The Man-Made Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon

In windy weather the passenger pigeons flew as low as 3.3ft. When it was calm, they soared as high as 1400ft. They reached speeds of 62mph.

Their droppings fell like snow. It piled up to a foot deep beneath their temporary roosts, deeper still where they congregated at nesting sites. But as they flew in those great migratory mega-flocks, all below rushed to take shelter or accept that they risked being covered.

Colossal columns of passenger pigeons stretched a mile wide, undulating, twisting, forming every conceivable shape in the air. Their numbers were so great that they blocked out the sun, causing darkness underneath.

Wilson was able to count enough of a sample to estimate the volume of the whole flock. He arrived at a figure of 2,230,272,000, but warned that it was a conservative number. He thought that there were many more than that.

One flock spotted in Ontario, in 1866, contained an estimated 3.5 billion passenger pigeons. If all the birds in the USA and Canada were counted together now, it still wouldn't beat the number of that species at the height of its population.

Yet forty-two years after that Ontario flock was sighted, the last wild passenger pigeon was shot by a man in Michigan, and stuffed for display.

The passenger pigeon had been hunted as food for as long as there were human beings in North America. Several First Native tribes fixed laws around when and where it was permissible to kill one. Nest sites were largely taboo, except where the juveniles flew away. Adult passenger pigeons could not be scared away from their traditional roosts.

In this way, the flocks were allowed to grow vast enough that the tribes thought they'd last forever.

Early European colonists weren't quite so careful in their husbandry of wildlife. Even so, they neither had the numbers nor the musket shot to cause too much damage directly. But indirectly was a different matter.

Pioneers crossing the country, and settlers founding their towns and cities, chopped down forests at an alarming rate. Wood was the primary building material. Anything else had to be shipped in from England at greatly inflated costs. North America swiftly switched from a largely forested continent to mostly plains.

By the nineteenth century, this had already had a detrimental effect on the passenger pigeons, who needed trees in order to roost and nest. But not so that anyone on the ground would notice. Those mega-flocks still ran into the billions.

The tipping point came around the middle of the century, when the populations of the big cities - like New York City - suddenly swelled due to boosted tides of immigration. This was the period when the coffin ships were bringing millions of starving Irish for a start.

Cheap food was needed quickly and in abundance, and passenger pigeons certainly fit the bill. It's commonly reported that a single arrow or musket ball, shot into a flock flying overhead, could bring down six birds. Once chain shot or tunnel nets were applied, then the bounty was much, much more.

People could get rich this way.  Passenger pigeons sold for between 12 and 50 cents a dozen - depending upon whether they were alive or dead (for freshness) - in the markets and eateries of NYC. A skilled netter could capture thirty dozen birds with one sweep.

In 1869, hunters from Hartford, Michigan, shipped a total of 11,880,000 passenger pigeons, over the course of just forty days. Those from a neighboring town weren't quite so proficient. They netted a mere 15,840,000 birds over two years.

It puts much into perspective, when you consider that the first lot stood to gain a potential $495,000 profit for just over a month's work.

It certainly explains why, in 1848, the state of Massachusetts made it a criminal offense to sabotage the hunt by frightening away the birds, or tamper with the nets of passenger pigeon hunters. The penalty was a $10 fine, at a time when the average wage was $7 a month (unless, of course, you hunted passenger pigeons).

"The passenger pigeon needs no protection." The Select Committee report read. "Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced."

Ten years later, the state of New York suddenly panicked and passed a law protecting the passenger pigeon within its borders. Until very recently, the region had regularly been visited by those mega-flocks, now they had become quite rare.

It was way too late for that piece of legislation. That entered the statute books in 1867, but by 1868, no wild passenger pigeons were to be found anywhere in the state.

By the latter part of the 19th century, it wasn't just entrepreneurs seeking to shoot these increasingly endangered birds. Hunting for sport had never really factored until now, but it emerged as the favorite pursuit of a growing 3% of the country.

These were people rich enough never to have had to hunt for food in their lives, and who could also afford musket shot and bullets to waste. The name of the game was to kill as many creatures as possible, then to either prepare the remains for display or leave them to rot.

They were also rich enough to lobby politicians, whenever laws were proposed to interfere with their sport. When Massachusetts rushed to pass legislation, in 1870, to stop the killing of passenger pigeons, lobbyists for the sportsman hunters forced a concession. There would be an 'open season' each year, when the birds were fair game.

The lobbyists were even more successful in Pennsylvania in 1878. There only the nesting sites were protected by law.

What nobody yet realized was that it was already too late. The passenger pigeon population had now dwindled beyond the point of no return. The birds wouldn't breed unless they were in colonies numbering in the thousands, and the mega-flocks were no more.

Protests were soon heard throughout Louisiana. Their passenger pigeon population decreased at an alarming rate, and the proceeds weren't even staying in the state. The hunting trip organizers were all from the north, as were the owners of the hostelries.

Soon it was a moot point. Louisiana had lost its allure along with its game. It wasn't worth a sportsman's time to travel there.

As for the rest of the USA, those tiny flocks had also diminished. Canada had long since stopped seeing passenger pigeons, and now they were rare south of the border too.

For a while, it was believed that a young Ohio boy named Press Clay Southworth had shot and killed the last wild passenger pigeon on March 22nd 1900. But then another was spotted by a Michigan huntsman in 1908. C. Campion immediately shot his bird and took his prize to the taxidermist.

Massive cash rewards were publicized, offered by conservationists and sportsmen alike, for any news of the bird anywhere in the country. Experts became tired of traipsing halfway across the country to look at yet another misidentified mourning dove.

No more reliable sightings were ever made in the wild.

The prices for eggs and display cases of stuffed passenger pigeons sky-rocketed. Collectors now realized the value of holding a souvenir of the soon-to-be-extinct bird. Yet there was still one last salvo to save them.