As I was writing this up, Lenny Flank posted this diary on the passenger pigeon. It's on the Rec List right now. I thought I'd go ahead and post mine because it includes additional links to current commentaries and projects and images that mark the centennial.
One hundred years ago today, at 1:00 pm, the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was the last of what is believed to have been the most abundant bird species on the face of the earth, numbering in the billions. Take 90 seconds to watch this video recreation of a flock of passenger pigeons balckening the skies...
LBP Passenger Pigeon Flock Overhead from Lost Bird Project on Vimeo.
Now imagine that continuing non-stop for fourteen days. That gives one an idea of the immensity of this biological phenomenon that was the passenger pigeon. In a few short decades after the Civil War, the pigeon went from billions to none. Several factors led to its unbelievable decline. Unregulated market hunting of its huge flocks, abetted by the new technologies of the railroad and the telegraph, continued until there were no more. This was compounded by the destruction and conversion of the pigeon's eastern deciduous forest habitat. The species peculiar biology, especially its massive flocking behavior, that had allowed it previously to thrive, prevented it from adapting to the new pressures. The last wild birds were shot just after the turn of the century. Martha and a few other birds were maintained in zoos. These began to pass on, one by one, until only Martha remained. Then she was found dead in her cage in Cincinnati. She was packed in ice and shipped off to the Smithsonian, where she has remained to today (and where she is now again on display as part of a special centennial exhibit.)
It was perhaps the most famous and consequential extinction event in history. It was, among other things, one of the few extinctions we know the exact time of. And it led to important changes in wildlife conservation policy that reverberate down to today.
The centennial of the passenger pigeon's demise is being marked by many. Project Passenger Pigeon serves as a handy clearinghouse of information. (The website includes a great feature where you can explore local passenger pigeon history and connections for your place.) Several new books tell the pigeon's story. Zoos, museums, nature centers, and universities are hosting commemorative events. There's a new documentary film, From Billions to None, that it beginning to be shown:
Many commentaries are being shared on this occasion. John Fitzpatrick, who is direcotr of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, had a lead op-ed in Sunday's New York Times:
Martha is receiving plenty of eulogies this year, including several recent books and even a petition for a presidential proclamation honoring her centenary. I suggest that our most important eulogy would be to reflect on her species’ once great numbers, on the century that has passed since her death and on the century that begins today. We need to imagine Martha asking us, “Have you learned anything from my passing?”
It seems that whenever humans discover bounty, it is doomed to become a fleeting resource. The fate of cod fisheries in the late 1900s mirrors that of the passenger pigeon a century before. Pacific bluefin tuna, down 96 percent from their unfished numbers, may be next in line. Countless such examples exist around the world, but the good news is that we still have time to reflect on them before their populations dwindle down to their last respective Marthas.
Elizabeth Kolbert, whose recent book
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is a must-read for those interested in the fate of the living world, has posted
these thoughts at the
New Yorker website:
...Whatever happened [to cause the pigeon's extinction], the mystery should give us pause. Species that seem today to be doing fine may be sensitive to change in ways that are difficult to foresee. And we are are now changing the planet at a speed that’s probably unprecedented in at least sixty million years.
Michele Berger,
blogging at Weather Underground, notes the recent push to resurrect the pigeon using modern genomic techonologies:
The team has made progress, sequencing DNA from a number of passenger pigeon specimens. In October 2013, they fully sequenced a single passenger pigeon, and in January and February of this year, fully sequenced a band-tailed pigeon. They’re close to what they’re calling a “first draft” of the passenger pigeon genome.
It's a project that draws lots of attention, but in my view, it's not conservation. It does nothing to address the present causes of endangerment and extinction, and asks for no change in our extractive human economy, in our pressures on the world around us, or in our relationships with other species.
As I've been reading about the pigeon, I've been struck by the number of art projects and installations that have been engaged in the commemoration. In Cincinnati, a massive new mural has been completed:
Sculptor Todd McGrain has created remarkable memorials to extinct birds, including the pigeon, through his Lost Bird Project. This is the pigeon sculpture, at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus, Ohio:
And Someone came up with a great idea: downloadable and printable origami passenger pigeons.
The Fold the Flock project aims to have a flock of 1 million folded. They are at 433, 296. Watch this young guy make the pitch:
(Nice job, MegaAnimalDoctor!)
I'll end at a place not far from where I live, the monument to the pigeon at Wyalusing State Park, where the Wisconsin River joins the Mississippi. The monument was dedicated in 1946.
Here's the plaque:
The inscription reads:
"Dedicated to the last Wisconsin passenger pigeon, Shot at Babcock, Sept.1899. This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man. Erected by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology."
The great naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold spoke at the dedication. The full text of his comments can be found
here. This was later published in his classic work,
A Sand County Almanac. He wrote:
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights.
Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.
...
The pigeon loved his land: he lived by the intensity of his desire for clustered grape and bursting beechnut, and by his contempt of miles and seasons.
Whatever Wisconsin did not offer him gratis today, he sought and found tomorrow in Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee. His love was for present things, and these things were present somewhere; to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings.
...
To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons. To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the still lapse of ages – all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr. Bush’s bombs and Mr. Du Pont’s nylons, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.