For every pigeon that was shot and recorded during the last part of the nineteenth century, probably 100, perhaps a thousand, were shot and eaten. Who was there to record them?
—EDWARD HOWE FORBUSH, 1927
Between 1882 and 1886, there were several mass gatherings, but they were tiny in comparison to what had been but a few years earlier. Because they were small and were of short duration due to exploitation, not much is known about them. For example, a roost formed near Huntsville, Texas, in 1883. Hunters marauded the site every evening during November and December.1
Missouri seemed to draw most of the birds and attention during the next two years. W. W. Judy, the pigeon dealer in St. Louis, reported from Oregon County in 1883 that a small group of birds had begun nesting. Forty netters were on-site and primed for action, but he feared that they would be stymied by the shooters, who were killing off the pigeons before they could nest. A local newspaper gave the total shipped to St. Louis from the site as more than ten thousand dozen, and that was two months before Judy’s dispatch. This was the pigeon city that supplied the forty thousand birds that died before they could be shipped to hunting clubs.2
The last “really impressive” number of pigeons in Missouri appeared in January 1884. Crowds of pro and amateur pigeon catchers descended on the roost, located in the same area of Oregon County. Fortunately, one of the visitors published an account of his trip. With provisions enough for four days, his group set out for the pigeon gathering. After spending a restless night, they were up before dawn: “As the sun rose, the birds began to fly over us, all day at short intervals we were shooting right and left in the roost. The trees were literally crowded with them.” As their outing concluded, they packed their gear and headed to the nearest town with a wagon full of pigeons. On the way they met more hunters, and as one small caravan they pulled into Augusta (now Thayer) with a combined total of 5,415 birds.3
Later in 1884, a nesting colony of three hundred pigeons took up residence in the wooded heights of Potter County, Pennsylvania, near Cherry Springs (now a state park but no longer a town). Remarkably, they completed their breeding without human interference, thanks to the secrecy maintained by the six or so persons who knew about it. Why they were so restrained in their speech and acts is not known, but that they allowed the pigeons to nest in peace may have been unprecedented in the passenger pigeon annals.4
The largest reported concentration of breeding birds in 1885 spread along the Oconto River in Langlade County, Wisconsin. But gunners drove the pigeons away before they could fledge any offspring. An hour after a flock of migrants showed up at Racine, five hundred hunters armed with shotguns appeared. The number of men may well have exceeded that of the birds. Longtime professional pigeon netter J. B. Oviatt found his last handful of nests that year in his home range of McKean County, Pennsylvania.5
The spring of 1886 saw remnant flocks of passenger pigeons converge on the upper Susquehanna basin of northern Pennsylvania to nest along the west branch of Pine Creek, where the beeches had produced a bountiful nut crop the preceding fall. John French had been watching the groups of birds as they passed over his hometown of Coudersport, and when he learned of their destination, he arose early one morning to see for himself a spectacle that was becoming less and less frequent.6
French began the thirty-mile trip before the sun had yet made its appearance, and not a single pigeon crossed his path over the entire hilly course. Nor were there any live pigeons when he finally reached the woods they had occupied. Instead, he was greeted by a sight so fantastic he might have been dreaming: “Young men were coming from the woods with bags full of dead birds. Many of them were lumberjacks, with high, spiked shoes on their feet; gray trousers, with legs chopped off at the knees, tucked into high-topped socks; mackinaw coats of bright red and brown and gray, in large checks; silken scarves around their necks; and high hats.”7
The nattily attired dandies had decided to plunder the pigeons in style. The timber company that owned most everything else in the area had just purchased the local general store and discovered an attic filled with silk hats dating from 1851, when the establishment first opened. They were of a design once marketed by P. T. Barnum and called Jenny Lind, in honor of the Swedish songstress with whom the shop’s longtime owner had been infatuated.8
The night before French’s arrival, the group of men with their fancy headgear had entered the pigeon city and begun firing. They did not stop until the woods were bereft of flying pigeons: “That was the death-blow to pigeons in Pennsylvania. They left in the night, which was clear, with a full moon, so the birds could see where to go in a northerly direction.”9
What happened on Pine Creek had become the norm: as hunters invaded the nestings blasting away, birds would leave before fledging progeny. The connection between shooting and abandonment was perhaps first explicitly noted in 1869, when pigeons left a nest site in Wisconsin after being assaulted by armed attackers. Ornithologist Ludlow Griscom and others claimed that the major reason the species became extinct is that it was incapable of adapting to the ever-more-intense slaughter. But, in fact, the birds had changed: they were now less tolerant of these disruptions and would increasingly flee at their commencement.10
No one knows for sure where the retreating pigeons went when they left Pine Creek that night in 1886. It is possible that some relocated a short distance to the east and nested near Blossburg, on reforested timber land where “thousands of squabs were killed with poles in the little trees during the bark-peeling time.” Others surmised that the birds, in their northward flight, traversed the skies of New York to settle somewhere in the remote vastness of Ontario or Quebec. One experienced pigeoner said that six hundred bred that year in a swamp near Lake City, Michigan. Naturalist Vernon Bailey found several nests along the Elk River, in Sherburne County, Minnesota, from the end of April to the middle of May. A tally of game killed in Missouri over the twelve months ending March 1, 1886, listed 8,129 “turtle doves” (presumably mourning doves) and 4,929 “wild pigeons.” But the origins of the data are not given.11
The species tried to nest in at least two states in 1887. During late May and early June, groups of unknown size abandoned their efforts at sites near the Wisconsin towns of Wautoma and Sparta respectively. In both instances, the birds suffered harassment from shooting. The trappers had already arrived at Wautoma, but were once again deprived the opportunity to ply their trade by the thoughtless gunners. An unexpected location for breeding pigeons was Tyler County, Texas. Fourteen pairs nested and laid eggs, six of which were collected by Edmond Pope. One egg survives in the collection of New York’s Columbia-Greene Community College, providing the only physical proof that the species did ever nest in Texas.12
By 1888, most ornithologists who thought about passenger pigeons probably lamented that the bird might well disappear without ever having been scientifically studied in the wild. When William Brewster, curator of birds at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, learned that big flocks of pigeons were settling in to nest near Cadillac, Michigan, he jumped at the opportunity to “learn as much as possible about the habits of the breeding birds, as well as to secure specimens of their skins and eggs.” He grabbed a colleague and headed straightaway to Cadillac, where they arrived on May 8. To their great disappointment, however, they found that the flocks had moved on to points unknown. They were just a few weeks too late! But the netters, already poised for action, urged patience. The birds would certainly set down somewhere within reach; in due time that place would be discovered and the news would rapidly spread. After two weeks, however, the secret pigeon haunts remained hidden: “One by one the netters lost heart, until finally most of them agreed that the Pigeons had gone to the far North beyond the reach of mail and telegraphic communication.” Indeed, those vernal flocks that had lured both scientists and pigeoners were the last large aggregations of passenger pigeons ever seen in Michigan. A mere decade had elapsed since Petoskey.13
Wild passenger pigeons still existed in 1890, but in pitifully low quantities. A. W. Schorger suggested a population of a few thousand. But as Brewster discovered, there was no place one could go and be assured of seeing the species in nature. The birds were too few and scattered. It seems, though, there was one place where one could see pigeons in the early nineties: the Boston market. During 1891, its purveyors received on one occasion twelve hundred birds from Pennsylvania and Missouri, and on another two thousand live individuals captured near Fayetteville, Arkansas.14
A number of reports come from 1892. While the pigeon supply dipped well below what could sustain national markets, early shoppers in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 16, 1892, could have indulged their taste for the species as both “wild pigeons and watermelons were among the delicacies exposed for sale in the city market this morning.” A few birds supposedly nested in an old stand of hemlocks along Young Woman’s Creek in Clinton County, Pennsylvania. The third record came from Bethel, Connecticut, where G. L. Hamlin watched seven birds in August and September as they regularly foraged in a tract of buckwheat. He shot one individual, but discarded it because it was in full molt and thus unlikely to make an attractive mount. Over the winter of 1892–93 “several hundred dozen” pigeons reached the St. Louis market from the Indian Territories. These may have been the last pigeons offered for sale in a big city, for a shipment arriving in New York City about the same time was condemned as being unfit for human consumption.15
Five reports of passenger pigeons were made during 1893. In late April, word came from Highgate, Virginia, that a few pigeons were breeding in the vicinity and, what is most remarkable, that an effort was under way to protect them. About the same time, twenty or so birds lingered in Maynes Grove, Franklin County, Iowa. One was discovered dead. A lone individual was taken at Morristown, New Jersey, on October 7. Also in the fall, a Mr. Riddick of Heywood County, Tennessee, saw eight birds, of which he shot one.16
A detailed and well-written account describes one of the two sightings from Illinois that year. To his great amazement Edward Clark discovered a male passenger pigeon in April 1893 as he birded in Chicago’s expansive Lincoln Park. Clark was a writer on the staff of the Chicago Tribune and a graduate of West Point who rose to the rank of colonel. The pigeon rested on the branch of a maple, fully illuminated by the early-morning sun: “There were no trees between him and the lake to break from his breast the fullness of the glory of the rising sun … The sun made his every feather shine. Not a single feather was misplaced, and about the neck there was the brilliancy of gems.”17
Clark had hoped to flush the bird so that it would fly to the north and out of the city. But, instead, to his dismay, the bird “winged his arrowy flight straight down the Lake Shore drive toward the heart of the city.” But even if the pigeon had flown in the direction Clark thought safest, it might not have mattered; just a few months later in September, somebody shot a pigeon out of a flock of three near the Des Plaines River, in Lake County, a little to the north and west.18
Indiana hosted more pigeons during 1894 than it had in the previous two or three years. There were five sightings, including a flock of fifty in La Porte County. An even larger group, 150 in all, reportedly appeared in Whitewater, Wisconsin, one day in early May. Massachusetts lost its last known passenger pigeon on April 12 when Neil Casey shot a female at Melrose. October 20 is the date on which a pigeon would intersect speeding lead in North Carolina for the final time. She met her fate in Buncombe County.19
With the dawning of 1895, the passenger pigeon as part of the North American landscape entered its final phase. Almost every record marked a “last.” A question that needs to be addressed is by what standard should reports be included here. Schorger believed that the last records needed to be based on “specimens with credible data,” a conclusion with which I agree. Sight records won’t do, although with the endorsement of a local expert of known repute they are worth noting.20
The need for a corroborating specimen is particularly acute in the case of the passenger pigeon, which so closely resembled the widespread and common mourning dove. In numerous published instances, passenger pigeons miraculously became mourning doves once they were shot and examined in the hand. And sometimes even a bird in the hand or expert testimony was not enough to convince the true believer. W. DeWitt Miller and Ludlow Griscom of the American Museum of Natural History made an on-site investigation of purported passenger pigeons nesting in York County, Maine. The year was 1919, but “no reports that we have ever seen were so plausible or circumstantial, nor could we have encountered greater certainty in our correspondents.” As further corroboration, one of the elderly witnesses was supposed to have been an experienced pigeoner in his younger days. But even after the two scientists observed the birds in question and identified them as mourning doves, the former hunter refused to concede. No doubt, to him they would always be passenger pigeons.21
During a cold spell in late January or early February 1895, two pigeons were shot at Mandeville, Louisiana, one of which is now in the collection of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. Pigeons continued to visit several places in Wisconsin that year. In Prairie du Chien hunters shot them. Michigan claimed ten birds sighted in West Branch and a young female taken on October 1 in a forested portion of Delta County. One flock of sixty and another of twenty-five spent some time in Indiana. Yet another pigeon ventured into Lake County, Illinois, this time reaching the tony suburb of Lake Forest. It was killed by a boy on August 7 using a rifle ball that mutilated the carcass. Fortunately, the young man brought the bird to a neighbor, John Ferry of the Field Museum, who, realizing its significance, preserved the skin anyway.22
Nebraska’s final specimen fell to the Honorable Edgar Howard of Papillion, Sarpy County, when he shot it out of a flock of about twenty on November 9. Another flock supposedly appeared later in the month at Omaha. Two birds became specimens in New York: a taxidermist recalled mounting a male killed in the spring at North Western, while another was shot in September at Clinton. A pair were noted in Grey County, Ontario, in mid-August, the last of the species the observer would ever see. Another bird shot that year, in Putnam County, West Virginia, is deemed the last reliable record for the state. When Oliver Jones collected a male, a nest, and an egg on June 21, 1895, near Minneapolis, he established the last verified record of both the species for the state and nesting in the wild anywhere. He would later donate the pigeon material and the rest of his extensive collection to the University of Minnesota’s Museum of Natural History (the Bell Museum).23
A number of reports come from 1896, spread widely across pigeon range. Professor W. P. Shannon observed the wings of a bird taken at Greensburg, Indiana, either in the winter of 1895–96 or the following spring. No month or day is given, but market hunters are said to have taken three birds at Houston, Texas. Observers in Ontario reported two flocks, one on April 15 consisting of thirteen females or young birds, and one of eleven on October 22. Frank Chapman, editor of Bird-Lore and the creator of the Christmas Bird Counts, examined a mounted young female molting into adult plumage that had been obtained on June 23 in Englewood, New Jersey. Frank Rogers shot one near Dexter, Maine, on August 16. Wisconsin, once home of vast nestings, surrendered its second-to-last bird when a hunter shot a young male that rested on top of a dead tree. This occurred on September 8 near Delavan Lake, Walworth County, an area rich in acorns and grasshoppers, as evidenced by the contents of the pigeon’s full crop. Iowa yielded its last passenger pigeon specimen when a male was shot near Keokuk on September 7 or 17. About a month later, on either October 23 or 25, the last fully corroborated specimen from Pennsylvania was taken north of Canadensis, Monroe County. Frank Cushing Norris shot the bird, an adult male, as it perched alone in a pine tree.24
The year 1896 would also mark the final recorded presence of the species in Louisiana. Just two days after Thanksgiving, A. E. McIlhenny, whose father invented Tabasco sauce, was pursuing prairie chickens in Cameron Parish. As he stalked his quarry, he came across a large group of mourning doves foraging in a field of corn and peas. Fraternizing with the doves was a lone passenger pigeon, which he shot. Hunting quail in Oregon County, Missouri, on December 17, Charles Holden encountered a flock of fifty pigeons skittering across the sky above him. He managed to collect two and sent them in the flesh to Ruthven Deane, the Chicago businessman who did so much to document the last passenger pigeons. These birds are now among the holdings of the Chicago Academy of Science’s Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and I can attest they are both stunning males. Chief Pokagon wrote to Deane in October 1896 that he had been “credibly informed that there was a small nesting of Pigeons last spring not far from the headwaters of Au Sable River in Michigan.” Deane tried to seek corroboration by contacting the state game warden, Chase Osborn. Osborn did not know anything about the Au Sable nesting but mentioned other recent sightings and expressed the belief that a few birds did continue to nest in the northern reaches of the state.25
Although in 1897 a small handful of passenger pigeons were still eking out a living in the great outdoors, at most only two are known to have been killed that year. Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has one bird that was taken on April 26 in Meridian, Wisconsin. The Chicago Academy of Sciences holds the other specimen, but the date of demise is less certain. The label lists the origin as Evanston or Rogers Park (that part of Chicago that borders Evanston) and the time as “around 1897.”26
Margaret Mitchell accepted on good authority that in spring of 1898 a group of twelve to twenty pigeons nested in maple and beech near Kingston, Ontario. Their fate was not recorded, but at least eight pigeons did have fatal encounters with humans during that year. It seems a bit odd that of these eight birds, only one was taken in the spring. That occurrence was evidently never published, but fortunately the corpse wound up in the Harvard collection. Number 248528 died in Adrian, Michigan, on April 19, 1898.27
According to the Osprey (“An Illustrated Magazine of Birds and Nature”), sometime in 1897 or so an unnamed newspaper concocted a story that the Smithsonian Institution was offering generous remuneration for passenger pigeon specimens and/or information on where live birds could be found. Other papers disseminated the falsehood and it reached innumerable readers, many of whom responded with various claims and offers of their own. One cunning soul declared that he knew the secret hideout of numerous passenger pigeons but would divulge the information only upon first receiving payment. But amid all the bogus claims, there arrived at the Smithsonian an immature pigeon, killed on July 27, 1898, two miles east of Owensboro, Kentucky. In November another Kentucky passenger pigeon was reportedly shot in a hemp field near Winchester, but unfortunately the hunter cooked it and served it to his infirm wife for lunch. Afterward, he lamented his mistake and wished he had kept the feathers.28
In Michigan the lives of three passenger pigeons came to an end in 1898. The first two were a pair reportedly shot in July near Grand Rapids. No one would have known of this record had not the outdoor writer Emerson Hough mentioned it in his Forest and Stream column “Chicago and the West.” Decades later, Schorger sought more information about the Grand Rapids birds and contacted the daughter of the man who had them in his possession at the time Hough wrote his article. Although she remembered the two mounts from her childhood, she could not tell him where they wound up.29
The final Michigan bird of 1898 was shot on September 14 and was for a number of years considered the last verified collection of a wild passenger pigeon. Nobody has questioned the identification or the date, but a major prevarication runs through the record. The event was announced to the world in two different notes published in 1903. (Note the five-year delay in publishing.) One of the papers was published in the Auk by James H. Fleming. He merely recorded the date, that the bird was immature, and the name of who mounted it. The second of the 1903 papers was penned by Philip Moody and appeared in the Bulletin of the Michigan Ornithological Club. He noted that Frank Clements shot an immature pigeon a few miles outside Detroit and that the bird was in Fleming’s collection.30
Seven years later, J. Clair Wood published another article on the specimen, also in the Auk. He provided more details on the collection based on conversations he had had with Dr. Moody. Moody is quoted: “Mr. Clements and I were in the thick woods when we noticed three pigeons. They were flying above the tree tops, two abreast and the third behind and lower down. The latter bird lit near the top of a tall tree but the others continued their flight without a pause. I could have shot it but thought it was a Mourning Dove.” A careful reading of the article reveals that Moody never says explicitly that Clements shot the bird, but since Moody did not and someone did, that can only be Clements. All was well and good until 1951 when Norman Wood (Clair’s brother) published The Birds of Michigan and informed his readers that Frank Clements is a pseudonym for Philip Moody. What is going on here? Did Moody lie in his first paper and then later to Clair Wood? At least part of the answer can be found in the statute Michigan enacted in 1897. Under this law, Michigan became the only state to ban all killing of the passenger pigeon. Thus killing a pigeon in 1898 within the borders of Michigan would have been in violation of state law. That is clearly why the announcement of the specimen wasn’t made until 1903. And even at that date Moody was obviously not comfortable admitting that he broke the law, so he created Frank Clements. But Moody’s motivation for getting the story republished in the Auk twelve years after the event and repeating the falsehood remains obscure.31
On September 14, a male passenger pigeon was taken by Addison Wilbur at Canandaigua, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. Elon Eaton was present at the shooting and describes the individual in his Birds of New York as one fledged the preceding spring, as it was not yet in full adult plumage. Canada’s last confirmed pigeon was a male whose life ended in Winnepegosis, Manitoba. According to George Atkinson, who stuffed it, the date of its demise was April 10. The bird was “in the pink of condition in every way” and was the “only specimen [he] was ever privileged to handle in the flesh in Manitoba.”32
The final specimen from 1898 has not hitherto been part of the passenger pigeon literature. The source of the record is Amos Butler, the grandfather of Indiana ornithology, whose monograph The Birds of Indiana (1898) served as the definitive reference for decades. He submitted most of his articles on Indiana birds to the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, including notes published in 1899, 1902, and 1912. Sandwiched between them, “Some Notes on Indiana Birds” appeared in the Auk in 1906. It seems likely that Schorger and other non-Indiana ornithologists assumed that the Auk paper and the 1897 book revealed all that Butler had to say about passenger pigeons in his state. But by overlooking the three papers in the Proceedings they missed two significant records.
Butler includes reports from a variety of people but makes clear those specimens that he himself saw and identified. In the 1899 paper he provides the details of one recently collected bird: “One mounted by Beasley and Parr of Lebanon, was killed by Frank Young, Wilson P.O., Shelby County, Indiana near that place around September 24, 1898. It was in company with two doves in a patch of wild hemp when found. The specimen is in the possession of W. I. Patterson, Shelbyville, Indiana.” He mentions the record again in the 1902 paper, reiterating the September 24 date and specifically stating, “I have seen this specimen.”33
Three reports emerge from 1899. The most poorly documented of them is the mere mention in Birds of Western Pennsylvania that Dr. McGrannon shot one at Roulette, Potter County, sometime during that year. Next, in order of increasing documentation, concerns the Little Rock, Arkansas, merchant who received a male pigeon in with a load of quail that arrived from Cabot, Arkansas. He knew the significance of the bird, for he displayed the specimen for a few days with a sign saying it was the last of the species. The time was late December. The report boasting the best credentials of the three is of a young pigeon that was shot in Babcock, Wisconsin, between September 9 and 15. Schorger considered it the last reliable record from the state and published a note in the Auk elaborating upon the initial report. Emerson Hough was part of the group that secured the specimen and averred that he still had the skin in his possession at least as late as 1910. Where it eventually wound up is unknown.34
STILLED WINGS: THE NEW MILLENNIUM AND THE END OF
THE PASSENGER PIGEON AS A CREATURE OF THE SKY
“Who killed Cock Robin?”
“I,” said the sparrow,
“With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.”
“Who saw him die?”
“I,” said the fly,
“With my little eye,
I saw him die.”
—ANONYMOUS, NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH RHYME
A first-of-the-year female, Buttons, or the Sargents’ Pigeon as preferred by some purists, is one of the best-known wild birds that North America has produced. Her popular sobriquet refers to the objects that were used by the taxidermist to fill the holes on the sides of her head when the preferred glass eyes were not available. She figured as the main character in Allan Eckert’s 1965 novel, The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, where she was called an adult “he” who had a white splotch on one wing. Christopher Cokinos has written at length about his search for the young man who allegedly shot her, and the dedicated scholar Geoffrey Sea, whose house is next door to where the bird was killed, has spent years ferreting out the details about those involved. What brought these people and others to focus on this particular specimen was Schorger’s proclamation “I am willing to accept as the very last record the specimen taken at Sargents, Pike County, Ohio, on March 24, 1900.”35
The saga of Buttons began with a 1902 article by W. F. Henninger on the birds of “Middle Southern Ohio.” His passenger pigeon account takes four sentences, the last two of which are relevant here: “On March 24, 1900, a solitary individual was shot by a small boy near Sargents, close to the boundary line of Pike and Scioto Counties, and mounted by the late wife of ex-sheriff C. Barnes of Pike County. This is the only authentic record for twenty years.” A Lutheran minister by profession, Henninger resided in nearby Waverly and was widely respected as an ornithologist and a taxidermist. He failed to comment on the gender or age of the bird, which has led Sea to conclude he never examined it. If that is true, it makes what follows even more critical.36
If, indeed, the identification rested with Barnes, the record would have warranted no more than a quick mention in any history of the species. But fortunately, Clay Barnes offered to donate the bird to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in October 1914, the month after the last captive bird died. The original accession card is now missing and the documents that remain are ambiguous on the details of the acquisition. But that card was quoted in a 1955 story that appeared in the Ohio Conservation Bulletin. It was dated February 25, 1915: “Received from Clay Barnes Waverly. Killed by Mr. Barnes himself.” The article relied heavily on the views of Dr. Edward Thomas, who served as both curator of natural sciences at the Ohio State University Museum from 1931 to 1962 and the curator of natural history at the Ohio Historical Society. No one knew the collection better than Thomas. Based on the accession card and other factors less clear, he evidently believed that Barnes had indeed shot the bird and invented the small boy to avoid any disapprobation (shades of Dr. Moody/Mr. Clements). The Waverly Courier Watchman, spurred by the recently passed Ohio law protecting game, had been railing against those who use “rifles in shooting every bird they see,” and thus it was politically inexpedient for the good sheriff to admit that he fell into that category.37
On the other hand, Thomas assumes that Henninger spoke with the Barneses about the incident. He would have had but a narrow window in which to conduct that conversation, as the bird was shot in late March and Mrs. Barnes died around July 8, just three days before her newly born infant also passed away. (Sea believes mother and child died of arsenic poisoning, as the substance was commonly used in the preparation of specimens.) But if that interview had occurred and the Barneses had made up the boy story, they would have been lying to Henninger’s face or Henninger agreed to go along with the ruse. Sea, though, does not think this talk did ever take place, because of both Mrs. Barnes’s death and local politics: divisions within Pike County at the time would likely have separated the Barneses from the Henningers.
Decades later, Christopher Cokinos tracked down the supposed shooter, Press Clay Southworth. Southworth had died in 1979, having lived just six years shy of a century. Cokinos describes him in the most glowing terms, calling him “a strong and polite man, witty and usually patient,” who grieved “deeply” for two wives who predeceased him. When Southworth read an article in Modern Maturity magazine in 1968 recounting the Buttons tale, he responded with a letter to the editor giving an extremely detailed recollection of events that took place almost seventy years earlier. The youngster had been tending the cattle in the barnyard when he saw “a strange bird feeding on loose grains of corn.” The bird flushed and landed in a tree. The visitor puzzled Southworth, for it was too big for a mourning dove and flew differently from a rock pigeon. He ran into the house to get permission from his mother to dispatch the bird with the family’s 12-gauge shotgun: “I found the bird perched high in the tree and brought it down without much damage to its appearance. When I took it to the house, Mother exclaimed—‘It’s a passenger pigeon.’” His father concurred in the identification and urged him to take the bird to Mrs. Barnes, who prepared the mount, improvising when she discovered she had no glass eyes left.38
As far as I know, no one since Schorger has examined the question of which record represents the last wild bird. It is, of course, impossible to know when the last wild passenger pigeon died. Buttons, after all, was a young of the year, so it is perfectly possible that one or both of her parents were still around, and if they could have fledged young, so likely could others. Most of these reports, including Buttons, had been first challenged by James Fleming, who seemingly tried to cast doubt on the timing of all specimens collected after September 1898, the date of the most recently killed pigeon in his possession.39
In my research, I have come upon two records unknown to Schorger that extend the confirmed presence of the species in the wild to 1902. One of these is a specimen at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, which is the last undoubted passenger pigeon known to have been collected in the wild for which there is an extant specimen. From Paul Hahn’s Where Is That Vanished Bird?—an amazing work that gives the location of every known passenger pigeon specimen in the world (along with a few other extinct or nearly extinct birds)—I knew that a passenger pigeon was in the collection at Millikin. A mutual friend contacted David Horn, the ornithologist at Millikin, about my interest, and Horn sent me several photos of the bird in its display case. One shot clearly revealed the label: “This bird was killed in March 25, 1901 near Oakford, Illinois and mounted by O.S. Biggs, San Jose, Illinois.” On the back of the case were the same words with some additional information. Biggs had mounted the bird for M. O. Atterberry, but then purchased it from Atterberry a short time later. The last sentence states, “This was the last Passenger Pigeon killed in Illinois that there is any record of.” And it ends with “O.S. Biggs.” I was flabbergasted to see a specimen that was purportedly taken so late.
Further research revealed additional details. The front page of the August 1901 issue of the Oologist (vol. 18, no. 8) includes this short note: “Under date of March 25, Mr. O.S. Biggs of San Jose, Ill., writes: ‘A friend sent me a fine specimen of a male Passenger Pigeon which was killed March 12 near Oakford, Illinois. It is the first one I know of being killed here in 8 or 9 years. I have it mounted and in my collection.” For reasons that are not clear, another central Illinois naturalist and friend of Biggs’s, R. M. Barnes, sent a similar letter to the Oologist that was published in April 1923: “We are informed by O.S. Biggs of San Jose, Illinois, that one of these birds [Passenger Pigeon] was killed March 25, 1901 at Oakford, Illinois, and was mounted by him and is still in existence. Owing to the lateness of the date, we thought this capture worthy of record.” Barnes obviously did not know that Biggs had sent the same information to the same journal twenty-two years earlier. The only real contradiction is that the original note as published gave the killing date as March 12 and the letter date as March 25, while Barnes and the label on the back of the case say the bird was shot March 25. I would be inclined to accept March 12, 1901, as the date the bird was shot and March 25 as the date Biggs sent his letter to the Oologist, particularly since it is not clear who wrote the label. But at most the discrepancy is thirteen days and is based on a plausible reason, confusion between the date of Biggs’s letter to the journal and the date of the actual shooting.
Nothing is known about the circumstances of the bird’s killing or whether Atterberry was even the actual shooter. But both Atterberry and, especially, O. S. Biggs attained enough prominence to have left a historical record. Atterberry and a partner bought what had been a drugstore in Oak-ford, Menard County, in 1892. Later, Atterberry acquired sole ownership in what would become a highly successful business that offered a wide variety of services and products including banking, hardware, drugs, groceries, and sundries. Residents referred to it as Sears Roebuck of Oakford. An operation such as that would have attracted local hunters and others who had unusual items to show or sell, so if Atterberry was not the shooter himself, he would have been in a good position to have acquired a freshly killed passenger pigeon.40
Biggs (1861–1947) was a college graduate who came from one of the founding families of Mason County. He had eclectic interests and was at various times occupied as a pig farmer, banker, tax assessor, apiarist (vice president of Illinois River Valley Beekeepers Association), and taxidermist. This last pursuit is the most relevant to this story. He donated specimens to the Illinois State Museum and “reportedly” had some of his work displayed in such universities as Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. A note published in the Auk on one of Illinois’s few prairie falcon records credits Biggs as the source of the specimen.41
Biggs had two daughters, Hazel and Olive. When he died, his extensive natural-history collection was divided between them. Hazel, who also became an accomplished taxidermist, used her home as a small museum that featured the mounts created by her and her father. These holdings were eventually donated to the Illinois State Museum. Olive, a liberal arts major who graduated from Millikin in 1926, wound up giving her birds to Millikin. In the college Bulletin of July 1947, there is a discussion of the contributions collected to help finance a proposed Science Hall: “More than 200 birds and animals were given by Mrs. Cyril Gumbinger (Olive Biggs) ’26. It is a collection her father made through a lifetime, including white owls, eagles, and a passenger pigeon now extinct. It is valued, we are told, at ‘several thousand dollars.’”
The second record I wish to introduce refers to an Indiana specimen for which all salient facts are known and the identification is beyond dispute; unfortunately, however, the bird itself was destroyed many decades ago. Details appear in those obscure notes of 1902 and 1912 that Amos Butler published in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science.
The bird was shot on April 3, 1902, and Butler learned about it shortly thereafter “through the kindness of Fletcher Noe,” who operated a pawn/taxidermy shop in Indianapolis. Butler quotes a letter from Charles K. Much-more, a pharmacist in Laurel:
The bird, which is a beautiful male, was taken by a young man named Crowell, near his home, about two and one-half miles southwest of this place. He reported that there were two. He heard the bird cooing and shot it and brought it to me, having concluded that it was something new. You can imagine how we almost took it away from him when he unrolled it out of a bloody old newspaper and began to inquire if we knew what it was … I used to see them occasionally in Iowa about 1882–3, and although I was then very small, the specimen was not new to me, and I, of course, at once recognized the same.42
If matters ended with that letter, the record would rest on Muchmore’s identification. Butler quotes him in a number of his papers so he likely was reliable, but his stature would not be enough to carry the weight necessary to establish the veracity of the report. Unfortunately, he never donated the specimen to a collection where it can currently be examined, but he did the next best thing. Butler continues the story in his 1912 paper: “The last verified record for this State is from Franklin County. Two birds were seen, and one was shot, near Laurel, April 3, 1902. The specimen taken was submitted to the writer for verification and was returned to Mr. C.K. Muchmore, the owner, at Laurel.” It is inconceivable that Butler would have misidentified a dead adult-male passenger pigeon that he had the opportunity to study in hand at leisure.43
I wanted to find out more, but inquiries in Laurel yielded nothing. Might there be a hint of the bird’s fate buried in Butler’s writings? Don Gorney, a longtime birder who enjoys a wild-pigeon chase, became my accomplice on a trip to the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, where most of Butler’s papers are housed. We spent a day perusing the contents of many boxes and realized that almost all of it related to Butler’s social-welfare and prison work. There was, for example, the case of the two young women who tried to bribe their way out of incarceration at a state facility by offering a gardener the only thing they could provide that he felt was of value. They kept their part of the bargain but he reneged on his. An old story, I suppose. But we found virtually nothing about birds.
Undaunted, Don started poking around and learned that the papers we sought were in the possession of the Indiana Audubon Society and kept at their headquarters. The society then passed the material along to their archivist and board member, Alan Bruner. Don contacted him, and Alan graciously invited Don and me to his house, where we could go through two huge boxes of unorganized Butler stuff. Alan lives near Turkey Run State Park, which is three hours from me and two hours from Don. The day I selected turned out to coincide with the season’s first serious discharge of snow. To arrive in advance of the precipitation, I left the day before and stayed at the closest motel. In the morning, the roads slick with slush, I slowly made my way around the S-curve, over one bridge, past the cemetery, and then across the final bridge before reaching Alan’s house. He and his wife, Jackie, answered my knock and the day began. Don arrived shortly thereafter.
Amos Butler. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Alan had moved the two big boxes next to a table off the kitchen. The boxes brimmed with papers of various kinds in no order. Both Alan and Don explained how many hands the contents had gone through before reaching their current state. I was not hopeful.
Amazingly, however, Alan found them: two letters from Muchmore to Butler, one dated August 30, 1932, and the other just a few weeks later on September 19. We learned that Muchmore obtained the pigeon from Crowell in exchange for “a week’s supply of tobacco trade” (September 19) and that Muchmore stuffed the bird himself. Crowell had since moved to Nebraska.
Then there was the August 30 letter, which brought closure to the affair, albeit in a disappointing way:
I am very sorry to report that the pigeon was destroyed some 17 years ago, in this wise: I was taken with tubercular trouble and dropped everything and headed for the mountains. I was in Grant County at the time. Later, I wrote to a friend to go to the store and get my specimens and take them home with him until I might be able to call for them. This he did, but unfortunately his wife promptly threw them into a woodshed attic and the winter rains beating through the roof wrecked them all, so that months afterward when I inquired about them they were gone. I shall always regret my failure to put this specimen in the state museum as you suggested and as I had fully intended to do.
(There is probably a lesson in this for all of us.)
This record is unassailable and is the strongest claimant as the last wild bird killed. Thus ends, to the best that can be ascertained, the existence of the passenger pigeon as a wild bird. But a hundred years ago, a few people were not yet ready to concede the fact. Schorger describes what follows this way: “No better example of eternal hope, so characteristic of man, can be found than the search for a living wild passenger pigeon long after it had ceased to exist.”44
Sight records and even some claims of dead passenger pigeons continued for years. None other than Theodore Roosevelt felt certain that he had observed a flock of seven on May 18, 1907, at his presidential retreat, Pine Knot in Albemarle County, Virginia. Roosevelt obviously knew the status of the species and quickly penned letters to two confidants. The most detailed exposition of his experience went to C. Hart Merriam: “I saw them flying to and fro a couple of times and then they all lit in a tall dead pine by an old field. There were doves in the field for me to compare them with, and I do not see how I could have been mistaken.” The other letter went to his close friend John Burroughs, the famed nature essayist. To Roosevelt’s delight, Burroughs responded that pigeons had also been seen in New York and on occasion in sizable numbers.45
Burroughs had independently concluded that “a large flock of wild pigeons still at times frequents this part of [New York], and perhaps breeds somewhere in the wilds of Sullivan and Ulster County.” His view drew the attention of William Mershon, who was preparing his book at the time. Mershon wrote him and asked if the observers had possibly mistaken plover, teal, or other migratory birds for pigeons as he himself had done. Burroughs replied that his view was based on the accounts of several people he knew well, one of whom said the birds spread across the sky at a length of a half mile. Still, Burroughs was enough of a scientist to harbor at least a trace of doubt for he commented that with all the pigeons in upstate New York “they ought to be heard from elsewhere—from the south or southwest in winter.” He further acknowledged that their presence raised another question as well: “If these flocks were pigeons, where have they been hiding all these years?” Where, indeed?46
Another person who still held out hope was the eminent scientist Clifton Fremont Hodge of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Called “a born naturalist,” Hodge possessed strong interests in a variety of fields including forestry, ornithology, physiology, and environmental education, long before it was called that. Hodge was tending his garden one fall morning in 1905 when a flock of about thirty long-tailed birds flew over. They were so close, he harbored no doubt as to their identity. “The passenger pigeons are not extinct,” he yelled as he waved his hat excitedly. Like others before him, he read meaning into the presence of the bird, although the message he divined was unique: by granting him this privilege, the fates wanted him to prove to the ornithological community that the species still survived outside a cage.47
During the American Ornithologists’ Union meeting in the fall of 1909, Hodge presented a paper he called “The Present Status of the Passenger Pigeon Problem.” It was a call for action. He asked the assembled bird scientists, “Do you think that a scientifically adequate search has been made for Ectopistes migratorius?” Nobody answered strongly that such an effort had been mounted, and some, including the influential C. Hart Merriam, replied firmly that it had not. Hodge went on to decry the offers made by various parties that they would pay for any recently killed pigeons. Putting a bounty on whatever few remaining birds there might be would surely minimize their chances of survival. Rather, he thought, the rewards should be for active nests that could be verified by competent ornithologists.48
After the session, Hodge had a conversation with Colonel Anthony Kuser, one of those who had offered money for a dead bird, in his case $100. Hodge was conciliatory, saying he did not expect everyone to concur with him, but to his surprise, Kuser agreed completely with his position. When Hodge then suggested the reward should go for information about live birds, Kuser not only obliged but also raised the ante to $300. Ultimately, the joint announcement stipulated these conditions: “Three hundred dollars for first information of a nesting pair of wild Passenger Pigeons undisturbed. Before this award will be paid, such information, exclusive and confidential, must be furnished as will enable a committee of expert ornithologists to visit the nest and confirm the finding. If the nest and parent birds are found undisturbed, the award will be promptly paid.49
Other affluent fans of the passenger pigeon soon followed Kuser’s lead: William Mershon for the first nest or nesting colony in Michigan, $100; Professor C. O. Whitman and Ruthven Deane for first nest in Illinois, $100 ($50 each); John Childs for a nest anywhere in North America, $700; A. B. Kinney for first nest in Massachusetts, $100; Edward Avis for first nest in Connecticut (will confirm at his own expense), $100; John Thayer for first nest in any state not yet spoken for up to five, $100 per state; and Allen Miller for first nest in Worcester County, Massachusetts, $25. The contributors and amounts varied a bit over time. These offers and specially prepared colored plates of passenger pigeons were distributed widely in the hunting journals and local newspapers.50
People realized that locating living birds would be but the first step. Hodge proposed that if the search proved successful, there should be established a Passenger Pigeon Restoration Club, which would reach out to public and private agencies to provide protective laws and “warden service.” The goal would be to ensure security for the birds over their entire range: “The organization of the people of a continent around such an interest is in itself an inspiring thing.”51
Reports poured in. Nests also found their way to Hodge, happily mostly of mourning doves, but at least one of either a sharp-shinned hawk or merlin. He lamented that the press was not more careful in emphasizing that payment would only be made for active passenger pigeon nests. George Harrington of Waltham, Massachusetts, did not even wait for official confirmation before going directly to the newspapers with his discovery of a pair of birds in an unnamed town. They were cooing away in a large oak. While everything that Hodge published referred to a maximum award of around $1,000, Harrington was expecting closer to $10,000. It seems he had the idea that both the federal and state governments had chipped in thousands of dollars as well. At the time of the article, Harrington was waiting to hear back from Hodge, so he could show him the pigeons and collect his small fortune. Hodge’s failure to even mention the incident suggests that the passenger pigeon claim was no more real than the expected cash windfall.52
But enough sight records, albeit every one lacking details, came in to warrant continuing the search one more year. During 1911, four reports came in that led to field investigations, but no surprises. A number of eyewitness accounts did seem highly credible. In two of these, birds were shot, but in each instance the evidence wound up in a pot. Even the feathers vanished. Hodge called this “the nightmare of the whole situation”: whether they were correct in their identifications or not, people continued to kill birds they thought were passenger pigeons.53
Then in October Hodge received a letter from one Dwight Cushman of Hebron, Maine: “One day recently, while out hunting, I shot a bird and had it mounted by one of our leading taxidermists. It proved to be a Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). I think it is a young bird as it has dark spots on the back. Please reply giving me some more information concerning this bird.” Hodge, probably quivering with anticipation, promptly mailed off a package that included “leaflets with photographs and underscored boldly in red ink the comparative lengths of the Pigeon and Mourning Dove. I also enclosed … colored plates of the two birds.” In his cover letter, Hodge told Cushman to compare the enclosed with his bird. If he still thought the original identification was correct, Cushman should send the bird express and he would be compensated for the expense. “An early express brought a little box,” inside of which was indeed a bird. Hodge sent the mourning dove right back to Maine, charging Cushman the eighty-seven cents for the return express. This incident illustrates so well why an acceptable late record of a wild passenger pigeon had to be either of a specimen examined by people competent to identify it or live birds seen well by multiple ornithologists.54
Hodge did not give up easily and the offer was extended one more year. By now the numbers of contributors had increased. Henry Shoemaker said he would give $200 to the first nest in Pennsylvania and would throw in $25 more if it was protected. A nest in New York would bring $100 courtesy of John Burroughs. But Hodge made it clear that this was it: if no confirmed passenger pigeon nestings materialized by October 31, 1912, all the offers would be rescinded. Halloween came and went. There were no treats. The scientific community had given it its best shot, but they were too late by years.55
All the passenger pigeons in the world that still drew breath resided in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. And her name was Martha.