Someone asked a question about the Passenger Pigeon. I first began looking into the importance of this bird during an Internet discussion among some friends, mostly naturalists and biologists, on rare and extinct birds. In some ways, humans, and natural processes, may actually have “created” the pigeon just as surely as they destroyed it. But if you begin to consider the conventional narrative, and look at the tale through contemporary scientific eyes, it begins to look curiously thin. The Passenger Pigeon’s extinction symbolizes the heedless exploitation of a continent’s riches at the hands of our culture.Īll of this is true, as far as it goes. By the 1870s, the birds were in retreat in 1914, the last pigeon-cutely named “Martha” after George Washington’s wife-died in a zoo in Cincinnati. We Europeans came to a world of abundance, cut down the trees, decimated the indigenous people, shot the wildlife, and hauled out barrels of salted Passenger Pigeons in railroad cars to the markets of the East. The Passenger Pigeon has become a conservationist’s green icon, a symbol of the fertility of the pre-Columbian world and our ruining of Eden. Like these phenomena, it was at first destructive but ultimately regenerative-though the species that took advantage of it look to be different from the ones from before-or those today. It resembled the destruction left by a herd of bison or a forest fire. The droppings first killed grasses and understory vegetation, then promoted riotous growth two or three years later. Contemporary observers said the ground looked “snow-covered” after the pigeons passed. But no hurricane would also leave inches, even feet, of nitrogen-rich droppings on the forest floor. The weight of the pigeons and their nests bore down on the forest like a hurricane, breaking limbs and even toppling trees. The pure physical effect of the flocks would have been like nothing that exists on the planet today, and perhaps since the days of the dinosaurs. Berries from no fewer than 11 families were dispersed by Passenger Pigeons, and some now rarely fall at any distance from their parent plant. Other species of plants also seem to be affected. Of these, two are at least mildly in retreat today relative to other species, one seems to have fewer “crops,” and one is ecologically if not genetically extinct. Passenger Pigeons fed on enormous amounts of “mast,” the nuts produced by the then-dominant species of the eastern hardwood forest: white oak, beech, and chestnut. Modern ecological thinking shows us that if you subtract a species that once comprised 40 percent of all the birds in North America, you lose or change more than just a bird. Such a biological phenomenon could not have acted in a void. It covered most of the southern two-thirds of Wisconsin! A flock like this could consume an estimated 210 million liters of food a day. One recorded breeding colony in Wisconsin in 1871 was 125 miles long and between six and eight miles wide. A single flock in motion could darken the sky over 180 square miles, and take days to pass. At its population’s peak, four to five billion pigeons roared over the forests and prairies of the East and Midwest, a number equal to the entire population of overwintering birds in the United States. Though its appearance was unremarkable, rather like a larger and more vividly colored Mourning Dove, it had habits like no other animal we have ever known. ![]() Calling it a “biological storm,” as Aldo Leopold did, was an understatement it was more like a series of simultaneous biological hurricanes, blowing all the time. ![]() The Passenger Pigeon was not just a bird. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.” - Aldo Leopold Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air.
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