There was still plenty of forage to support the birds, but logging and the expansion of agriculture reduced the areas where the birds could congregate and made them more accessible to hunters. Habitat loss played a role in the extinction as well, but only indirectly. Their efforts were augmented by local hunters, who also took advantage of this fortuitous source of revenue. These markets sustained anywhere from 600 to 3,000 hunters who did nothing but chase the birds throughout the year wherever they appeared. This enabled hunters from all over to converge on such locations, and the proximity of rail stations meant the pigeon corpses could be easily conveyed to the burgeoning markets of the Midwest and East. The introduction and expansion of the telegraph and railroad beginning in the 1840s meant that wherever the birds were observed the information could be distributed quickly and widely. The best evidence is that the bird was “simply” slaughtered into oblivion. More plausible theories included disease, which although not impossible is without any evidence at all, as large numbers of dead birds were never found (unlike caves today filled with dead bats, the victims of white-nose syndrome). Some, like Henry Ford, accepted their extinction but thought the birds had drowned in the Pacific Ocean as they fled to freedom. There were the deniers who claimed the hordes of pigeons all moved to South America where they changed their appearance to elude their pursuers. The 1871 nesting of passenger pigeons in Wisconsin likely involved 136 million adult birds.Īt the time of Martha’s death, the depletion of so much abundance in such a short time was difficult for people to accept and explain. And it holds some important lessons today for a world where increasing numbers of species are becoming extinct. The rapidity with which this bird’s population went from billions to none was, I believe, unprecedented. Yet by 1890, there were probably no more than several thousand of the pigeons left, and the last wild bird was shot on Apin Laurel, Indiana. Other accounts, written over the course of three centuries and in several languages, testify to the birds darkening the sky for hours at a time over the major cities of the eastern third of the United States and Canada.Īt Fort Mississauga, Ontario (located at Niagara on the Lake, about 80 miles from Toronto) in early May of around 1860, Ross King, a major in the British army, witnessed and described in great detail a movement of passenger pigeons that has been calculated at more than two billion birds and, depending on how fast they were flying, could have been as many as 3.7 billion. John James Audubon, America’s best-known student of birds, recorded a flight of passenger pigeons along the Ohio River in Kentucky that eclipsed the sun for three days. These birds had a propensity for forming huge aggregations that are difficult to imagine today. SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONĪs late as the 1860s, passenger pigeons had likely numbered in the billions, and their population was neither evenly distributed across the landscape nor in any way subtle. Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon, on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

Passenger pigeon