Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Passenger Pigeon

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

In the early 19th century, the most abundant bird in North America, and perhaps the entire world, was the passenger pigeon. An estimated three billion of them would fly in flocks so large that they could blot out the sun.  However, within a century, the entire species had gone extinct.  It was one of the fastest and most disastrous turnarounds for any species in recorded history. Learn more about the passenger pigeon and how they went extinct on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early 19th century, the most abundant bird in North America, and perhaps the entire world, was the passenger pigeon. An estimated three billion of them would fly in flock so large that they could blot out the sun. However, within a century, the entire species had gone extinct. It was one of the fastest and most disastrous turnarounds for any species in recorded history. Learn more about the passenger pigeon and how they went extinct on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The scientific name for the bird known as the Passenger Pigeon is Ectapestays Migratorious. The term passenger comes from the French word passagee, which means passing by in reference to the bird's migratory habits. In a previous episode, I talked about the extinction of the dodo bird. The dodo was as unlike the passenger pigeon as a bird could be. For starters, the dodo was a flightless bird, which made them really easy to catch. But the biggest difference is that there were never many dodoes to begin with. The dodo was limited to the small island of Mauritius. The passenger pigeon, on the other hand, was extremely abundant and had a habitat that covered most of the eastern and central parts of North America.

The passenger pigeon was approximately the same size as a morning dove, but genetically closer to the North American pigeon. Male passenger pigeons were approximately 390 to 410 millimeters, or 15.4 to 16.1 inches in length, with females only slightly smaller. The biggest difference between male and females was color. Males had a bronze-colored neck and females were a duller brown color. However, these were not the distinguishing characteristics of the passenger pigeon. Anyone who ever encountered and wrote about the passenger pigeon always noted the same thing about them. They lived and traveled in massive flocks. Truly massive flocks.

It's entirely probable that they created the largest flocks of any species of bird in the world. Even if you discount the stories of how big the flocks were, they would still be be enormous. It's estimated that there may have been as many as three billion passenger pigeons in the 19th century, a full one-third of all of the birds in North America. One of the best descriptions of passenger pigeons was given by a man named Simon Pockegon, the chief of the Pockegon band of Potawatomi Indians. He wrote of an experience he had in Southern Michigan in May of 1850. Quote, one morning on leaving my wigwam, I was startled to hear a gurgling, rumbling sound as though an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advanced.

advancing through the deep forest towards me. As I listened more intently, I concluded that, instead of the trampling of horses, it was a distant thunder, and yet the morning was clear and calm and beautiful. Near and near came the strange commingling sounds of sleigh bells mixed with the rumbling of an approaching storm. While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving towards me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season. They passed like a cloud through the branches of the high trees, through the underbrush, and over the ground, apparently overturning every leaf. Statue like I stood, half-concealed by the cedar boughs. They fluttered all about me, lighting on my head and shoulders,

gently I caught two in my hand and carefully concealed them under my blanket." End quote. There were many other similar recollections of awesome displays of passenger pigeons. The noted ornithologist John James Audubon wrote in his book, Ornithological Biography, quote, The air was literally filled with pigeons. The light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse. Before sunset, I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensburg, 55 miles. The pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession. End quote. John Meir wrote in his personal memoir, the story of my boyhood and youth, quote, I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon

to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at the rate of 40 or 50 miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts, and rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses like high splashing spray." By all accounts, and there are many more of these, witnessing passenger pigeon flocks was one of the most incredible sights in nature. Because they were so abundant, they were a huge source of food. The native people who lived in North America regularly harvested them and would frequently move their camps to be closer to nesting areas. The way they usually hunted was by taking juvenile birds

from their nests at night. They took juveniles instead of adults, so they wouldn't move their nesting areas. The admonition against taking breeding adults was taken very seriously by many tribes to the point of making it a crime. Away from breeding areas, they would just use large nets, which could capture as many as 800 birds at once. There were reports of birds flying so low that they could be killed by just throwing sticks or stones at them. When European settlement, arrived, they too used passenger pigeons as a major source of food. Hunting usually consisted of nothing more than pointing a shotgun at a flock and pulling the trigger. There were so many birds that you wouldn't even need to aim. One hunter was reported to have killed 61 pigeons with a single

blast from a double-barreled shotgun. One technique they used to get pigeons to land was to tie one, usually blind, to a stool to call in other birds. And this is the origin of the term stool pigeon. Passenger pigeons were hunted in such quantities that they would be sent to large East Coast cities by the ton in railroad boxcars. The hunting of passenger pigeons eventually became commercialized. One hunter reported sending three million of them to major cities. When the town of Plattsburgh, New York was connected to the railroad in 1851, they shipped 1.8 million pigeons in a single year. There were so many pigeons that they were often captured and used for sporting competitions. They would often be kept inside a trap and then released for shooting contests.

And this is the origin of the term trap shooting. When live pigeons ceased being used, they were replaced with clay pigeons. As you can see, passenger pigeons were extremely abundant, so abundant that the idea that they could possibly go extinct seemed absurd to almost anyone living in 19th century North America. So what happened? If it was just a matter of hunting, the passenger pigeon probably wouldn't have gone extinct. The most prescient statement about the passenger pigeon was given by the French adventurer and author Benedict Henri Revoille. He noted as early as 1856, quote, Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or change their way of living, according to the rate at which North America is populated by the

European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent. And if the world does not end this before a century, I will wager that the amateur of ornithology will find no more wild pigeons except those in the Museum of Natural History." End quote. The biggest thing working against the passenger pigeon was actually deforestation. They would nest in deciduous forests in eastern and central North America. As settlers spread westward, the vast majority of that forest was converted to farmland. Passenger pigeons laid only one egg at a time. They would create large communal nesting areas, often hundreds of square miles in size. One such nesting site in Wisconsin was 2,200 square kilometers or 850 square miles in area and was estimated to have 150 million birds.

The passenger pigeon had very particular nesting requirements. When the large forest disappeared, they weren't able to reproduce. The decline in passenger pigeons became noticeable in the 1770s. However, there was no change in hunting. One of the last great nestings occurred in 1878 in Michigan, and at that site, hunters killed 50,000 pigeons a day for five months straight. The problem was that the hunting prevented the pigeons from nesting and finding new nesting sites. The 1880s and 1890s saw a rapid decrease in the population of the birds. Nesting areas were continually being converted into farmland, yet hunting never let up. Attempts were made to put restrictions on hunting or bans on passenger pigeon hunting outright,

but they either weren't passed or they were ignored. By the mid-1890s, there were very few passenger pigeons left. Many of the last wild passenger pigeons would often be found with doves and other pigeons. Despite almost complete disappearance, they continued to be hunted. The last wild nest and egg were found in 1895 just outside of Minneapolis. The last wild passenger pigeons were shot and mounted in 2001 in Illinois, in 1902 in Indiana. The 1901 pigeon is still. located at Milliken University. Some passenger pigeons were kept in zoos. One of the largest

populations of passenger pigeons was kept at the Cincinnati Zoo. By 1909, one female and two males at the Cincinnati Zoo were the last passenger pigeons in the world. The female named Martha, the very last passenger pigeon on Earth, died on September 1st, 1914. Martha was mounted by taxidermist and is now on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Unlike many other extinct species, we actually have many samples of genetic material from passenger pigeons. There are over 1,500 examples in existence. Genetic analysis of the diversity in the genes in the samples which are remaining indicates that the passenger pigeon might not have normally had such large populations that were found in the 19th century. One theory holds that the

passenger pigeon may have been what is known as an outbreak species. An outbreak species is one that has massive swings in population size, like a plague of locust. According to this theory, passenger pigeons didn't always have such large numbers as they couldn't support those sort of numbers permanently. They would be too destructive to forests. The large numbers of passenger pigeons in the 19th century may have been for the same reason why there were so many bison. There was a large die-off of native people in the centuries prior due to disease, which resulted in higher than normal populations of some species. So, as Europeans began to settle and move west, they encountered the pigeon population at its peak. When the population began to naturally decline, it was exacerbated

by hunting and loss of habitat, which drove the population into the ground, causing its extinction. There is one final thing I should address about the passenger pigeon, and that is its future. You might not think that an extinct species has a future, but because the passenger pigeon only went extinct about 100 years ago, and because we have a reasonable amount of DNA, some people think it's possible that in the near future we can bring the species back. This is assuming that the passenger pigeon could reproduce with small numbers, which didn't appear to be the case in the late 19th century, and the pigeons at the Cincinnati Zoo never reproduced in captivity. Even if the reproduction issue could be solved, it isn't known if the habitat which exists today would be

sufficient for a population to thrive. If there was anything good to come out of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, it was a greater awareness of how humans affected the natural world and increased efforts to protect endangered species. The loss of the passenger pigeon was best expressed by the naturalist Aldo Leopold. In 1947, he spoke at the unveiling of a memorial in Wisconsin at what was once one of the largest passenger pigeon nesting areas. He said, quote, men still live who in their youth remember pigeons. Trees still live who in their youth were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence, only the oldest oaks will remember.

And at long last, only the hills will know. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener, The One and Only Smarty Pants from Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, my favorite. I love this podcast. much. It's very informational and helpful. Topics that I previously thought

uninteresting are now the things I love the most. My favorite. Ellison, age nine, New Jersey. Thanks, Ellison. I'm really glad to hear that you're enjoying the show. And if you enjoy the show at the age of nine, you are already way ahead of the curve. And also, in my capacity as headmaster, I would like to welcome you to the Everything Everywhere Academy for Curious Youth. The Academy is one of the elite and most prestigious online podcast academies in the world. And And the best part is classes are only 15 minutes a day, and there's plenty of time for recess. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.