Roasted, stewed, pan-fried, minced in soups and - most especially - baked into pigeon pie with a slab of pork fat for gravy, there were few meals more eagerly anticipated come April, after a long winter of deprivations. Those powerful breast muscles that could carry a bird at 60 mph from its overwintering quarters in an oak-hickory forest in Georgia to breeding grounds in an upstate New York beech-maple woods, and then 100 miles per day in search of food, were deemed better eating than duck. 1, 1914.īut my oh my, weren’t they some kind of delicious. The last wild specimen was shot in the Province of Quebec in 1907 and the species went extinct with the death of an aged female named Martha in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. One was killed in Maine in 1904, another in Missouri in 1906. More: Ken Baker: Passenger pigeons went from superflocks to extinctionĪlmost as crazy as arguing, say, that humans’ burning of fossil fuels could actually impact the world’s climate.Īnd yet, in just 30 years the species had all but vanished. Its numbers were such that it was inconceivable to all but a few widely ridiculed doomsayers that human actions could ever affect their abundance in any meaningful way. In 1871, the largest nesting colony ever observed was estimated to extend over 855 square miles of woodlands covering the southern third of Wisconsin and neighboring areas of Minnesota. Roving unpredictably over deciduous forests and prairies from northern Florida to eastern Texas and northward into southern Canada above the Great Lakes, individual flocks regularly numbered in the billions (with a B) of individuals. This essay follows up on my last column’s overview of the astonishing abundance and behavior of the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius - formerly North America’s most numerous species of bird - with the equally astonishing story of its almost instantaneous disappearance.
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