Wilson's Snipe
by John Crawley

by Nichole Telford

What do dinosaurs, dodos, and passenger pigeons have in common? They are all now extinct, never to live again. The passenger pigeon is a bird that was driven to extinction in the 1900s. Consequently, I have never seen it, but I have read sources written by those who had. Charles Whitman, a keeper of captive passenger pigeons, described them as being actors. They would readily attack birds that tried to steal their nests, but if they fought back the pigeons would shy away, even if the bird was half their size. Audubon saw the passenger pigeons when they passed him in a large flock that lasted for three days. Richard Fluke was a friend of Martha, the last passenger pigeon. He was also probably one of the last people alive who saw passenger pigeons. The passenger pigeon was killed by humans hunting them too much.
  The passenger pigeon sort of looked like a large mourning dove in shape. Males had blueish heads and red breasts. Females were gray all over. Squabs, passenger pigeon babies, were fat from feeding off of pigeon milk, produced by both the mother and

the father. Squabs would be so fat that if they fell out of their nests (which were just masses of twigs and sticks) they would just sit on the ground and their parents would have to feed them there. Squabs, males, and females were all good to eat, so they were hunted by Indians and white men.
    Above it is mentioned that humans hunted passenger pigeons to extinction. Now, understand that passenger pigeons were by no means rare. In fact, they probably had the biggest population of birds in North America, around 5 billion birds. Now, passenger pigeons went from 5 billion to none in about 50 years, so it was a big deal. Indians hunted passenger pigeons before European settlers arrived, but it was just like the herds of bison in the plains. Indians hunted them, but wouldn’t have ever hunted them so much they could be close to extinction. Passenger pigeons were tasty and populous. That combination made them sought after and easy to kill. I found recipes that called for six pigeons. That means six or more being killed every day when they felt like having pigeon for dinner.
    There were even competitions with prizes to see how many passenger pigeons you could kill. Many people got dozens of pigeons, and others got around 50. Add that up and you get hundreds of pigeons killed for the sake of sport. I don’t know how often these contests were held, but I would imagine that at least a couple thousand pigeons were killed each year just from these contests. Of course, several more thousands of pigeons taken away for food, and many more were shipped across railroads to different states. Some numbers I got from a book by Clive Ponting are, “During 1874 Oceana County in Michigan sent over 1,000,000 birds to the markets in the east and two years later was sending 400,000 a week at the height of the season and a total of 1,600,000 in the year.” 1.5 million birds from one county in Michigan, just one. No wonder this species went extinct.
    In 1900, hunting was no longer profitable. There weren’t enough passenger pigeons to bother with, as flocks had gone from millions to only a few dozen. Many people, realizing the scarcity of the birds, tried keeping captive flocks. Those small flocks died out from avian tuberculosis and other things. But Charles Whitman had sent one small female to the Cincinnati Zoo. That female’s name was Martha. She sat on a perch for people to stare at her, throw sand at her in hopes of making her fly. Her passenger pigeon companions, including a male named George, died, leaving her all alone. Martha lived for a long time, trembling with palsy, never laying a fertile egg, until September 1st, 1914. No one knows exactly how she died, but they found her on the floor of her cage, still and silent. The passenger pigeon would never fly again.
Only one good thing comes from this, and that is the laws passed because of their extinction. First, the Lacey Act. It protects endemic birds and wildlife, creating punishments for killing like the sort the passenger pigeons faced. From the Lacey Act there came the Bird Migratory Species Act. This law protects migratory species’ plumage, their nests, and them in general. Finally, people were just more aware of the harm they could do to the environment. It is because of that awareness that the California Condor for example, is alive today. When people realized they were dying off from lead poisoning, they actively did something about it, raising the population to a better number. We ourselves can learn from the passenger pigeon too. The passenger pigeon is gone, and it will never come back (unless we find a way to do genetic engineering like in Jurassic Park). However, we can protect the bird species we know in order to stop a tragedy like the passenger pigeon’s extinction from ever happening again.

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