P r e fa c e

M
y first recollection of reading about the extinct passenger pigeon
was when I was in fourth grade at College Hill Elementary School
in Skokie, Illinois. I checked out T. Gilbert Pearson’s Birds of
America and became so mesmerized I studied it relentlessly until the two-
week period elapsed, after which I renewed it three consecutive times. Even-
tually, Mrs. Kelly, the librarian, encouraged me to sample other works that
might interest me, including the Newbery Medal winner Gay-Neck: The
Story of a Pigeon, about an individual Columba livia that flew messages on
behalf of Allied troops in World War I. Although the story of the passenger
pigeon crossed my consciousness while absorbing Edward Howe Forbush’s
account in Pearson, it became firmly lodged there in 1966 when I started
birding as a twelve-year-old.
A year or two later my supportive parents responded to my request by
giving me a hard-cover edition of A. W. Schorger’s authoritative The Passen-
ger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction. Schorger was one of the coun-
try’s premier historians of natural history. He spent forty years collecting
thousands of sources related to passenger pigeons, starting his research at a
period early enough when it was still possible to interview people who had
known the living bird.
The pigeons not only affected the ecosystems of which they were un-
doubtedly a keystone species, but also the consciousness of the people who
saw them. Accounts survive attesting to the presence of the pigeon hordes
over every major city of Canada and the United States, from the Atlantic
coast to the Missouri River. They were part of the cultural and economic
development of these two nations. As passenger pigeon historian John French
xii Preface

wrote, they were martyrs to our progress. So this really is a story of people as
much as birds.
Indeed, the interaction between these two species is yet another element
that makes the story of the passenger pigeon unlike any other. As late as
1860, one flight near Toronto likely exceeded one billion birds and maybe
three billion. Forty years later the species was almost extinct, and by late af-
ternoon on September 1, 1914, it was completely extinct when Martha, the
last of her species, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Human beings destroyed
passenger pigeons almost every time they encountered them, and they used
every imaginable device in the process. Unrelenting carnage reduced the
population to the point where it began its inexorable spiral to obliteration.
Whether a concerted effort could have reversed the decline and altered the
outcome was a question asked far too late for any attempt to have even
been tried.
I think that if an attempt had been mounted early enough to gather a
sufficiently large and diverse group of breeding stock, they could almost cer-
tainly have survived, even if gone from the wild, because the bird bred readily
in captivity. If a wild reproducing population had somehow survived a few
more decades, it could have been protected by the strict conservation mea-
sures enacted in the 1930s— and based on scientific management, the species
might still be with us, albeit in numbers much lower than billions. Modern
Americans and Canadians coexist with cranes, waterfowl, and blackbirds
that move across the landscape in flocks of many thousands or even millions,
so why not passenger pigeons?
It is unusual when the exact date of an extinction is known with a
strong degree of certainty. That the hundredth anniversary of Martha’s death
was fast approaching provided an impetus in my wanting to mark this event.
It led to the writing of this book and a broader hope that this centenary could
be a vehicle for informing the public about the bird and the importance that
its story has to current conservation issues. In my research, I learned that
others had the same idea, particularly ornithologist and pigeon scholar David
Blockstein. We talked and began reaching out to other people and institutions.
Among the first organizations I contacted were the Ohio Historical Society
(which has on display the stuffed Buttons, one of the last known wild pas-
senger pigeons), the Cincinnati Zoo (where Martha lived most of her life
and died), and the Chicago Academy of Science’s Peggy Notebaert Nature
Museum. This eventually led to a series of conference calls involving an ever-
expanding group of participants, and then Notebaert graciously hosted a
meeting in February 2011 that drew about twenty organizations from across
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the eastern half of the country. Several others participated via conference call-
ing. Project Passenger Pigeon emerged from that gathering, and as of Septem-
ber 2012, over 150 institutions were involved. Our goal is to use the centenary
as a teaching moment to inform people about the passenger pigeon story and
then to use that story as a portal into consideration of current issues related
to extinction, sustainability, and the relationship between people and nature.
It is hoped that this tragic extinction continues to engage people and to act as
a cautionary tale so that it is not repeated.