101. The Passenger Pigeon A different view of the demise of the passenger pigeon, which argues that the bird s way of life also doomed it. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/779939pass.html

102. In Memoriam, The Passenger Pigeon « EcoTopia Contemporary descriptions of flocks of living birds from prominent naturalists. http://www.ecotopia.org/about/pigeon.html

Home About Contact Circle Trail ... EcoTopia A design strategy for the new millennium Posts Recent Posts Florence the Goose The Quality of Mercy: Homelessness In Santa Cruz 1985-1992, Chapter One Donate! Socrates and the Rise of Rational Self-consciousness in Ancient Greece The Deeply Green Reading Guide In Memoriam, The Passenger Pigeon Audubon drew a pair of them, drew them from dead birds he shot himself, and showed a pair sharing food. He lived in the heyday of the pigeon, in the great dreamtime, when they blackened the skies of eastern North America. He wrote of their speed, their beauty, and especially of their incredible abundance: Birds of America , full text available on the web John Muir devoted a full five pages of his autobiography to these wonderful birds which, by 1910, were extinct in the wild: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth , full text on the web at the John Muir Exhibit op. cit op. cit In 1900, the last wild passenger pigeon the world will ever know was killed in Ohio. It was stuffed and put in the State Museum. Nine years later, the species was down to three individuals, two males and a female held at the zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio. The males died in 1910. The female, Martha, last of her kind, died at 1 P.M. on September 1, 1914. Aldo Leopold wrote: Sand County Almanac . "On A Monument to the Pigeon"] Category: Ecotopia 1 comment to In Memoriam, The Passenger Pigeon

103. Extinction: The Story Of The Passenger Pigeon Brief history of the events leading up to the extinction. http://www.eco-action.org/dt/pigeon.html

Species Extinction The Story of the Passenger Pigeon By Clive Ponting Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter in the history of wildlife was not the bison but the passenger pigeon - a story that almost defies belief. The early Europeans in North America frequently commented on the huge numbers of blue, long-tailed, fast and graceful pigeons in the country. One of the first settlers in Virginia wrote that, `There are wild pigeons in winter beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that even have they shadowed the sky from us.' Similar reports can be found from the Dutch on Manhattan Island in 1625, from Salem in Massachusetts in 1631 and some of the first explorers in Louisiana in 1698. As late as 1854 in Wayne County, New York, a local resident wrote that. `There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.' On 8 April 1873 at Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7.30 in the morning and 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Other reports describe flocks a mile wide flying overhead for four or five hours at a time during their migration in the early spring from the south to their breeding areas in New England, New York, Ohio and the southern Great Lakes area. The flocks were so thickly packed that a single shot could bring down thirty or forty birds and many were killed simply by hitting them with pieces of wood as they flew over hilltops.

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