EXTINCT FOR A CENTURY

The Passenger Pigeon Has Been Extinct For A Century. Only Stuffed And Mounted Specimens Remain.

One Hundred Years Ago This Month The Passenger Pigeon Vanished From The Earth

The fate of the passenger pigeon stands as a strong reminder that any species, no matter how numerous, can slip into extinction within a short period of time—and that being extinct means that a unique piece of creation is gone forever.

The passenger pigeon was a North American bird that in size and color looked quite a bit like the mourning dove. As late as the 1860s they were probably the world’s most numerous species of bird: They traveled in flocks estimated at over a billion, and when they were on the move they darkened the skies for hours. When they roosted in trees at night, the combined weight of birds would sometimes shear off a limb and send it crashing to the ground.

But people shot and netted them because they were good to eat—uncountable numbers were harvested for sale in the markets of Eastern US cities—and also because they ate the grain crops of Midwestern farmers. By the 1890s they were already becoming scarce, with hunters actually having to look for them in the woods rather than standing in one spot and firing away as thousands flew over.

By the early 1900s there was only a single passenger pigeon left—a lone bird named Martha who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. Then, in September, 1914, Martha died and the passenger pigeon was fully extinct.

Humans drove a few other species into extinction prior to the passenger pigeon, the elephant bird, the great auk, the dodo bird, and the moa among them. But the pigeon’s disappearance made a stronger impression than any of the others because of the fact that just a few decades before it vanished it had been so awesomely and incredibly numerous. The pigeon’s extinction had come in the relative blink of an eye.

Of course, we now have lost, or are in grave danger of losing, thousands of bird and animal species of all kinds. Some scientists even believe that we are currently in an era of mass extinctions during which our planet will lose a devastating portion of its biological diversity. If so, it is our own habitat-destroying, climate-changing species that is responsible.