How We Killed the Passenger Pigeon
It’s a little-known fact that the bird with the highest global population is a tiny finch-like fellow called the Red-billed Quelea. It is estimated that across Sub-Sahara Africa there are about 1.5 billion Queleas hopping about. They form flocks tens of millions strong and cause all sorts of mischief as they eat grain and other commercial crops.
But as numerous as these little birds are, just 200 years ago, they couldn’t hold a feather to a far more multitudinous bird — The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius).
On sheer numbers, these birds have never been matched; with an estimated 5 billion individuals roaming the flyways of North America. But in the space of just 100 year the Passenger Pigeon was extinct. How could a bird that formed flocks so vast they could literally darken the sky for hours on end be wiped out in a single generation?
The short answer is people — it’s always people. We have a certain knack for making other things not live.
But the long answer is more complex. In one sense, ironically, their staggering numbers were the cause of their downfall. For millions of years, their mammoth flocks were their greatest defence. They deployed a strategy known as predator satiation. It’s a simple strategy: have so many individuals that no predator, no matter how insatiable their appetite, could ever hope to make a dint in your population. This, combined with their migratory nature, meant no predator could grow their own population over time to take advantage of the winged smorgasbord on offer. The pigeons would fly into a feeding ground, strip it bear and then move on to the next roost. They never stayed anywhere long enough for a predator to raise a family on fresh squab — before they had a chance the pigeons had come and gone. Indeed, this is why they’re called ‘passenger’ pigeons. The name derived from the French passer, meaning, to pass by. They were a nomadic species, constantly on the move. This was the key to their success, until they came across a predator with an appetite that was truly insatiable — the European colonisers of the American west.
For it was our appetite that proved to be their undoing. By all accounts, the plump-breasted pigeon made for a rather tasty treat. And unfortunately for these pigeons, they were dead easy to catch. So easy, in fact, that the official sporting organisations of the time didn’t even consider them to be a proper game bird. A hunter only had to point a rifle at the sky and open fire. Their flocks were so thick that a single shot could bring down six birds at a time without any need to aim.
Of course, humans, ever the industrious species, came up with more creative and efficient ways to kill their quarry. Nets were strung up close to their roosts that could catch thousands at once. Others cut down the trees where the pigeons would nest en masse, dislodging their eggs and knocking the hatchlings to the ground before they had time to fledge. One particularly creative method involved capturing birds, blinding them, tying them to a stool and using them to lure a passing flock to the ground, tricking them into thinking there was food nearby. This cruel and unusual tactic gifted us the term ‘stool pigeon’.
For a hundred years, the poor pigeons were hunted indiscriminately. It was believed their flocks were so large that there was no way they could ever be wiped out. The notion was an absurdity. So the practise continued, even as the flocks dwindled. Their last mass nesting site was found in 1878; over five months 50,000 birds were killed a day (that’s around 7.5 million in total). After that they were only found sporadically, and when found … generally killed. They must have been one tasty bird.
Around this time campaigns were launched to protect what few birds remained. Legislation was drafted, making it illegal to trap or kill them. But the laws were vague and rarely enforced. By the 1890s, only scattered and isolated nests remained. The last confirmed nest was found in 1895, the eggs were duly collected. The last known pigeon found anywhere in the wild was seen in Oakford, Illinois in 1901. It was duly shot.
For a couple of years, a few birds remained in zoos and aviaries. The last Passenger Pigeon was a female called Martha. She lived alone in Cincinnati Zoo for six years where she became famous as the Passenger endling. As she grew older she became slow and lethargic, so visitors would throw sand at her to make her move. When she died in 1914 she was skinned, stuffed and put on display in the Smithsonian National Museum. She remains there to this day.
Many nuanced reasons have been put forward to explain why the Passenger Pigeon population collapsed so dramatically. But the simple truth is they were remorselessly hunted to extinction. Between the butchery and the large scale deforestation that was also occurring at the time, it was just too much. The wholesale slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon has sometimes been described as a blitzkrieg.
They were only ever seen as a resource. A resource so vast as to be inexhaustible. It’s a sad habit we humans have. The story of the Passenger Pigeon is the same story in miniature to how we have treated our planet. The Earth is a vast place, brimming with life and resources in such plentiful quantities as to seem inexhaustible. But we know it isn’t. Just as conservationists of the 1880s and 1890s knew the Passenger Pigeon wasn’t. America’s tokenistic and weak-willed efforts to save the pigeon were far too little far too late. There was no recovery for the pigeon. Our planet is not at that stage yet. But I worry. Sometimes we people are slow learners.
