Nature Bulletin No. 181-A   February 27, 1965
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Seymour Simon, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation

****:THE PASSENGER PIGEON

We Americans have been a greedy heedless people plundering and 
wasting the natural resources which made possible the building of this 
great nation -- the soils, the waters, the forests, the minerals and the 
wildlife, In the United States there was once an abundance of wildlife 
never found on any other land. We have come close to exterminating 
many valuable kinds, notably the buffalo and the beaver. Several 
species once abundant are extinct, among them the Passenger Pigeon.

The passenger pigeon was a graceful elegant bird with a long wedge-
shaped tail, considerably larger than our Mourning Dove and mighty 
good to eat. The males were handsome: slaty blue and brown above; 
the head blue; the sides and back of the neck iridescent with pink, 
purple, green and gold; the breast a rich reddish-brown shading to 
pinkish on the sides; with short stout red legs. Unlike other doves and 
pigeons, its voice was rather loud and harsh. The females were more 
drab in color. Native to the unbroken forests which covered most of 
central and eastern North America, they nested in huge colonies. An 
area of 100 square miles might have every tree loaded with nests, some 
times 100 nests in a single tree. The nests were merely a crisscross 
jumble of sticks in which one pure-white egg was laid.

Those billions of wild pigeons fed on mast -- the acorns, beechnuts, 
chestnuts and other seeds on the trees and on the ground; also upon 
the many kinds of berries so plentiful in those days, as well as upon 
caterpillars and other insects -- a much wider variety of food than any 
of our present-day pigeons and doves. Feeding on the ground, a flock 
would extend over a wide front, moving rapidly forward, with one rear 
rank, and then another continually rising in the air and dropping down 
ahead so that, as the flock surged along with a rolling motion, the 
ground was swept bare of pigeon food.

Their migrations were not the regular seasonal flights of most birds 
but mass migrations in search of food. Audubon, the great naturalist, 
observed a flight over Louisville, Kentucky, in 1813, which darkened 
the sky as if by an eclipse of the sun and continued to pass over "in 
undiminished numbers" for three successive days. In 1832, another 
great ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, estimated that a single flock 
which roosted in Kentucky and fed in the beech forests of Indiana, 
contained at least 2,230,270,000 birds and possibly twice that many. 
Audubon measured one pigeon roost more than 40 miles long that 
averaged over 3 miles in width, where large branches and even big 
trees were broken down by the weight of the birds.

There were other gigantic flocks that nested in Arkansas, Missouri, 
Michigan, New York and other places. Wherever they were, wherever 
they went, the market hunters followed and slaughtered them. They 
were decoyed, trapped, netted, shot, clubbed, caught at night, and 
suffocated with sulfur fumes. The young -- the tender squabs -- were 
taken by millions and shipped to market or dried, smoked, or pickled 
for winter use. In the northern birch forests, the trees were set afire, 
causing the young birds to leap from the nests, to provide food for 
fattening droves of hogs.

The last great nesting in Michigan was at Petoskey in 1878. At least 
300 tons of birds were shipped to markets, and possibly a hundred 
million or more birds killed by the 5000 netters, hunters and laborers 
who made their living there that year. That was the beginning of the 
end. By 1890, only a few stray flocks remained, here and there in the 
Middle West and Southwest. In 1908, $1000 was offered for a pair of 
passenger pigeons because the only known survivors were about a 
dozen in the Cincinnati Zoo. On September 2, 1914, the last one died.

They are extinct -- gone where the dodo did.