Over a century ago the
passenger pigeon was probably the most numerous bird in all the world; today it
is extinct.
Incredible as it seems, it
may have outnumbered all other birds in the United States combined—hundreds of
species.
One authority, summing up
the evidence, believes that in Audubon’s day there were nearly five billion
passenger pigeons in the states of Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana alone!
From Newfoundland to
Florida, early writers told of immense hordes.
The great columns in
flight, extending for hundreds of miles, blotted out the sun and took as much
as three days to pass.
Alexander Wilson,
sometimes called the father of American ornithology, estimated a flock in
Kentucky to contain 2,230,272,000 birds.
He considered this far
below their actual numbers.
He reckoned that if each
bird ate a half pint of acorns a day, their daily food consumption would be
17,424,000 bushels!
Similarly, Audubon
estimated a flock near Louisville at 1,115,136,000 birds.
Accounts of the great
roosts read like the tales of a romancer.
Trees broke under the
weight of the pigeons; thousands of armed men slaughtered day and night and
shipped countless barrels to the big cities where they rotted on the sidewalks
for want of buyers.
The last immense nesting
took place in Michigan in 1878.
During the next thirty
years the remaining flocks dwindled until they were gone.
The last passenger pigeon
in the world expired at the Cincinnati Zoo at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time,
September 1, 1914.
it is difficult to imagine
that
once the sky was so full that
now the sky is so empty
trees breaking under the
weight
of all those hollowed
bones
murmuring
