fel t a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were  soon  knocked down by the pole men.  The birds continued  to pour in . . . The pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted  everywhere,  one above another, until solid masses as large as  hogsheads , were formed on the branches all round.  Here and there the  perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and falling  to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was  loaded. It was  a scene of uproar and confusion.  I found it quite useless to speak,  or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me.   Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard,  and I was  made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading (Schorger 1973).         Once they located a forest with abundant food, they nested in  huge aggregations.  One colony in Wisconsin was  estimated to  cover more than 750 square miles, with 136 million  nesting birds  (Wilcove 1991).  Audubon wrote of their courtship,  "the  tenderness and affection displayed by these birds  toward their mates are in the highest degree" and painted two birds "billing" for his Birds of America series (Blaugrund  and Stebbins 1993).  Some described their courtship songs as  a series of bell‑like notes (Fuller 1987).        Their nests, constructed of loose sticks, held their single  white egg.  A tree could hold many nests, which the birds  placed on strong branches close to the trunk.  The flocks  rarely nested in the same area two years running, and  dispersed as soon as nesting was over; this may  have been  to prevent natural predators from increasing enough to have a serious impact on their numbers (Wilcove  1991).  Also, their food supply tended to be abundant only every few years in a given area.  These great colonies  made easy targets for legions of meat and market hunters,  beginning in the 1600s.  By the 18th century, naturalists  began to  observe that nesting colonies were disappearing;  the last  great nesting in New England took place near  Lunenburg, Massachusetts, in 1851 (Wilcove 1991).  By the  1860s, the  large flocks had been hunted out of coastal New York State  and Pennsylvania.  The few laws that were enacted  to protect  them in the Northeast were not enforced  (Wilcove 1991).   Season after season, pigeon hunters killed millions  of these  birds, destroying one colony after another.        Neltje Blanchan, in the 1904 book Birds That Hunt  and Are  Hunted, documented that unlimited netting, even during  the nesting  season, had resulted in sending more than 1 million pigeons to market  from a single roost at the height of the hunting; an equal number of  birds were wounded or left starving, helpless, naked chicks behind .  Hunters shipped 100 thousand pounds of pigeons to market from  a nesting colony near Grand Rapids, Michigan (Wilcove 1991).  Audubon and other observers of the time described  the brutal  hunting methods:  young birds were knocked out of  their nests  with poles, and captive pigeons, whose eyelids had  been sewn  shut, were tethered to lure wild pigeons to the ground  where they  were netted (Wilcove 1991).  Nesting trees were cut  down or set  afire, and sulphur was burned under nesting trees to kill  the birds  (Wilcove 1991).  Blanchan (1904) described the glut  of pigeons  at markets as so great that the price per barrel scarcely  paid for  their transportation.  The pigeon meat was often fed to  hogs.         By the late 1800s, it had become evident to some that the  killing was having a disastrous effect on the passenger pigeons.   The warnings went unheeded, however.  In Ohio, a  bill  submitted in 1857 to protect the passenger pigeon received  the following report from a Select Committee of  the Senate:  "The passenger pigeon needs no protection.   Wonderfully  prolific, having the vast forests of the North  as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search  of food, it is  here to‑day and elsewhere to‑morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from  the myriads  that are yearly produced" (Hornaday 1913).        The final and precipitous decline of passenger  pigeons began  in the 1870s, a decade which began with some large  flocks still  attempting to nest in the Great Lakes area.  In 1878,  naturalists  estimated that some 50 million pigeons survived,  but with continued heavy hunting, only one large nesting colony in Wisconsin remained in 1887 (Wilcove 1991).   This colony  dispersed within two weeks after beginning to  nest when  hunters began shooting at them (Wilcove 1991).   By the 1890s, only scattered individual pigeons – who  were  apparently unable to breed or forage successfully – remained.   In 1892, one observer noted, "The extermination  of the  passenger pigeon has progressed so rapidly during  the past  twenty years that it looks now as if their total  extermination  might be accomplished within the present century"  (Blanchan 1904).  This statement proved correct.  The incredible  wildlife  spectacle that flights of billions of passenger pigeons  presented,  ended completely on March 24, 1900, when the last  wild bird was killed in Pike County, Ohio (Wilcove 1991).       The reason for the sudden crash in passenger  pigeon  numbers has been the subject of controversy in  the years  since.  Two ornithologists from the University of Minnesota , David E. Blockstein and Harrison B. Tordoff, believe during  the last 20 years prior to its wild extinction, hunters were able  to disturb or destroy virtually every nesting  colony.  Each year,  the adult birds that were able to escape previous  hunting and  attempt breeding were harassed or chased off the  nest, or their  fledglings were killed (Wilcove 1991).  The adults  not killed were  relatively long-lived, averaging a lifespan of about  20 years, but  because their numbers were not replaced by  succeeding generations,  when they died off, the species became extinct  (Wilcove 1991).   Blockstein and Tordoff noted some Passenger  Pigeons nested in  small groups, escaping the attention of hunters,  but they  conjectured that without the protection provided  by large colonies,  these birds rarely succeeded in producing fledgling chicks, and were  easy targets for predators (Wilcove 1991).  This explanation seems logical, and clearly, the birds were unable to survive  in small, scattered  groups, dependent on a large colony for successful  reproduction.   Other factors may also have entered in.  It may be  that only in the  presence of large numbers of their own kind was  instinctive breeding  behavior stimulated.        A captive passenger pigeon named Martha, about  29-years -old and the last of her species, died at 1 p.m. on  September 1,  1914 at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens.  This is perhaps the  only species for which the exact minute of its extinction is known (Fuller 1987).