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Tuesday, March 28 Local

Man's slaughter of passenger pigeons a warning call for today

Demise of passenger pigeons a warning call for today

In his memoir, "Recollections of a Lifetime," writer Samuel Griswold Goodwin remembers growing up in Ridgefield in the early 1800s.

One of the highlights, he wrote, was seeing huge flocks of passenger pigeons move through town in the fall.

What the famed ornithologists Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon had seen in Ohio and Kentucky was true as well for Connecticut, he wrote.

"I have seen a stream of these noble birds, pouring at brief intervals through the skies, from the rising to the setting sun, and this in the county of Fairfield. I may here add, that of all the pigeon tribe, this of our country -- the passenger pigeon -- is the swiftest and most beautiful of a swift and beautiful generation."

By the end of that century, however, those overwhelming, beautiful flocks were gone. The last passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914 -- exactly 100 years ago.

What happened is a tragedy -- the story of a thoughtless slaughter of a bird that was most plentiful in North America.

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Passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)
About 15 to 16 inches long, with the females smaller than the males
Weighed between 9 and 12 ounces
Larger than the mourning dove
Had a brick-red breast with a blue-gray back; females were less colorful than the males.
They were migratory birds that circled the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, looking for food, hence their name "passengers.'' They ate nuts -- especially acorns and beech nuts -- as well as fruit, grain and insects.
They were extremely swift and agile fliers.
Until the mid-1800s, there were more passenger pigeons in North America than any other species any other animal or bird, with their numbers reaching into the billions. They may have been the single-most plentiful bird species in the world at that time.
They were hunted to extinction for food and sport in the mid-to-late 19th century.
The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914, 100 years ago.

"We unrelentingly and systematically destroyed them," said naturalist and author Joel Greenberg, whose new book, "A Feathered River Across the Sky," tells the story of the passenger pigeon in North America.

But it is also a story of renewal. The end of the passenger pigeon was a goad that helped create the American conservation movement.

"The Endangered Species Act has saved over 100 species," Greenberg said in a recent lecture in New Haven sponsored by the Connecticut Audubon Society and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The fate of the passenger pigeons is also a bit of a cautionary tale -- proof that people need to pay attention and not take the natural world for granted, Greenberg said.

They blocked the sun

Through his research, Greenberg was able to portray the almost unimaginable spectacle that was the passenger pigeon in its prime.

The birds thrived in the great Eastern forests of the U.S., feeding on nuts in the woods. Unless they were nesting, they were on the move, looking for food -- hence the name "passenger."

Their significant number -- as many as 3 billion -- provided them a buffer against predators. And because of the vast forest that covered the eastern half of North America and the nuts they produced, the birds thrived.

"It was a testament to how incredibly rich the landscape was," Greenberg said.

They were beautiful birds, with brick-red breasts and iridescent blue-gray backs. While distant cousins to the pigeons we see today, the mourning dove and the rock dove -- city pigeons -- Greenberg said passenger pigeons were more beautiful and far more numerous.

"It was unlike any other bird that has ever lived here," he said.

Humans had always hunted passenger pigeons. Native Americans depended on them for food -- the Seneca word for passenger pigeons, "jah'gowa," meant "big bread."

But in the mid-1800s, the killing became organized. Railroads could ship pigeons to market, Greenberg said, and the telegraph could alert people to where the flocks were showing up.

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Along with local hunters, there were professionals who followed the flocks, shooting them wherever they were.

The pigeons were killed for food. They were shot by the hundreds of thousands as sport -- instead of clay pigeons, there were contests for marksmanship that involved shooting passenger pigeons. Farmers fed passenger pigeons to their pigs.

"They were used as fertilizer," Greenberg said.

The pigeon's decline also is tied, in part, to the loss of forest and wetlands to farming in the 19th century. It was also a species not big on reproducing -- females laid only one egg a year.

The species began to peter out in the last decades of the 19th century. "Birds of Connecticut" tells how in 1880 G.L. Hamlin saw a flock of 500 birds near his home in Bethel, in a buckwheat field. By the 1890s, it was down to seven birds, then a single bird.

The last definitive sighting in Connecticut may have been in 1901. A bird shot in Bridgeport in 1906 is also a contender.

But as Greenberg pointed out, as the flocks began to disappear, hunters, rather than holding back, became determined to bag their last bird.

In 1876, when a flock of 100,000 birds nested near Groton -- the last recorded big flock in the state -- hunters hurried out with any firearm available and killed thousands of them.

The very last passenger pigeons, named George and Martha, lived in the Cincinnati zoo. When George died in 1900, the zoo threw him away. Martha died Sept. 1, 1914. Stuffed, she has achieved a sort of immortality at the Smithsonian Institution -- the most famous dead bird in the world.

A new era of extinction

Because the discipline of ecology didn't exist in the U.S. in the 19th century, no one studied the impact of the birds on the environment or the impact of their leaving, he said.

But when people did accept it, the extinction of the passenger pigeon became one of the reasons the U.S. began to want to conserve, rather than destroy, nature. The hard lesson had been learned.

The Supreme Court in 1896 upheld Connecticut's ban on killing non-game birds and on exporting game birds to other states.

In 1918, Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to protect migrating species. The environmental laws of the 1970s -- the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act -- have all proved crucial in helping threatened birds and animals stay alive, Greenberg said.

Today, because of climate change, habitat loss and the ease in which disease can travel around the globe, we may be entering a new era of extinction.

Connecticut is seeing bats die off at an alarming rate because of a fungal disease given the common name of white-nosed syndrome.

Jenny Dickson, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said one species that was common in the state, the northern big-eared bat, is now probably gone from Connecticut. Two other species, the little brown bat and the tricolor bat, are disappearing quickly.

In the midst of such problems, Greenberg said, there are politicians who want to weaken, if not dismember, legislation like the Endangered Species Act. People moved by the loss of the passenger pigeon still have fronts to fight on. "These laws have to remain strong," he said.

bmiller@newstimes.com; 203-731-3345