As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Silence to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of last ever passenger pigeon


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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