Vanishing Assets: Conservation Status of U.S. Species

“The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse.” So observed John James Audubon, the eminent naturalist and bird artist, of a mass migration of passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) passing through Kentucky in 1813. For three days the pigeons poured out of the Northeast in search of forests bearing nuts and acorns. By Audubon’s estimate, the flock that passed overhead contained more than I billion birds, a number consistent with calculations made by other ornithologists. As the pigeons approached their roost, Audubon noted that the noise they made “reminded me of a hard gale at sea passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel.” Indeed, they were so numerous that by some accounts every other bird on the North American continent was probably a passenger pigeon at the time of European colonization (Schorger 1955). Yet despite this extraordinary abundance, barely 100 years later the last passenger pigeon, a female bird named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The vast flocks of passenger pigeons moved around eastern North America, feeding mostly on the fruits of forest trees such as beechnuts and acorns. Two factors conspired to seal their fate. Because of their huge numbers, the birds were easy to hunt, especially at their roosting sites. Hunters were ingenious in developing increasingly efficient ways to slaughter the birds. Armed with sticks, guns, nets, or sulfur fires, hunters swept through the enormous roosting colonies, carting away what they could carry and feeding the remaining carcasses to their pigs. One of these methods, in which a decoy pigeon with its eyes sewn shut was attached to a perch, or stool, gave rise to the term stool pigeon. As the railroads expanded west, enormous numbers could be sent to major urban markets like New York, where pigeons became the cheapest meat available. They were so cheap and abundant that live birds were used as targets in shooting galleries. At the same time that this frontal assault on the pigeons was under way, human settlers were expanding into the interior of the country, clearing large areas of the forests on which the flocks depended for food.