Within four centuries of North American civilization (or modified barbarism) we can be credited with the wiping into the past of at least three species of animal life originally so phenomenally abundant and so strikingly characteristic in themselves as to evoke the wonders and amazement of the entire world.
—GEORGE ATKINSON, “A REVIEW-HISTORY OF THE
PASSENGER PIGEON IN MANITOBA,” 1905
John Josselyn visited New England twice, the second time staying from 1663 to 1671. After describing the abundance of passenger pigeons (quoted in chapter 3), he is the first author who notes a decline in the bird’s population: “But of late they are much diminished, the English taking them with Nets.” A few other seventeenth-and eighteenth-century authors, including Kalm and Mather, collected similar sentiments. Kalm’s informants thought the pigeon decline was due to a growing human population, the felling of timber, and increasing competition with swine for mast. These passages are significant not because they reflect an actual depletion in pigeon numbers on a range-wide scale, but because they are the first statements suggesting the possibility that the species could be vulnerable as a consequence of human behavior.
John Audubon seems to be the first to address the impacts that mass slaughter might have on the species’ long-term prospects, and for that he deserves accolades even if he got it wrong. After describing the carnage at one huge roost, he tackles the obvious question: “Persons unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that such dreadful havoc would soon put an end to the species. But I have satisfied myself, by long observation, that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease, as they not infrequently quadruple their numbers yearly, and always at least double it.” But in reaching this conclusion, he presumed incorrectly that the birds lay two eggs per nest and that they regularly nest multiple times a year.
As is so often the case, it took a foreigner to glimpse the truth. The de Tocqueville of passenger pigeons was the French writer Benedict Henry Revoil, who traveled through the United States in the 1840s. After having witnessed butchery at a pigeon roost at Hartford, Kentucky, in the fall of 1847, he demonstrated singular perspicacity in his astonishing prediction: “Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or to change their manners of living according to the rate in which the territory of North America will be populated more and more by the European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent, and, if the world does not end this before a century, I will wager with the first hunter coming that the amateur of ornithology will find no more wild pigeons, except those in the Museums of Natural History.” Events would show him to have been overly optimistic by about fifty years.
As the decades of the nineteenth century reached their final two or three, the occasional public statement would be made admonishing those engaged in the killing. The Mauston (Wisconsin) Star printed this dispatch from its New Lisbon correspondent in May 25, 1882: “Some of our prominent businessmen are busily engaged … in destroying thousands of poor little helpless young pigeons not yet with feathers, and encouraging others in the wholesale murder, and all from a greedy desire to catch a few squabs to ship and sell for thirty cents per dozen. Money! Fie upon you for shame.” The American Field published a plea on behalf of the species the very next month: “But this fact is patent and admits of no argument to the contrary: that unless the trapping and shooting of the wild pigeon is stopped during the period the birds are nesting, extermination must necessarily follow, and rapidly.” To protect one nesting in Wisconsin, a petition was drawn up and signed by various citizens requesting that the governor send out the state militia to prevent further hunting. J. B. Oviatt, the Pennsylvania pigeoner, said of his fellow netters, “If they knew that the pigeon were decreasing, they didn’t want it known. For years I said the pigeons were decreasing, and they [most netters] were afraid a law would be passed, which there should have been” (Scherer 42).
In fact, laws relating to passenger pigeons were on the books, many of which stayed in effect long after the birds were gone. In 1848, Massachusetts became the first state to enact legislation dealing specifically with passenger pigeons. Rising up to quell a grave injustice, the legislature passed a law to protect netters. Should any miscreant impede the activities of this class of worker by firing guns or otherwise scaring off pigeons, he would be subject to a fine, damages, or punishment as a trespasser.
Vermont’s statute three years later actually aimed to provide some protection to the bird, albeit not much. The pigeon was considered a nongame species, and thus the citizenry was prohibited from destroying eggs or nests. A violation could bring a fine of a dollar, but apparently the law was rarely enforced (Young 248).
The Ohio Senate looked at the need to protect passenger pigeons and issued findings that are widely quoted in the passenger pigeon literature. The 1857 report is ranked by the Ohio Historical Society as the fifth most embarrassing moment in the state’s history, behind such events as the burning of the Cuyahoga River and the discovery in 1953 that Congress had never formally adopted a resolution admitting the state to the union. The legislative committee wrote, “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, travelling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here to-day, and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”
Canada’s restrictions on the exploitation of passenger pigeons lagged behind those of the states. Under its Small Bird Act of 1887, Ontario specifically excluded the pigeon as being among the birds that could no longer “be at any time killed or molested.” A revision of the statute ten years later seems to have finally granted the protection that might have helped if there had been any birds left to protect. Game laws enacted in Quebec in 1899 and Manitoba in 1891 failed to provide the species any relief. The bird’s extinction saved lawmakers the trouble of having to pass any protective measures (Mitchell 147).
Most of the laws that were eventually put in place in the United States modeled themselves after the one passed in New York in 1861. No disturbances were allowed at the actual nesting sites, and there could be no gunfire within a mile. The distances varied between states. Pennsylvania would also require that out-of-state pigeoners buy a county license for $50 to ply their trade, but apparently no one was ever prosecuted under the law. Massachusetts in 1888 did pass a potentially effective law when it banned pigeon hunting from May to October, when what few pigeons still existed were most likely to be in the state.
Michigan was the only jurisdiction to eventually ban all killing of passenger pigeons. As mentioned earlier, this occurred in 1897, just a year before the last pigeons were to be recorded from the state. But Michigan’s first law affecting pigeons was in 1869. Under this statute, they were considered neither songbirds nor game birds and warranted their own separate section. A distinction was made between places where the birds nested and where they roosted. At nesting places, it was illegal to shoot pigeons within one half mile, but at roosts the shooting ban applied only to the actual site. Nothing restricted where or when netting could occur. Six years later the law was amended to provide a tiny bit more protection: the distance from a nesting where one could now lawfully shoot pigeons was extended to a mile. There was also a purported limitation on netting that read, “No person … shall, with trap, snare, or net, or other manner, take or attempt to take, or kill or destroy, or attempt to destroy, any wild pigeon, at or within two miles of such nesting place at any time from the beginning of the nesting until after the last hatching of such nesting.” Note the final eight words: once the last eggs hatched, market hunters could have free rein. Protection adhered to the netters rather than the pigeons. And so the law stood until its revision in 1897, when for the first and only time in U.S. history a state granted passenger pigeons complete protection. That the provision called for the reinstatement of regulated hunting for the species in 1907 was really moot even at the time of its enactment. (Full citations are in the bibliography.)
Claims of cloning have been made for a frog, carp, and maybe twenty species of mammals. In many cases, the “successful” clone lived but a short time due to defects that are almost inevitable when shortcutting the intricate steps that have developed over millions of years of evolution. No bird has ever been cloned, not even those that are economically important, although poultry have been genetically manipulated.
All successful clones have been from tissues taken from living or freshly killed animals. The freezing and thawing of such tissues damages cells and destroys their suitability for cloning unless specific cryoprotectants are used. Still, the prospect of bringing back to life an extinct bird and releasing it into the wild is exciting enough for scientists and others to give it serious consideration. The Long Now Foundation hosted a meeting at the Harvard Medical School to discuss that possibility in January 2012. Of various theoretical approaches, the one with the most promise involved the extraction of DNA from passenger pigeons and using that to create passenger pigeon traits in a band-tailed pigeon. A host of challenges were identified, such as:
1. At what point, if ever, does a genetically altered band-tailed pigeon become a passenger pigeon?
2. If a handful of passenger pigeons could be created for life in a zoo, is that even worth doing?
3. Are vast flocks an essential attribute of passenger pigeons?
Even if all the scientific problems inherent in producing live passenger pigeons could be mastered, a host of political and other challenges of perhaps even greater difficulty would remain in creating wild, reproducing populations of the species. As of June 2013, additional discussions are being held and genetic research is moving forward.
(Based on my attendance at the meeting referred to, as well as additional information provided by Jennifer Schmidt, associate professor of biological sciences, University of Illinois–Chicago, and Ben Novak, lead researcher for de-extinction with the Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore Project.)
Paul Hahn (1875–1962) first learned of the passenger pigeon through an article he read when he was twelve years old and living in Württemberg, Germany. He saw his first mounted passenger pigeon in 1902, four years after he and his family had immigrated to Ontario. The sight had a profound impact on him: “I was struck by its beauty and saddened by the knowledge that no one would ever again see the magnificent flocks which once darkened the sky.”
As a personal memorial to the species, Hahn devoted himself to combing attics, bars, cellars, and every other kind of human habitation to collect passenger pigeons. From 1918 to 1960 he acquired seventy specimens, all of which he conveyed to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Largely through his efforts, as well as those of James Fleming and others, the museum has 152 passenger pigeons (including ten egg sets), more than any other institution in the world.
This is known with certainty because of Hahn’s other great work. In 1957 he became curious as to how many passenger pigeon specimens were known to exist, and he attempted to find out. At the suggestion of James Baillie at ROM, Hahn also included in his search comparable information on the great auk, Carolina parakeet, Eskimo curlew, Labrador duck, ivory-billed woodpecker, and whooping crane. Over five years he contacted collections all over the world, receiving responses from over a thousand. His final tally of passenger pigeons came to 16 skeletons and 1,532 skins and mounts. The work was published in 1963 as Where Is That Vanished Bird? Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of these specimens are in the United States and Canada. Based on my knowledge, which is certainly incomplete, there are specimens in every province except Newfoundland/Labrador (and none in the three territories) and every state but Georgia (had one but it was lost when Science Hall at the University of Georgia was destroyed in a fire), Hawaii, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma (Schorger includes a photo of a lovely male from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, but it is no longer there), Virginia, and Wyoming. It seems likely that collections within at least some of these states have passenger pigeon specimens. If you know of any, please contact the Project Passenger Pigeon website or the author in care of the publisher.
Almost all of the European countries have at least one. Other totals—Mexico: four birds in two museums; Australia: three birds in two museums; Japan: two birds; New Zealand: four birds in two museums; Guyana: one bird; and Sarawak, Malaysia: one bird. This last location stands out like a severe case of rhinophyma: How did a passenger pigeon get to Borneo? After a couple of letters to the Sarawak Museum failed to elicit any response, I contacted Frederick Sheldon of Louisiana State University, who conducts much of his research on Borneo. On his next visit, he met with the appropriate people in Sarawak and determined that, alas, no passenger pigeon was in the collection, nor any record of there ever having been one. But since Hahn received the information from the longtime director (now deceased), a passenger pigeon did undoubtedly once grace the collection. One can only imagine what happened to it.
George Lowery was a nationally prominent ornithologist who taught at Louisiana State University for many years. He was also a good friend of Schorger’s, and they corresponded frequently. In May 1960, Lowery had just returned from New Zealand, where he was hosted most generously by a local ornithologist. They agreed to trade specimens, but the New Zealander badly wanted a passenger pigeon for his university’s collection. Lowery sought Schorger’s advice: “I now have a corner on the world’s market of Whooping Crane eggs, thanks to the apparent infertility of good ole Crip and egg laying propensities of Josephine in the Audubon Park in New Orleans. Do you have any idea who might have an extra mounted specimen of a Passenger Pigeon to swap for a Whooping Crane egg?” Schorger responded by suggesting Lowery contact the Royal Ontario Museum, given its large collection of passenger pigeons: “Write Lee Snyder [of ROM] that nothing could promote the solidarity of the British Commonwealth more than the exchange of one for the egg of a Whooping Crane.” That transaction was apparently never consummated, as ROM’s only whooping crane egg is an early donation from James Fleming. But a trade was completed some years ago when a museum in Rhode Island gave up two passenger pigeons for a polar bear cub.
As one would expect, the amount of money it takes to acquire a passenger pigeon has increased dramatically over the years. In March of 1954 George Bachay from Edgerton, Wisconsin, wrote Schorger offering to sell one of his two “priceless” birds for $500. Schorger replied, “I … wish you luck in your attempt to get $500 a piece for the Passenger Pigeons. This figure is far beyond any that I have ever heard of. I bought a pair a few years ago for $75.00” (Schorger Papers).
No one keeps a closer eye on passenger pigeon sales than Garrie Landry, a botanist at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. In 1982 he recalls a bird went for $500. Today, birds typically go for around $5,000, although on occasion specimens can still be had for closer to $3,000. The highest price Landry knows of that anyone has spent on a single bird in the United States is $12,000; this purchase occurred around 2003–04. As someone at Sotheby’s explained, the price is determined by how badly a potential buyer wants the bird rather than any generally accepted value based on previous sales.
To this day a goodly number of birds remain in private hands, and more turn up regularly. Ideally, these birds would all wind up in educational or scientific institutions, through gifts, sales, or loans. Meanwhile, a registry should be established of these privately held birds. If anyone is interested, let me know via the Project Passenger Pigeon website or the publisher.
Bachay, George. March 29, 1954. Schorger Papers, University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.
Baillie, J. L. “In Memoriam: Paul Hahn.” Auk 82 (April 1965): 323–24.
Hahn, Paul. Where Is That Vanished Bird? Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.
Archaeologists have discovered passenger pigeon bones in places well beyond their historical range. These include Dark Canyon Cave, New Mexico; Charlie Lake Cave in northern British Columbia; Stansbury II site at the Great Salt Lake of Utah; and at least two sites in Southern California, including La Brea Tar Pits. Bird bones don’t preserve well, so the presence of even a few in the far west suggests the possibility that the species once enjoyed a significantly wider range than that documented in the historical record. If that is true, the size of the total population might have been double or more the mind-boggling numbers that we do know about. Live birds were recorded in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, southern British Columbia, and southern Alberta.
The only documented instances of the bird in Mexico were the handful that showed up in the states of Veracruz and Puebla during the winter of 1872–73. Cuba hosted at least two passenger pigeons, a female shot in mangroves on the western part of the island and a male that turned up in a Havana market. Pigeons have been shot in France, England, Ireland, and Scotland, but Schorger doubted that any of the birds crossed the Atlantic on their own. Various people released passenger pigeons in all of those countries except possibly Ireland, but a species with the population and flight abilities of the passenger pigeon might well have made the trip on occasion, as have other North American birds.
To me, the most wayward of all passenger pigeons was the young male that appeared on Captain John Ross’s vessel Victory, as she bucked in the heavy seas off Baffin Island on July 31, 1829. The bird arrived with a storm that roared out of the northeast. From that direction, the closest land was Greenland, as inhospitable to a passenger pigeon as most any place on earth. The waif might have been doomed, but it gave hope to the crew, as noted by Ross: “If the sailors called it a turtle dove, and hailed it as an auspicious omen, we were well pleased to encourage any of the nautical superstitions which served to keep up their spirits and furnish them with subjects of discussion.”
Chandler, Robert. “A Second Record of Pleistocene Passenger Pigeon from California.” Condor 84 (1982): 242.
Harington, C. R. “Quaternary Cave Faunas of Canada: A Review of the Vertebrate Remains.” Journal of Cave and Karst Studies 73, no. 3 (2009): 162–80. doi:4311/jcks2009pa128.
Howard, Hildegarde. “Quaternary Avian Remains from Dark Canyon Cave, New Mexico.” Condor 73, no. 2 (March–April 1971): 237–40.
Ross, John. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage and of a Residence in the Arctic Region During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. Brussels, 1835.
Serjeanston, Dale. Birds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 384–85.
Despite the similarities in appearance between the mourning dove and the passenger pigeon, DNA analyses—based on material extracted from toe pads—indicate that the closest living relatives to the passenger pigeon are those in the New World genus Patagionenas, which includes the band-tailed pigeon of western North America. According to one study, it is likely that both species originated from one of the cuckoo doves of Asia (Macropygia). Under this scenario the birds crossed the Pacific into the Beringean Region (Alaska) during the Miocene, millions of years ago, although this would be one of the few instances known of North American land birds having Asian origins. A later paper suggested that these pigeons might have originated in the neotropics.
Fulton, Tara, et al. “Nuclear DNA from the Extinct Passenger Pigeon Confirms a Single Origin of New World Pigeons.” Annals of Anatomy, 2011. doi:10.1016/j.aanat .2011.02.017.
Johnson, Kevin, et al. “The Flight of the Passenger Pigeon: Phylogenetics and Biogeo-graphic History of an Extinct Species.” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 57 (2010): 455–56.
Most of us have our heroes. For a long time now Arlie William “Bill” Schorger (1884–1972) has been one of mine. No one looms larger in the world of historical natural history. Schorger is the only person I know of who perused every newspaper ever published in a state in search of articles on wildlife (excluding waterfowl because there were too many stories on people hunting them). Even cutting off his searches at 1900, the exercise took fifteen years, produced 795 typed pages, and yielded a trove of information on the changing status of wildlife in Wisconsin that is unsurpassed for any other state. This remarkable database, augmented by other historical and scientific literature, enabled him to write a series of articles with such titles as “The Black Bear in Early Wisconsin,” “The Prairie Chicken in Early Wisconsin,” and “The Rattlesnake in Early Wisconsin.” Out of this mass of material emerged two books as well, The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction (1955) and The Wild Turkey: Its History and Domestication (1966). (His first book, published in 1926, is The Chemistry of Cellulose and Wood.) Of The Passenger Pigeon, Schorger said that if the twenty-two hundred books and journal articles he read were added to the newspaper accounts, he consulted over ten thousand sources. Seven packed three-ring binders hold the notes from which he composed the manuscript.
Schorger was born in Republic, Ohio, in 1884 and received a master’s degree in chemistry from Ohio State University. After a stay in Washington, D.C., he relocated to Madison, where he worked at the federal Forest Products Laboratory and pursued his doctorate in chemistry. Moving into the private sector, he started at the C. F. Burgess Laboratories in Madison and ascended the corporate ladder to become president of Burgess Cellulose Co., which had a factory in Freeport, Illinois. When he retired in 1950, he had to his credit thirty-four patents. But as one more testament to his lifelong interest in natural history and his affinity for data collection, he kept track of all the dead birds he encountered on his weekly drives between Madison and Freeport. He made the trip 693 times and recorded 4,939 individuals of 64 species.
During Schorger’s short tenure at the Forest Products Laboratory, he met and befriended another young scientist, Aldo Leopold. The two of them formed a group with several others who also enjoyed canoeing, fishing, hunting, and other outdoor activities. Leopold was one of the great thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. His A Sand County Almanac is an amazing amalgam of science and philosophy expressed in some of the most beautiful and powerful English prose you will have the pleasure to read.
It is impossible to say how Leopold’s career would have evolved had he left Wisconsin, but Schorger and other friends succeeded in ensuring that such a move never happened. In 1933, the University of Wisconsin hired Leopold as the nation’s first professor of game management, and he joined the Agricultural Economics Department. Research by Stan Temple and Curt Meine (who authored the definitive biography of Leopold) revealed that coincident with the hiring, Schorger and other group members made substantial donations to the university. It is thought that these funds went toward Leopold’s salary. The same nucleus of patrons stepped up when Leopold was offered a high-level federal position in Washington, D.C. Due to their lobbying and financial generosity, the school created a whole department for him: Leopold was the sole faculty member of the country’s first Department of Wildlife Management.
After his retirement from business, Schorger joined the department in 1951 as professor of wildlife management. He evidently team-taught but one course, and he earned a token amount rather than an actual salary. Four years later he became an emeritus, but remained a presence at the department until the year before his death in 1972. He left an estate in excess of $6 million, at the time one of the largest in Dane County history. Fifty thousand dollars went to the department to help add books for the library, and a like amount established a scholarship for the study of Italian art, a subject of great interest to his wife. Marie McCabe explained, with a dollop of humor, that at Schorger’s death, colleagues heard about the endowment and praised the generosity, but when they later learned how much the estate was, the accolades turned to grumbling.
A. W. Schorger. Courtesy of Stan Temple and the University of Wisconsin Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology; photo by Tim Wallace
Schorger married Margaret Davison, the daughter of a small-town banker, in 1912. Margaret was physically large and possessed a strong personality: two different people who knew her described her as “formidable.” One next-door neighbor suggested that Bill was quiet because Margaret was so loud. She was apparently the only reviewer of his written work whose suggestions he accepted. In gratitude and with humor, he dedicated the passenger pigeon book to Margaret, “whose patience surmounted extinction.” She died in 1961, a loss he struggled with for the remaining decade of his life. They had two sons, William and John. William served on the anthropology faculty at the University of Michigan for many years, and John taught writing and language at the Minnesota Metropolitan State College.
Two stories are worth relating, for one pertains to Schorger’s tenacity as a natural historian and the other as a businessman. Wisconsin’s only extant specimen of a cougar was an individual killed near Appleton in 1857. For many decades its mounted carcass graced the biology department of Lawrence University. But the faded cat was eventually deaccessioned into the trash, from which it was rescued by a tavern owner who thought it would make a nice addition to his establishment. It would undoubtedly have stayed there until the next remodeling had not the story been recorded in an old newspaper that Schorger examined as part of his ongoing research. He drove to the bar and for $50 liberated the scarred and odoriferous hostage. It now resides in the beer-and smoke-free confines of the University of Wisconsin’s zoology collection. In honor of Schorger’s efforts, another Badger, Hartley Jackson, christened the animal a new subspecies, Felis concolor schorgeri, a designation no longer recognized.
Toward the end of World War II, the U.S. military found itself low on sleeping bags, due to shortages of the feathers and kapok that were used as fillers. A request went out for proposals for substitutes. Schorger believed he had found one: cattail seeds. He rented a large warehouse at the corner of University and Whitney Way in Madison and hired students to collect masses of cattail heads. Apparently the building was literally brimming with the plants and could hold no more. But before Schorger had concocted an adequate technique for processing, other sources of stuffing became available and the bedding crisis passed. For Schorger, though, a new challenge arose: the dried cattail heads had discharged their seeds, and every inch of the building was covered in fluff. It was described as a sleeping bag with a tin exterior.
Schorger was meticulous in his research and his life. Data ruled and details mattered. He would spend hours caring for his lawn, removing dandelions by hand. When someone had the temerity to report a rare bird at the Kumlien Club, Schorger would pepper him with questions, the key one often being whether a specimen was procured. One story goes that upon learning of a brown pelican (an oceanic bird that occurs only rarely inland) on Lake Mendota, he raced out to collect it, only to encounter a group of birders who were not happy at the specimen slung over his shoulder. Once he decided that the perfect dessert was blueberry pie à la mode, he had no need for further experimentation, and blueberry pie finished nearly every meal.
Robert McCabe and Joseph Hickey, close friends and colleagues of Schorger’s, both comment on how serious he seemed: no photos show him smiling, he was gruff, had no patience for ineptitude, and was difficult to know. (At least he smiled and laughed in person—unlike Leopold who has been described as almost grim in his countenance.) McCabe and Hickey found these impressions lamentable-because they knew the real Schorger possessed a first-rate sense of humor. The Passenger Pigeon and The Wild Turkey were each criticized for their lack of personal analysis and overabundance of citations and “historical and biological statistics.” Professor McCabe made the point that the body of the passenger pigeon book ends with this sentence: “A photograph of a nest with an egg occurs in Craig.” Still, even in a work written in the Joe Friday style (“Just the facts, ma’am”), there are gems of jocularity that reflect the author’s viewpoint. Perhaps my favorite is on page 85. After quoting the Reverend David Zeisberger to the effect that a foot of dung accumulated at a roost in a single night, Schorger commented, “It is to be noted in the history of this pigeon, data involving the highest figures are given by men of the cloth, a trait not inconsistent with a belief in the miraculous.”
In reading through the boxes of Schorger’s correspondence housed at the University of Wisconsin archives, I was struck not only by how genuinely funny he was but also how considerate to the many strangers who wrote him. A high school senior from Northfield, Ohio, asked Schorger if he could provide her with information on “cyclic reactions in growth and development of plants and animals in the United States,” the subject of her term paper. After confessing he did not really know what she meant, he provided a potentially helpful reference. A letter from a father in Richland, Washington, asked about the wisdom of his son’s majoring in wildlife management. Schorger acknowledged that the field offered limited opportunities, and that “the decision should be based entirely on his personal desires.” (He might have suggested that the prudent course was the one he followed: first, amass a fortune, then pursue the nonlucrative calling.) In July 1968, a correspondent from Livonia, Michigan, wrote a rambling, and in places incomprehensible, letter linking nesting passenger pigeons in Guatemala that were driven north to Michigan by a volcanic eruption in the 1890s and Persied meteors with 1960s grizzly maulings in Montana and mass murder in Saskatchewan. Maybe by then Schorger had mellowed a bit, for he promptly responded, “This will acknowledge receipt of your interesting letter … As to their nesting in Guatemala, there is no record of the passenger pigeon south of central Mexico.”
Ornithologist Ralph Palmer, then at the New York State Museum, sent a short note on January 16, 1961, expressing his interest in visiting Madison: “How is Lake Mendota on or about April 14? Should I bring my bathing suit, or can such be rented locally?” Schorger replied, “Lake Mendota is always open by April 14 but contains ice floes that make the swimming lively. I might add that bathing suits are prohibited, the reason being that no one should feel inhibited.”
(In October 2009, I interviewed several Schorger acquaintances due to the kind assistance of Stan Temple. This piece is, in part, based on those interviews with Emily Early, Marie McCabe, Phil Miles, Gene Roark, and Stan Temple. Ms. Early has since passed away.)
Hickey, Joseph. “In Memoriam: Arlie William Schorger.” Auk 90 (July 1973): 664–71. McCabe, Robert A. “A. W. Schorger: Naturalist and Writer.” Passenger Pigeon 55 (1993): 299–309.
Schorger, A. W., Papers. University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison. To Palmer, January 16, 1961; to Dzuro (student), November 11, 1963; to Livonia, July 31, 1968.
Economists have used the history of the passenger pigeon to demonstrate why the market system does not prevent extinction. These demonstrations go down two paths. First, with scarcity the price ought to increase. Now that could either depress demand or fuel it, with more hunters trying to cash in on the higher prices and consumers wanting the prestige of buying rare things. (People are willing to pay a premium for acquisition of the higher status that they think comes with spending lots of money: this is known as the Veblen effect.) But in the case of the passenger pigeon, the market was unable to distinguish passenger pigeons from other game, or even domestic poultry, so as the availability of pigeons declined, the overall supply of cheap meat did not. Therefore, passenger pigeon prices neither rose nor did demand fall. Further, because of the few large massings of the birds in the early 1880s, the true rarity of the species was masked, so it was easy for most to assume that there were still plenty.
The second economic principle embodied in the destruction of the passenger pigeon relates to the impoverishment of the commons, a term that could mean a resource open to all or one that is open to a specific group. But given the wandering nature of the species, only national governments could effect limits on the exploitation of the passenger pigeon as a resource, and those laws came too late for this bird. Cornell University economist Jon Conrad wrote a paper entitled “Open Access and Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon in North America,” in which he uses models and formulas to explore the economic factors that led to the bird’s demise. Conrad’s work was summarized at my request by Jeffrey Sundberg, professor of economics at Lake Forest College: “A thriving market for passenger pigeons, technology that allowed for low search costs, low shipping costs, and high remuneration (in comparison with other jobs the hunters could perform), and a low opportunity cost of wage for farmers combined to make extinction a logical outcome, given that no property owner limited access to the resources.”
Conrad, Jon. “Open Access and Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon in North America.” Natural Resources Modeling, 2005.
McDaniel, Carl, and John Gowdy. “Markets and Biodiversity Loss: Some Case Studies and Policy Considerations.” International Journal of Social Economics 25, no. 10 (1998): 1454–65.
Perelman, Michael. The Natural Instability of Markets. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 53–55.
Tober, James. Who Owns the Wildlife? Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
It takes a far more imaginative mind than mine to connect the extinction of the passenger pigeon with eugenics, but the oddest document in Professor Schorger’s papers is the undated Pamphlet No. 58 published by the “successor to Eugenics Society of Northern California”: “We had no wildlife conservation a century ago. Now we strenuously try to save our last whooping crane, our ivory-billed woodpeckers, our roseate spoonbills. Fine. But how about talented humans? With excessive birth control, our irreplaceable leadership types are going the way of the dodo, moa, the great auk, yes … even yesteryear’s passenger pigeon.”
I am aware of four memorials to the passenger pigeon: (1) In 1947, the Boy Scouts of America dedicated a memorial in the Pigeon Hills of New Hanover, Pennsylvania. It was destroyed by vandals in 1961 and was rededicated on September 12, 1982, at Codorus State Park, where it overlooks Lake Marburg; (2) also in 1947, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology erected a passenger pigeon monument at Wyalusing State Park in Bagley, Wisconsin (at a ceremony the year before, Aldo Leopold read his essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” one of the most poignant ever written about extinction); (3) to mark the Petoskey, Michigan, nesting of 1878, a memorial was installed at the Michigan State Fish Hatchery at Oden, Michigan, in 1957. The 1878 flocks had nested over a three-county area, with a large concentration at Crooked Lake, near the hatchery; and (4) the Cincinnati Zoo has preserved the aviary that housed Martha, even spending thousands of dollars to move it a short distance when zoo renovations threatened its existence. Distinguished artist John Ruthven aided the zoo in their preservation efforts by helping raise funds through the sale of prints made of a special passenger pigeon painting he created. He also donated an antique shotgun to the exhibit, never dreaming that someone would break in, steal the weapon, saw off most of the barrel, load it with modern shells, and attempt a robbery. The guy was caught, and at his trial Ruthven had to testify that it was indeed his gun and explained how it wound up as the weapon. The gun was returned and John filled the barrel with lead so it could never be used as a weapon again, except possibly as a club. That is the gun on display today.
1. Opera
The Dresden (Germany) Music Festival commissioned Deborah Artman to write the libretto, and the San Francisco–based Bang on a Can, comprising the three composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, to write the music, for a unique exploration titled Lost Objects. It was first performed in May 2001. Artman explains that she and the three composers looked to Jewish texts and tradition for inspiration and direction: “The Talmud attempts to define—how lost things bind all people together, how we build our life around things that have been lost and forgotten, or lost and not forgotten.” The pieces range from consideration of the mundane, “I Lost a Sock,” to extinction, “Passenger Pigeon”:
Passenger Pigeon
was once
one of the most
numerous birds
on earth
Thousands of pigeons
carrying messages of
sport
carrying messages of loss
carrying messages of life
No matter how long it is
gone
No matter how far it
has flown
the bird
will always come home.
(The text for Julia Wolfe’s “Passenger Pigeon,” libretto by Deborah Artman, is reprinted by kind permission of Red Poppy Music.)
2. Popular Music
At least three songs focus on the last passenger pigeon. The best known of the songs is the highly sentimental “Martha (Last of the Passenger Pigeons)” by the late giant of bluegrass music John Herald. This touching work, as printed lyrics, is best appreciated by skimming the words without pausing at the mention of “dozers” in the 1870s and the bestowing on Martha of certain intellectual and emotional characteristics that have not yet been documented in birds:
Oh high above the trees and the reeds like rainbows
they landed soft as moonglow
in greens and reds they fluttered past the windows
ah but nobody cared or saw
till the hungry came in crowds
with their guns and dozers
and soon the peace was over
God what were they thinking of?
Oh on and on til dreams come true
you know a piece of us all goes with you.
Oh the birds went down
they fell and they faded to the dozens
Til in a Cincinnati Zoo was the last one
Yes all that remained was the last
with a name of Martha
Very proud, very sad, but very wise.
Oh as the lines filed by there were few who cared
or could be bothered
how could anyone have treated you harder
and it was all for a dollar or more.
Oh on and on til dreams come true
you know a piece of us all goes with you
Oh and surrounded there by some of whom wept around her
in a corner of the cage they found her
she went as soft as she came so shy til the last song
oh the passenger pigeon was gone.
(Reprinted with permission.)
A humorous take on the last passenger pigeon was penned by the Canadian naturalist/musician David Archibald (1994, Rogues’ Hollow Music). Many liberties were taken with the facts, most glaringly turning the last bird into a male. But the goofy tone creates an appealing result in “The Passenger Pigeon’s Lament”:
I was never that beautiful to look at
Still, there were times I was at my best
The ladies would all turn their beaks to see me
When I puffed out my red and manly chest.
They’d keep a staring right above my shoulder
To the favorite part of my anatomy
Where the feathers all were purple, green, and golden
A finer pigeon neck you will never see.
CHORUS
But where oh where have my buddies gone
Where are my family and friends
We used to block the sun
But now I am the only one,
I’m the last of the passenger pigeons.
Sure, we got complaints our nests were always messy
That branches could not stand the heavy load
Now, I wish that I’d inquired what the price was
For contravention of the nesting code.
For they hunted us like dogs, well, more like pigeons
With nets and sticks and guns, they were so rude
Its distracting hearing all those shouts of “Timber”
When you are trying to get your loved one in the mood.
CHORUS
My relatives enjoyed a balanced diet
Be it beechnuts, winter green, or raspberries
For a true gourmet’s delight, you ought to try it
With a farmer’s freshly planted field of peas.
But soon the “family dinner” changed its meaning
Now, what’s a lonely pigeon going to do
When his cousins are all smoked and dried or roasted.
And Uncle Walter’s (that’s Walter Pigeon) always in a stew.
CHORUS
I’m the last passenger pigeon
’Bout to cross the waters Stygian
And I’m hopin’ that religion sees me through
’Cause there’s no one left to care now
For I leave behind no heirs now
I’m alone and in despair now
Yes it is true
I’m just living out my days inside this zoo.
(Reprinted with permission.)
The Handsome Family in their album Twilight (2001) give an accurate rendition of passenger pigeon history in a poignant metaphor for lost love, “Passenger Pigeons”:
Ever since you moved out
I have been living in the park
I’d rather talk to the wind
Than an empty apartment.
And I wish I could forget
How a billion birds flew in
My hollow dying heart
The first time I touched your arm.
Once there were a billion passenger pigeons
So many flew by, they darkened the sky
But they were clubbed and shot
Netted, gassed, and burned
Until there was nothing left
But vines of empty nests
I can’t believe how easily
A billion birds can disappear
The park is empty now
It’s so cold out
And all the paddle boats
Are covered up with snow.
Once again it is dark
The electric lights snap on
But I’m still sitting here
Drinking frozen beer
And throwing potato chips
Into the white snow drifts
Just in case a bird decides
To fly through hinter night
I can’t believe how easily
A billion birds can disappear
Oh, I can’t believe how easily
A billion birds can disappear.
(Permission granted.)
Scouse the Mouse is a delightful children’s album featuring Ringo Starr as the main performer, with Donald Pleasance as the producer and author of the lyrics and Roger Brown writer of the music (released in Great Britain in 1977 by Polydor Records). Among the vast literature of the English language, the song “The Passenger Pigeon” is undoubtedly unique in featuring verse that rhymes platypus with Ectopistes migratorius.
At least three novels devoted to the passenger pigeon appeared in the twentieth century, two by well-known and highly acclaimed authors. The first and most unusual is published in 1938 by MacKinlay Kantor (1904–77), The Noise of Their Wings. (The title is a quote from Audubon.) E. D. Starke, sickly as a child, is sent by his parents to stay one summer with an uncle and aunt who operate a farm in Michigan. Just after midnight one morning, Starke’s uncle rouses the boy from his slumber and forces him to participate in a raid on a passenger pigeon roost. The event leaves an indelible scar on his psyche. When the young man grows to become head of a giant food-canning operation, he devotes substantial portions of his fortune to conservation and scientific efforts. He never loses hope that some passenger pigeons still survive all these years later. With an independence of mind bolstered by great personal wealth, he announces that he will give $100,000 to anyone who can provide him with a living pair of passenger pigeons. Amazingly, a legitimate claim emerges from the Gulf coast of southern Florida. Most of the action takes place when Starke assembles his estranged daughter, a longtime friend who is an ornithologist, and others to receive the birds. A dispute with one of the claimants for the reward results in arson and the death of the passenger pigeons. Kantor includes a bibliography that contains Forbush, Mershon, and French, and what he says about the birds is mostly factual. Time (October 31, 1938) said the story “is teasing and ingenious rather than effective” and that the author spent most of his “vitality … devising a modern plot.” But I respect Kantor for creating a novel that incorporates the passenger pigeon into a plot that goes beyond straight natural history; he reaches out to a potentially larger audience to share the pigeon’s history with those who might not otherwise know anything about it. Kantor wrote thirty books, many of which dealt with the Civil War, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Andersonville.
The other two books are nature novels, of the type where the author tells the life history of a species through the story of one individual. The Last Passenger by James Ralph Johnson was published in 1956. According to the book’s jacket, he was born in 1922 and spent his career in the U.S. Marines. At the time of the novel, he held the rank of major and was teaching in an ROTC program at the University of Louisville. He had written two previous nature books for children. This slim book tells the life of Blue, a male passenger pigeon born in a huge gathering on the Ohio River. Blue wanders north to another large nesting near Petoskey, Michigan, but excessive disturbance by hunters forces the birds to flee northward, where they wind up nesting near Hudson Bay. (Too many nestings in a year for my taste.) In his meanderings across pigeon range he encounters a host of wildlife including Carolina parakeets, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and Labrador ducks; survives the impact of a diving peregrine falcon; finds a mate; spends time as a stool pigeon; and flies to freedom when shooters at a trap meet fail to bring him down. The manuscript was sent to Schorger, who gave his approval, and the New Yorker called it “a rare, unpretentious, and, in its way, singularly appealing work.”
Allan Eckert’s Silent Sky was published in 1965. The last passenger pigeon of this novel is also a male, one with a narrow splotch of white on his right wing. He was born in Michigan and would end his days at the hand of a child in southern Ohio; in death his eyes would be replaced with buttons. I think Eckert is a more accomplished writer than Johnson, and Eckert’s bird, spared a name, has fewer harrowing escapes. Although Eckert takes some liberties with the details, he works into his story more of the historical literature, including a passage on Roney’s account of Petoskey. More people were probably introduced to the story of the passenger pigeon through The Silent Sky than any other single source.
Eckert holds a rare place in American letters: he wrote mostly about natural history and Midwestern history, two realms usually far removed from popular culture, yet enjoyed a broad, national audience. Of his many books, seven were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in literature. He also authored 225 episodes of the long-running nature program Wild Kingdom. His highly regarded play Tecumseh!—based on the life of the Shawnee prophet—has been performed in Chillicothe, Ohio, every summer since it premiered in 1973. I wrote him in the fall of 2011 to tell him about Project Passenger Pigeon and learned that he had died the previous July. His wife said he would have been interested in our effort, and I regret not having contacted him earlier.
From 2010 through 2013, at least four novels were published with major plot elements involving passenger pigeons: Quick Fall of Light by Sherrida Wood-ley (Spokane, WA: Gray Dog Press, 2010) is a superb science fiction novel dealing with a number of environmental themes; Post by Hilary Masters (Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2011) is a funny satire connecting the disappearance of species with the impoverishment of culture (among other things); Chase the Wild Pigeons by John Gschwend Jr. (self-published, 2011), is an adventure novel about two boys in the Civil War trying to find their way back home; and One Came Home by Amy Timberlake (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013) is an admirable novel for young adults that combines mystery, adventure, and humor against the backdrop of the huge pigeon nesting of 1871.
The website www.placenames.com makes it easy to find all the locations in the United States that have pigeon as part of their names. Given the low regard that most people hold for feral rock pigeons, the word pigeon in most geographic entities within the historical range of the passenger pigeon likely refers to this species (one exception is Pigeon House Corner, a populated place in Ann Arundel County, Maryland). Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, is probably the best known, but there are Pigeon Creeks throughout the eastern third of the country. Here is a sample of states and the number of towns, schools, churches, hills, creeks, and other places within their respective borders having appellations that include pigeon: CT—4; TN—26; KY—44; WV—38; GA—16; PA—32; WI—26; OH—20; MI—20; MO—17; IN—16; NY—13; MA—12; IL—12; LA—9; and IA—5. Margaret Mitchell lists a number of pigeon bays, lakes, islands, rivers, points, and even a rapids in Ontario and Manitoba.
White Pigeon, Michigan, and White Pigeon, Illinois, are actually named for a Potawatomi chief who saved a white settlement by alerting the inhabitants to an imminent attack. But his name does refer to the bird in question. Hunt-ingburg, Indiana, memorializes a nearby passenger pigeon roost that attracted hunters for decades. The name of Mimico, a Toronto suburb, derives from the nineteenth-century Mississauga word, omiimiikaa, denoting a place where wild pigeons gather. Ontario is the home of two other places based on Indian names: Omemee in Victoria County, and Omemea, an island in the Parry Sound area of Georgian Bay. (Variations of a similar word meaning passenger pigeon appear as o-me-me-wog in the language of the Potawatomi and omimi among the Cree and Chippewa.) There is one high-profile place named after the passenger pigeon, in Quebec: Île aux Tourtes (Passenger Pigeon Island) which is connected to Montreal by a high-traffic bridge (Pont de l’Île-aux-tourtes).
Amos Butler ended his article on the passenger pigeon in his Birds of Indiana (1897) with these words: “Their passing away must fill the soul of every one, into whose life their migrations have come as an experience, with profound regret. I introduce the lines of a careful observer, a faithful interpreter of nature, my friend, Hon. B. S. Parker. His “Hoosier Bards” are the feathered songsters of our beloved State, and therein he has preserved his recollections of the Passenger Pigeon:
And windy tumults shake the ground,
And trees break down with feathered store,
And many swiftly pulsing wings
Are spread at once in sudden fright,
Till every fleeting minute brings
The noise of some delirious flight,
And all the air is dark with swarms
Of pigeons in their quest for food,
While autumn leaves in eddying storms
Are beaten by the feathered flood.
Written in the 1880s or 1890s is the poem “Wilda Dauwa” (Wild Dove) authored by the Reverand Eli Keller, who lived in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and knew the birds well. It is written in Pennsylvania German and was translated by Alan Keyser at my request (via Rudolf Keller). It is presented here in English for the first time:
In olden times there were passenger pigeons
We saw them fly in spring time
In small flocks and charming large ones
What a great pleasure it was!
The boys in the fields a plowing
Would stop with their tired teams
And in full voice call “pigeons.”
You heavenly beautiful creatures.
And they flew away over mountains high,
Still higher over deep valleys,
So, we, with joy, just let them fly:
Thought to ourselves, “You may decide.”
We hear guns cracking here and there
Rusty iron long-time loaded.
The shooting is worth nothing—just noise,
Damaging the lazy shooters themselves.
Still finally the pigeons tired from flying
Set down with water rushing
In cool shade consider themselves lucky
There they call their “Eht” and listen.
How beautiful they are sitting in long rows,
And in high green trees and branches,
With little gray caps and tidy gray coats
With red and white vests!
They are now entirely gone these wild pigeons,
Eternally never to come back!
What yet remains of these beautiful blessings?
The spirit lays its treasures down.
One of the greatest contemporary authors of children’s literature is Paul Fleischman, a Newbery Medal winner and the 2012 U.S. nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Awards. In several of his poetry collections, he writes in two voices, including “The Passenger Pigeon.” This poem appeared in his collection entitled I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices (published by HarperCollins, 1985, and used here with permission from the publisher):
We were counted not in |
|
|
thousands |
nor |
|
|
millions |
but in |
|
billions. |
billions |
|
We were numerous as the |
stars |
stars |
|
in the heavens |
As grains of |
|
sand |
sand |
at the sea |
|
|
As the |
buffalo |
|
|
on the plains. |
When we burst into flight |
|
|
we so filled the sky |
That the |
|
sun |
sun |
was darkened |
|
|
and |
day |
day |
|
became dusk. |
Humblers of the sun |
Humblers of the sun |
we were! |
we were! |
The world |
|
inconceivable |
inconceivable |
|
without us. |
Yet its 1914. |
|
And here I am |
|
alone |
alone |
|
caged in the Cincinnati Zoo, |
the last |
|
|
of the passenger pigeons. |
Arts Etobicoke is a collective of artists active in West Toronto that has presented a wide range of innovative offerings to the community and region. In October 2010, they unveiled the Art Alley Mural Project, which helps celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13 addresses the freedom of movement. The project uses both a painting and a poem by Toronto’s poet laureate Dionne Brand called “Article 13.” Although the passenger pigeon is not central to the poem, Brand uses the birds as both a symbol of place (mimico, the name of a nearby suburb, means “where wild pigeons gather”) and the freedom to migrate. But although the words refer to people, it is a pretty fair description of the bird itself, “tributaries of migrants / inalienable nomads,” making uncounted sojourns.
The novelist William Burroughs, a keystone of the beat movement of the 1950s, produced a unique collection of writings, much of it imbued with sardonic humor and unleavened bleakness. His poem “Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” is a litany of America’s flaws and begins: “Thanks for the wild turkeys and passenger pigeons destined to be shit out of thoroughly wholesome American guts.”
Drawing of Martha and accompanying text by unknown artist that graced a wall of the Stockholm, Sweden, subway. Many of the train stations there feature permanent and temporary art exhibits. Photo by Anna-Karen Granberg
Ski Country Limited Edition Whiskey Decanter with porcelain passenger pigeons, issued as a special collectable in 1983. It is based on the original artwork of David Malick. Courtesy of Garrie Landry
The earliest European drawing of the passenger pigeon is one with a forked tail that appears in Louis Nicolas’s Codex canadensis, seventy-nine pages of text and pictures that depict the people and natural history of the eastern half of the United States and Canada. The work was prepared about 1700.
Mark Catesby is the painter of the first colored illustration of the species. There have been innumerable drawings since, manifesting a vast range of talent, styles, and settings, including trading cards; dishes; faux gravestones; advertising; puzzles; a subway wall in Stockholm, Sweden; a mural in the Dennison, Ohio post office; several postage stamps issued by such nations as Mozambique, Cuba, and Tanzania; and as tattoos on at least three people. I have already discussed Lewis Cross, whose passenger pigeon drawings may be unique in that he knew the birds from life and created his dramatized images specifically to remind people of their former multitudes. Some well-known contemporary painters who have incorporated images of the species in their work include Norman Rockwell, John Ruthven, Walton Ford, and Hunt Slonem.
A male passenger pigeon appears on one of the plates in the state dinner service that was commissioned for President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879. Mrs. Hayes selected Theodore Davis, who worked for Harper’s Weekly, as the artist to oversee the production of the dishes. He created images that represented native animals and plants, including the pigeon.
Sculptors have re-created images of the birds as well. Todd McGrain, for example, has made one that has been placed at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, on the banks of the Scioto River south of Columbus, Ohio. Another artist is Rosalind Ford, who lives in Newfoundland and Labrador and creates textile sculptures of flocking birds including passenger pigeons.
One of the most perplexing aspects of the passenger pigeon slaughter was the apparent absence of all photographic documentation: no photos of a guy with one dead pigeon, none of wagons filled with dead birds, none of barrels of pigeons being lined up along a railroad track or a Great Lakes dock, none of a bird or two hanging from the stalls of a game market, none of coops with live birds to be used for food or shooting contests, or of contestants in urban trap meets showing off their dead birds.
Schorger never published such a picture nor are there any in his papers. Scholars such as Garrie Landry, Stan Casto, and Stan Temple have searched for years without success. There is a photo in Mershon of a game market with dead birds, but none is clearly a passenger pigeon. A photo on the Internet shows a huge pile of bison skulls that is sometimes purported to be of pigeons. Garrie had a false alarm once when he read on eBay that a seller was offering a photo of dead passenger pigeons. He contacted the person and was allowed to examine the photo, but, alas, when he looked at the picture with a microscope, he could see that the alleged passenger pigeons had webbed feet, making them most likely teal or other species of small duck. Supposedly, too, a photographer was present at Kilbourn City (Wisconsin Dells) at the time of the 1871 nesting, but the story goes he was so appalled by the slaughter he deliberately refrained from recording it. This seems to be almost certainly apocryphal, but for whatever reason, the pictures he did take do not include passenger pigeons. And unfortunately the half-tone process that allowed newspapers to print photos had not yet been developed when the pigeons were still in the wild.
Finding a picture of newly slain wild passenger pigeons became an important goal of mine as I was convinced that such pictures must have been taken. I contacted hundreds of people and institutions throughout Canada and the United States in my search, but to no avail. A number of interested librarians and archivists joined the effort and continued their own investigations. But none of us struck pay dirt.
Then, on October 9, 2012, I received this remarkable e-mail from Destry Hoffard: “I saw in the recent issue of On Target! [newsletter] that you were looking for photographs that showed Passenger Pigeons in a trap shooting or hunting sense. I’ve collected vintage photos for years and only have two that might fill the bill.” He sent me copies, and sure enough they are indeed passenger pigeons, as the reader can see (photo insert). To my knowledge both are unlike any photos previously published. (Although, quite amazingly, on January 17, 2013, my colleague Susan Wegner spotted two versions of the same stereopticon card on two websites so obviously multiple copies are still in existence. That different companies featured the same shot suggests it sold fairly well.)
Destry recalls obtaining the stereopticon card about a decade ago at a postcard show in Toledo. There are more details associated with his acquisition of the tintype. He was in northern Michigan, on his way to Iron Mountain, when he stopped for lunch and noticed a small antiques shop nearby. Destry asked the proprietor if he had any old hunting photos. After rummaging about for a while, the owner emerged with a box of tintypes, out of which he selected one: “The light in the shop was bad and I didn’t really look too closely. He wanted the princely sum of $3 and it seemed like some kind of sporting scene so I just rolled the dice and bought it. It didn’t really dawn on me what it might show till I got it home a few days later and began to study it with a glass.”
The stereopticon card is entitled “Small Wild Game of the Alleghenies” and depicts a string of gray squirrels, below which are a number of ruffed grouse and three passenger pigeons. It was produced as part of the “Stereoscopic Gems of American and Foreign Scenery” series by the Universal Photo Art Company (1880–1910), headquartered in Philadelphia. The use of the image represents the common practice of reissuing photos taken earlier. In this instance, the photographer was likely R. A. Bonine of Altoona, who took many photos on commission from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company during the 1870s.
The tintype (photo insert), probably taken in the 1860s but possibly as late as 1880, has a number of fascinating elements that are difficult to identify with absolute certainty. An important point is that this was a staged grouping (as evidenced by the painted background) and not a shot of people actually in the field catching passenger pigeons. In addition, the pigeon paraphernalia would have varied greatly, as it was not manufactured but rather made by individual hunters. I have discussed this image with a number of people, particularly Garrie Landry and art historian Susan Wegner of Bowdoin College, and the latter undertook a detailed analysis of the picture. The long pole held by the man on the left is the rod that would be attached to a fulcrum stake allowing it to be moved up and down teeter-totter like. The disk at the top is the stool where the decoy pigeon was perched. The short cross stake below the man’s hand was driven into the ground under the stool and provided the lowest point that end of the teeter-totter could reach; depending on the nature of the ground, this would prevent possible damage to the stool and the pigeon. A rope from the pole enabled the pigeoner to move it up and down. The long box with the holes—probably of wood with a canvas top—on which the rightmost pigeon preens is likely the traveling cote that held the stoolies and the fliers. (The basket might have served the same purpose.) Finally, the bag with the lumpy contents probably held the nets.
The only picture that comes close to that of the two men and their stool pigeons is the one that appeared in an article long known to passenger pigeon researchers, but the significance of the photo was not realized until February 2012 during a conversation between Garrie Landry and me. In his paper “The Last of the Wild Pigeon in Bucks County,” Colonel Henry Paxson included a photo of longtime pigeon trapper Albert Cooper of Solebury Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, posed with what appear to be three live passenger pigeons. These birds are described in the caption as “blind decoys,” referring to the practice of temporarily blinding stool pigeons by sewing their eyelids shut during their use as decoys. The photo was taken “about 1870.”
There are other photos of live birds, but over 90 percent of them are of birds in Professor Whitman’s Chicago flock. The remainder, minus the two already discussed, are from the Cincinnati flock, and most, if not all, of those are of Martha. I have never seen a photo of Whittaker’s Milwaukee birds.
References to passenger pigeons have appeared from time to time in radio, television, movies, and theater. On April 27, 1948, the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show aired the episode “The Passenger Pigeon Trap.” McGee thought he found a living passenger pigeon despite the generally held view that the species was “stinct.” The bird in question, a rock pigeon, was perched on a bus and hence was a passenger.
In the inaugural episode of Star Trek, entitled “Man Trap” and aired on September 18, 1966, a visit to a planet virtually devoid of life elicits mention of the extinct bird. Running from 1982 to 1988, the PBS children’s show 3-2-1 Contact had a regular feature involving the Bloodhound Gang, a group of kids who solved mysteries. “The Case of the Dead Man’s Pigeon” centered on a contested will that is proved fraudulent because one provision leaves the estate to a society dedicated to the conservation of passenger pigeons; since the bird is extinct, there can be no such society and the will is a forgery. The script was written by acclaimed children’s writer and Newbery Medal–winning Sid Fleischman, whose son Paul carried on the family tradition of writing superb children’s literature, including the passenger pigeon poem printed above.
In Jim Jarmusch’s movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), a character refers to a particular bird as a “carrier pigeon” but is corrected (incorrectly as it turns out) by the owner, who yells, “Passenger pigeon! Passenger pigeon! They’ve been extinct since 1914!” Terrence Malick’s New World (2005) shows unmistakable faux Carolina parakeets, and one scene has a cloud of birds in the background that some have claimed are passenger pigeons, but a viewing of the movie indicates they could be any of the birds that flocked in huge numbers during that early period of U.S. history.
Passenger Pigeons, a feature film dealing with a coal-mining town in eastern Kentucky, was released in 2010. Writer-director Martha Stephens answered my query regarding the title: “I named the film Passenger Pigeons because … [it] represents the death of a culture that was once flourishing [but] is a much different animal than what it once was. Sadly, poverty still reigns but the work ethic and a sense of self-pride has seemed to disappear much like the Passenger Pigeon. I guess to sum it up, my movie touches upon the extinction of a place and the extinction of a person” (e-mail, April 7, 2011).
In the early winter of 1999, the Kraine Theater in New York City presented the play American Passenger written by Theron Albis and directed by Stephan Golux. Ostensibly about a family of New York gangsters, it explores the consequences of an inability to change when circumstances demand it. Mr. Golux kindly elaborated on the content of the play in response to my question: “American Passenger is a multi-layered fugue on the dangers of the failure to adapt. The title of the play refers directly to the American Passenger Pigeon, mentioned explicitly in the script and referenced implicitly in the production as the metaphor for a species that cannot evolve to meet rapidly shifting threats to life” (e-mail, April 5, 2011).
An interesting and slim volume of ornithological satire was produced by Melissa Weinstein and Jack Illingworth in 2003, entitled The Writings of Noah Job Jamuudsen on the Passenger Pigeon and purportedly published by the National Jamuudsen Society. The authors, having met in Montreal, discovered the text of this previously unknown ornithologist, the letters of whose name are coincidentally the same as those of America’s most famous bird student, “hidden inside a cask of St-Ambrose Oatmeal Stout.” Born in Sweden in the early 1800s, Jamuudsen came to the United States sometime before the summer of 1867, for that is when he first appears in “the archives of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Ornithologists [as having been] involved in a number of disturbances.” It is the goal of Weinstein and Illingworth to place the subject of their biography on his “rightful throne: that of the Priest-King of all ornithologists.” Jamuudsen’s account of the passenger pigeon is indeed unique in the extensive literature on this species.
A totally fabricated story about the final days of the wild passenger pigeon has permeated the Internet so thoroughly that it has been repeated as fact by serious authors in numerous articles and books (including one by Stephen Jay Gould). Like the most persistent of urban legends, it sounds plausible, is a narrative, and contains a moral. The claim is made that the last of the pigeons, all 250,000 of them, attempted to nest near Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1896: “In a final orgy of slaughter over 200,000 pigeons were killed, 40,000 mutilated, 100,000 chicks destroyed.” Only 5,000 managed to survive the wrath of the hunters. The 245,000 corpses were processed and packed in barrels for rail transport east. Unfortunately, however, the train derailed and all the dead birds spoiled and had to be discarded.
Unless one is steeped in the passenger pigeon record, it would be easy to swallow this story, but red flags are everywhere. First, as I document in the second-to-last chapter, there were nowhere near a quarter of a million birds in 1896. By then, all that still survived in the wild likely numbered no more than maybe a hundred or so. Second, not only don’t the numbers add up, but the purported breakdown of avian casualties is both far too precise and too high a percentage of the total to be believable. Third, and of great importance, such an event could not have escaped the knowledge of every historian and ornithologist who has ever written about the species. It would have made big news at the time. Finally, it is just too neat a story that every one of the dead birds was wasted. (The same article says a flight of over two billion passenger pigeons flew over Cincinnati in 1870; again, no such thing has ever been reported anywhere else.)
This fable is a classic type of folklore known as the cautionary tale, which usually has three elements: a taboo or bad thing to do (killing all the birds); violation of the taboo; and a bad consequence (birds spoiled and discarded). The amazing thing to me, though, is that people are still making stuff up about a bird that has been extinct for nearly a century. I have attempted to trace this fable to its origins, and I think—although I am not sure—it first appeared in an anonymous article called “The End of the Wild: An Essay on the Importance of Biodiversity,” which supposedly ran in the now defunct Borealis magazine. The language is elegant and written in the first person; the author claims to have shared podiums with the likes of Richard Leakey. But modern authors who refuse to use their names and offer no explanation are suspect from the get-go. You can find the tale at
http://raysweb.net/specialplaces/pages/endofwild.html.
