PASSENGER PIGEONS

Passenger pigeons. Photo courtesy: National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium

PASSENGER PIGEONS.

Dubuque Miners' Express, reprinted in the Vermont Phoenix, May 26, 1843

The following account of a Western wild Pigeon Roost is from the Dubuque Miners' Express:

    There is an immense Pigeon Roost in the forks of 
    the Maquoketa river in Jackson County, such as has 
    never been seen in this country before. It is three 
    miles long, and a half a mile in width. There can be 
    no estimate made of their numbers. Their roosting 
    places are almost a mile distant from their nests and 
    feeding places, being three in number, and each covering 
    a section of land; and in passing to and fro they darken 
    the air with their number; they break down young trees 
              with their weight and hundreds are killed by getting 
              entangled in the falling limbs and branches. The people 
              kill them with clubs; and their noise is so loud that 
              when a gun is fired amongst them, the report cannot be 
              heard; and a person can stand in one place and shoot all 
              day, the birds returning as soon as you can load. They 
              are building their nests, and the people are alarmed, 
              lest they may destroy their crops. (1)

Passenger pigeons were often described as blackening the skies when their colossal flocks passed overhead.

              A rough estimate of the number of birds passing a given 
              point in spring may be useful.  The cross-section of an 
              average flock was say, a hundred yards from front to rear, 
              and fifty yards in height, and when the birds were so 
              close as to cast a continuous shadow there must have been 
              fully one pigeon per cubic yard of space . . . or say 
              30,000,000 for a flock extending from woodland to the other.  
              Since such flocks passed repeatedly during the greater part 
              of the day of their chief flight at intervals of a few minutes, 
              the aggregate number of birds must have approached 120,000,000 
              an hour for, say five hours, or six hundred million pigeons 
              virtually visible from a single point in the culminating part 
              of a single typical migration.” 
                    W.J. McGee describing a flight near Dubuque, one spring 
                    day in the early 1860s or 1870s. (2)

The famous ornithologist John James Audubon claimed to have seen a flock take three days to pass by. The birds appeared inexhaustible and were treated as such. Each year over the course of several decades, hundreds of thousands of passenger pigeons were killed and trapped. They were shot for sport, commercially hunted, and even captured for use as live trapshooting targets.

              Ed Volkert of Dubuque used a net that was thirty by 
              sixty feet. He took as many as 1,500 birds in one 
              morning and sold the live birds for ten cents each 
              to be used as targets for trapshooting. The crippled 
              birds were killed and sold by the barrel, which went 
              for a dollar on the market in Chicago. (3)

However, by the late 19th century the great flocks had disappeared and the last confirmed report of a wild passenger pigeon occurred on March 24, 1900, in Pike County, Ohio. The bird had been shot and killed by a young boy. (4)

Passenger pigeons likely remained in the wild, but all subsequent sightings were unconfirmed. President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt owned a cabin in Albemarle County, Virginia, known as Pine Knot. During a stay in May 1907, Roosevelt saw what he believed to be a small flock of passenger pigeons and wrote to naturalist John Burroughs about it. At Burroughs’ suggestion, Roosevelt was able to collect at least one statement of corroborative evidence from an Albemarle County neighbor. (5)

In 1907 the birds could still be viewed, at least in captivity. By 1910, only a single individual remained, a female named Martha, at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Passenger pigeons passed into history with Martha’s death at around 1:00 p.m. on September 1, 1914. (6)

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Source:

1. "Pigeon Roost," Online: http://iagenweb.org/boards/jackson/documents/index.cgi?read=414250

2. Project Passenger Pigeon. Online: http://www.passengerpigeon.org/states/Iowa.html

3. Ibid.

4. Passenger Pigeons. Online: http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/2013/August/09-Passenger-Pigeons.aspx

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.