Updated, 8:15 p.m. | As you may have noted, this is the centennial of the extinction, on Sept. 1, 1914, of the passenger pigeon, which once darkened skies in flocks of a billion or more birds. First, here’s a look back at one of the odder ramifications in 1937 — a market in rare passenger pigeon eggs:
The Library of Congress:
Passenger pigeon eggs at $300 a piece. Washington, D.C., Dec. 1. Since the last passenger pigeon in existence died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, the eggs from the now extinct birds have become so scarce that G. Ellis Miller, of this city, is asking $300 a piece for the three perfect ones in his possession–with no takers. The eggs were left to Miller by his grandfather from a collection made 75 years ago — when the birds flew in flocks that darkened the sun and broke branches off trees when they roosted en masse. Marjorie Beall, biology student at George Washington University, is shown studying the eggs, which are kept in a display with carved birds and other eggs. 12/1/37
But I want to focus attention on a point made in a fascinating Carl Zimmer essay in National Geographic — on the role of 19th century social networks (the telegraph) and railroads in facilitating mass slaughter:
“The telegraph allowed word to go out: ‘The pigeons are here,’” says David Blockstein, a senior scientist at the National Council for Science and the Environment and a founder of Project Passenger Pigeon. Thousands of hunters would then jump on newly built trains to ride out to wherever the pigeons had settled and start slaughtering them.
The hunters weren’t just killing the birds to feed their families, however. Pigeons would be stuffed into barrels and loaded back onto the trains, which would deliver them to distant cities, where they’d be sold everywhere from open air markets to fine restaurants. “Technology enabled the market,” says Blockstein.
These days, global social networks — a keystone of the expanding Knowosphere — may do more to forestall future extinctions than accelerate them. Two cases in point are the online push against consumption of shark fins and elephant ivory by WildAid and allies like the basketball star Yao Ming.
Another is Greenpeace’s clever use of YouTube campaigns focused on orangutans and popular chocolate bars to press companies like Nestle to pay attention to the source of palm oil.
Time will tell.
Addenda | In an email discussion I initiated with some conservationists and journalists, my friend Keith Kloor noted that eBay abetted the sales of endangered species and related contraband before conservation groups and journalists (including Kloor) exposed what was going on. Here’s eBay’s policy now.
The writer and conservationist Carl Safina added this thought in the same chat:
In my view, human psychology wiped out the passenger pigeon, the same mind that went to work on bison, the prairie, cod, forests, and bluefin tuna. This is from my first book:
In July 1991, Massachusetts Congressman Gerry Studds had declared, “We cannot stand by and watch cod and flounder and haddock—the bread and butter species of Georges Bank—become the nautical equivalents of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.” … In the late 1800s, millions of passenger pigeons were caught commercially in nets for human consumption each year. … By 1889, an American scientific journal carried an article by ornithologist William Brewster, who …noted that the last major nesting colony in Michigan, in 1881, “was only… eight miles long.” He reported that, “All the netters with whom we talked believe firmly that there are just as many Pigeons in the West as there ever were… The theory is that the birds are so infinitely numerous that their ranks are not seriously thinned by catching a few million breeding birds in a summer… The netters, many of whom strike me as intelligent and honest men, seem really to believe this. As they have local influence, and the powerful backing of dealers in the cities, it is not likely that any really effectual laws can be passed until the last of our Passenger Pigeons are preparing to follow the Great Auk and American Bison.” …That is human nature, regardless of what kind of animals are involved. But the passenger pigeon’s sad story, and the human capacity for denial, should be kept in mind.
My upcoming book concludes that one of the things that makes us human is a unique capacity for denial.