The Passenger Pigeon
From billions to none within a single lifetime.
- EXISTED
- Until 1914
- WHERE
- North America
- LOST
- 1 September 1914
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Industrial-scale hunting and the felling of its nesting forests
The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet, perhaps three to five billion of them in North America. Migrating flocks took days to pass overhead and darkened the sky from horizon to horizon; their roosts broke the limbs of trees under sheer weight of number. It seemed inconceivable that they could ever be diminished, let alone ended.
Commercial hunting on an industrial scale, shipped by the railcar-load to city markets, together with the clearing of the great nesting forests, brought them down with astonishing speed. The species that had numbered in the billions was, within a few decades, reduced to one captive bird named Martha. When she died in 1914, an entire river of life that had flowed for millennia simply stopped.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo at about 1 p.m. on 1 September 1914, roughly twenty-nine years old. She had never been alone in the wild; she died having outlived her entire species.