NOV 16, 2017
On September 1, 1914, an old,
trembling passenger pigeon named Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo. With her
demise, her entire species slid into extinction. But in many ways, the species
was already gone, for a solitary passenger pigeon is almost not a passenger
pigeon at all. This is an animal that existed in gestalt. Its essence was in
the flock.
Passenger pigeons were once the
most abundant bird in North America, and quite possibly the world. At their
peak, there were a few billion of them, traversing the continent in gargantuan,
nomadic flocks that would blacken the sky for hours as they passed overhead.
Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi author and leader, described
them as
“the grandest waterfall of America” and their sound as that of “distant
thunder” or “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells.”
And then, people started shooting
them. They poisoned them, netted them, gassed them, hit them with sticks. In a
matter of decades, the continent’s most common bird has been completely wiped
out, down to the last individual. “It’s always astounded me how something could
have that large a population and entirely disappear,” says Beth Shapiro from
the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Why didn’t tiny populations survive
somewhere in refugia? I mean, we are pretty good at murdering things, but how
did we kill every one of them?”
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