100 Years Since Martha, The Last Passenger Pigeon, Died In Cincinnati Zoo - 9/1/14

[hatrack]

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The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was once the most common bird in North America, comprising an estimated 20 to 40 percent of the entire avian population of the United States. Ranging east of the Rocky Mountains from central Canada to the southern U.S., flocks were purported to contain millions of birds, with some reports counting billions in a single, “infinite” mass. They ate acorns whole, built hundreds of nests in a single tree, and could fly 100 kilometers per hour (62 mile per hour). “A velocity such as this would enable one of these birds, were it so inclined, to visit the European continent in less than three days,” wrote Audubon.

And yet, even with seemingly inexhaustible numbers and an ability to travel great distances to find food, they went from billions to extinction in less than a century. The exact reasons as to how this could happen are still being investigated to this day, but one thing seems certain – humans most definitely had a hand in propelling the species to oblivion. The birds were very vulnerable to commercial hunting, with hundreds of nestlings harvested in the felling of a single tree. Tunnel nets were often used by hunters and farmers, and could catch 3,500 birds at a time. Pigeons were shot, clubbed, and intoxicated with alcohol-soaked grain, then pickled, smoked, and salted for winter stores.

Railroad expansion in the mid-1800s made it easier to transport killed pigeons from the relatively unpopulated U.S. Midwest to the more lucrative East Coast markets, with 1.8 million pigeons shot and shipped in 1851 alone. In the 1870s the birds were still so common that the prices they fetched at market weren’t enough to pay for the costs of the barrels and ice needed to ship them, leading to a shift to live-caught birds. However, by the 1890s, it was becoming very clear that the species was in trouble. Already extirpated from the East Coast, pigeon populations completely crashed in the Midwest over the course of just ten years.

“Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon came with stunning rapidity,” write biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and colleagues in a 1988 essay. “Michigan was its last stronghold; about three million birds were shipped east from there by a single hunter in 1878. Eleven years later, 1889, the species was extinct in that state.” Efforts were made to head off extinction, with a bill brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the species. However, the proposal was denied, with a Senate report stating the passenger pigeon “is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”

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http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0901-morgan-centennial-passenger-pigeon.html

[kysrsoze]

1. I visited Field Museum in Chicago this weekend. The number of species either extinct or near

extinction was sickening. I saw so many exhibits of animals which were either endangered or already extinct. So many of the animals' impending or historic extinction was due to habitat destruction and/or hunting by humans. Even without weapons of mass destruction, the human race truly causes massive destruction on a global scale.

There was even a counter in one section of the museum detailing the number of species which went extinct since 8 a.m. that day - 3 per hour, 72 per day, 1,728 per month, 20,000 per year. This includes insects and such, but still, it's mind-boggling.