Monday 01 September 2014
Conservationists will fall silent at noon today to mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of Martha, the last ever passenger pigeon – just as a new project is set up to bring the species back from the dead.
The iconic clock will stop at Cincinnati Zoo, where Martha died in her cage on September 1, 1914, ending a demise that was so dramatic that it represents the most extreme extinction in modern history.
The North American passenger pigeon – or wild pigeon – was once so abundant it accounted for 40 per cent of the continent’s birds when Europeans first arrived in the 16th Century, and even by the 1860s it still accounted for one in four birds.
One flock in southern Ontario was reported to be a mile wide, 300 miles long, containing 3.5billion birds that took 14 hours to pass and eclipsed the sun from noon until nightfall.
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