Thoughts about
Passenger Pigeons
(This column was first published in
the December 1, 2003 issue of The Buffalo News.)
Walking
through a neighborhood woodlot early on Thanksgiving morning I flushed a dozen
mourning doves from a weed patch where they had been gleaning seeds. Their
wings made that whistling "whe-whe-whe" as they flew off a short
distance to perch on tree limbs. They bent to watch my progress along the trail
below them.
As
I walked on my mind turned to their larger relative, the passenger pigeon, once
the most common bird in North America but since September 1914 extinct. In that
month the final individual died in the Cincinnati Zoo.
What
would it have been like, I wondered, to walk through these woods when pigeons
roosted here during a mid-1800 migration?
When
I returned home I sought an answer to this question and found that it would not
have been a pleasant experience. Here is how Peter Kalm describes just such an
occurrence: "The big as well as the little trees in the woods...became so filled
with them that hardly a twig or branch could be seen which they did not cover;
on the thicker branches they had piled themselves up one above another's
backs."
He
continues, "When they alighted on the trees their weight was so heavy that
not only big limbs and branches of the size of a man's thigh were broken
straight off, but less firmly rooted trees broke down completely under their
load. The ground below the trees where they had spent the night was entirely
covered with their dung, which lay in great heaps."
It
is almost impossible to conjure up the numbers of those birds. Most of us have
seen flocks of thousands of starlings and blackbirds. Those are nothing when
compared to passenger pigeon numbers so I checked census records of the Buffalo
Ornithological Society. I found that the maximum number of birds recorded in
one day during migration across all of western New York and nearby Ontario is
about a quarter million.
In
1832 ornithologist Alexander Wilson estimated a single flock of passenger pigeons
at over 2.2 billion. That number is almost 9000 times that total of birds in
our entire area.
Here
is how Wilson reached his amazing estimate. He assumed the flock he saw to be a
mile in breadth, although he believed it to be much more. Supposing it was
moving at a mile a minute, as it was four hours in passing, he estimated that
its whole length would have been 240 miles. He also assumed that each square
yard contained three pigeons: as the flock was many levels deep, there must
have been many more than this.
Audubon
compared the ambient light as migrating pigeons passed over to an eclipse.
Others described the noise they created as roaring like thunder, trains or even
tornados.
What
happened to that vast multitude of birds?
Alexander
Bent tells us, "Its annihilation has been popularly attributed to various
natural phenomena: epidemics, tornadoes, early deep snowstorms, forest fires,
strong winds while the birds were crossing large bodies of water causing
exhaustion and death by drowning." But he puts them in perspective:
"These natural causes had acted for countless ages but the passenger
pigeon survived, but when the white man arrived on the North American
Continent, and especially after the pigeon became a commercial asset, its
destruction was ordained. The evidence that man is responsible for the enormous
destruction is voluminous and convincing."
Thank
goodness not all stories end so sadly. We need only think of our Thanksgiving
bird, the wild turkey, once completely extirpated from this region. Now these
handsome birds are a rather common feature of our countryside.--
Gerry Rising