[wisb] Sheboygan Press article about Passenger Pigeon
- From: "Dave&Margaret Brasser" <2shebbirders@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wisbirdn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 10:41:05 -0500
On page A4 of The Sheboygan Press today (April 12, 2014) there was a photo:
A rail car and hunters with their catch on a North Dakota pigeon hunt.
1890s. This accompanied an article, "Passenger Pigeons - from abundance to
extinction", written by Beth Dippel, executive director of the Sheboygan
County Historical Research Center, 518 Water St., Sheboygan Falls;
schrc.org.
Link to the article:
http://www.sheboyganpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014304120188&nclick
_check=1
Since this year's WSO Convention (May 15-18 in Prairie du Chien) has the
demise of the Passenger Pigeon as its focus, I thought I would pass on this
article - and encourage all birders to sign up for the Convention! Deadline
for registration: online at the WSO website
(http://wsobirds.org/?page_id=5176) or postmarked by April 15. Here's the
article:
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon.
Once the most plentiful land bird on Earth it went from abundance to
extinction in about 50 years. When Europeans began exploring North America
in the 17th and 18th centuries historians estimate there were 3 to 5 billion
passenger pigeons. Yes, that really is billion. They made up, perhaps, 40
percent of the total North American bird population. Each spring flocks
migrated from the South to the Midwest, making the return journey in the
fall, darkening the sky with their passing. A flight over Columbus, Ohio, in
1855 prompted the following eye-witness account: "As the watchers stared,
the hum increased to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses
and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting
out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered
their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A
few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium,
and several dropped on their knees and prayed."
Passenger pigeons would fly and nest as huge groups. John James Audubon,
famed naturalist, recorded a flock flying at 60 miles an hour that passed
overhead continuously for three entire days, and upon finding their roost he
found the ground covered in two inches of bird droppings. The largest
recorded nesting was in Wisconsin in 1871. A conservative estimate of the
nesting area was 850 square miles, and estimates put the number of nesting
pigeons at 136 million. With as many as 100 nests in a tree, the weight
sometimes caused branches to fall off and trees to collapse.
So, what happened? In the late 1800s pigeon hunters followed flocks around
the country via rail, searching for nesting grounds. The put their bounty in
barrels and later refrigerated box cars and shipped them east. Squab was a
tasty delicacy. Operating on an enormous scale, hunters crammed tens of
thousands of birds into boxcars. Hunting of passenger pigeons decreased
their numbers, especially since they laid only one egg a year. All this
coincided with an explosion in logging, which began destroying the habitat
of pigeons just as hunters were destroying the pigeons themselves.
Deforestation of the land played a huge part in their extinction. The birds
fed voraciously from the tree nuts of mature beech and oak forests. A
Detroit newspaper in the late 19th century described the squabs as having
"the digestive capacity of half a dozen 14-year-old boys." Once the forests
were cut down, the food source disappeared. In their wake, passenger pigeons
left behind stripped fields and ravaged woods. Their droppings, which coated
branches and lay a foot thick on the ground like snow, proved toxic to the
undergrowth and fatal to the trees. The abundance was misleading. In 1900, a
boy in Ohio shot a passenger pigeon out of a tree with a twelve-gauge
shotgun, killing what was probably the last wild member of the species.
A small captive population remained at the Cincinnati Zoo, including a pair
named George and Martha. By 1910, Martha was the sole survivor. Officials
offered a thousand-dollar reward for a mate, but on Sept. 1, 1914, the last
passenger pigeon in the world died. The last live bird seen in Sheboygan
County, as noted in a diary entry, was in the town of Mitchell in the 1880s.
A Jan. 3, 1930, Sheboygan Press article noted that the Smithsonian was home
to 35 to 40 stuffed passenger pigeons, including Martha. A Milwaukee
Sentinel article from Feb. 2, 1933, reported that the Milwaukee Public
Museum owned just one pair. In 1963, a Sheboygan Press article highlighted
the pair of pigeons on display at the Sheboygan County Museum. They had come
from the Carl Benninghaus collection, but because of safety concerns from
arsenic used during the taxidermy process, they were removed from the
collection in the 1990s and sent to a facility more able to deal with such
issues.
Excessive hunting, loss of habitat and overpopulation of the birds
themselves created a perfect storm that ended a species. All that remains of
the once abundant birds in Wisconsin is a monument in Wyalusing State Park
on the Mississippi River. [Note: That monument has been refurbished and
will be re-dedicated on Saturday morning, May 17.)
--Margaret Brasser
Sheboygan
Sheboygan County
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