Mourning 100 years of passenger pigeon extinction

Monday’s opening of dove season across most of the United States will be celebrated by millions of hunters. The same date could also be looked on with sadness, since it marks 100 years since the last passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo.

That a bird species once believed to be North America’s most thriving through the mid-1800s could totally vanish from the wild in 50 years is almost hard to believe.

Long fascinated with the birds, I’ve lately come up with these facts.

In the early 1800s, it’s estimated up to 5 billion passenger pigeons lived in the eastern U.S. and Canada. At the time, there were only about 1 billion people on the entire planet. Kansas was at the western fringe of the bird’s range, and there are a few documented specimens or sightings from the 1870s.

In 1813, noted ornithologist John James Audubon wrote of a flock that took nearly two days to pass overhead. According to Bird Watcher’s Digest, estimates put that single flock at about 180 miles long, and holding 1.1 billion birds. In 1806, a Kentucky flock was reported to be one mile wide, and 240 miles long, which could have had 2.2 billion passenger pigeons. As late as 1860, a flock estimated at 3.7 billion birds passed over Ontario, according to Smithsonian.com.

Passenger pigeons were between mourning doves and common pigeons in size, though they looked more like the dove. Unlike both birds, though, they normally only laid a single egg per year. Mourning doves commonly raise two to four broods per year, each with two to four chicks.

According to both publications, passenger pigeons amassed in huge breeding colonies from the upper Midwest into New England. One colony in Wisconsin in 1871 held an estimated 136 million breeding birds, within 850 miles of forest, according the the Smithsonian. Sometimes the droppings under such roosts could be a foot deep. Birds spread in most directions after their young were raised.

Passenger pigeons depended heavily on mature hardwood forests, both for roosting trees and for the acorns and other mast they ate. They also had a fondness for farmers’ grain, too. Such crop losses, the popularity of the bird on American dinner tables, and deforestation led to some amazing slaughter rates.

In 1878, an average of 50,000 passenger pigeons were killed daily around Petosky, Mich., for five months, according to Bird Watcher’s Digest. The birds were shot, killed with poles, caught in nets and even killed with explosives. Those not eaten by humans were sometimes fed to hogs or discarded.

By 1890, passenger pigeons were considered rare, with no more than a few thousand birds left in the wild. By 1900, biologists debated if any birds were left in the wild.

According to the book “Wilderness Warrior,” one of the last reports of passenger pigeons in the wild came when about a dozen birds were sighted near a cabin in the mountains of Virginia. The birds were reported by one of America’s leading wildlife experts of that time, and greatest conservationist of all time, President Theodore Roosevelt.

This story was originally published August 30, 2014 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Mourning 100 years of passenger pigeon extinction."