I have a distinct memory of an incident when I was quite small — perhaps four years old — on some warm weekday afternoon when my grandmother received a phone call and then bustled me out the door of our home in Culver (my parents were both at work) to the parking lot of the nearby Emmanuel Methodist Church, where a small but excited crowd had gathered around an injured bird.
I remember there being quite a bit of mystique about the bird, which was some sort of pigeon (I caught that much), and which had a note tied around its leg. In due time, there arrived the closest thing to Dr. Doolittle (for those old enough to understand the reference!) our little town had: Dr. Wallace Helber, a biology instructor at Culver Academies who had a sort of menagerie of his own in the backyard of his home on the north side of Culver. Mr. Helber — whose animal-filled yard fascinated me the few times I visited with my mother — was the one everyone consulted in those pre-Internet days about any topics relating to wildlife in the area. I expect most small towns had such a resource back then.
Only decades later, as an adult, did I learn that the bird had been a carrier pigeon, sent cross-country by its hobbyist owner. The bird had been blown off course and was injured by a storm, and Mr. Helber’s phone call to the number tied to its leg yielded instructions to allow the bird to heal, and feed it, if he would, please, before sending it off to resume its flight, all of which took place, and the story apparently had a happy ending.
Besides the general excitement most children feel over animals, I believe the incident was also cemented in my mind due to some confusion about the topic of this month’s article. I knew there had been “these pigeons” (who exactly told me, I don’t know, but it was probably my older sister) that had once been prolific in our area but which had gone extinct.
Carrier pigeons, or homing pigeons have a fascinating history as literal carriers of notes and messages going back centuries (most prominently in the years before telephones, but also for various reasons simultaneous to phones’ existence). They are also, of course, not extinct. So, our small-town storm victim was nowhere near the last of his kind, but he was an interesting enough specimen for a slow weekday in Culver.
But the homing pigeons’ (arguably) less employable cousin, the passenger pigeon, is, in fact, extinct. And to make their sad story more relevant to Lakes Magazine readers, the last known passenger pigeon in the wild was killed 123 years ago this month, on April 3, 1902, near the town of Laurel in Southeastern Indiana.
Passenger pigeons, unlike, say, the well-known case of the dodo bird, which had a geographic range that played a significant role in its limited numbers, were once incredibly prolific, especially in the Midwest, as they bred especially around the Great Lakes. And while many people presumed passenger pigeons had a close biological relationship with the well-known (and still common) turtle dove, or mourning dove, instead passenger pigeons are technically more closely related to the standard pigeon quite visible in larger cities. Their name is taken from the French and refers to their tendency to “pass by” as highly migratory (and for that matter social) birds.
Not only are the sheer numbers of passenger pigeons that once occupied the US notable for being ironic — given their eventual extinction — but the volume of the birds occupying the land was also notable as their best-known trait, cementing them in the minds of those who witnessed the almost-unbelievable size of their flocks.
Legendary ornithologist John James Audubon, famous for his efforts to paint every North American bird, ran into a flight of pigeons near the Ohio River in Kentucky that was so large that he gave up efforts to count them. He estimated he saw at least a billion of the birds that day, noting that “the air was filled with Pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow.”
Audubon’s description of flocks of passenger pigeons blacking out the sky was not an uncommon one. In a 2017 article on the Indiana Historical Bureau’s blog, “Untold Indiana,” 10-year-old rural Monroe County resident Walter Rader was quoted (from a 1934 article) as recalling millions of passenger pigeons gathering at his family’s farm in the 1870s, blackening “almost the entire visible area of sky,” and their weight roosting in the surrounding trees at night “often break(ing) large limbs from the trees” so loudly he could hear the noise inside his house.
Similar descriptions date to some of the earliest years of European settlement in the country, with the site quoting Ralphe Humor describing a scene in Virginia in 1615 with passenger pigeons “beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that even they have shadowed the sky from us.”
According to Wikipedia, the birds’ flocks ranged from a mere three feet to as high as 1,300 feet off the ground, with passenger pigeons averaging around 62 mph in flight. The site also notes that some three to five billion of the birds were estimated to have existed prior to the 19th-century reduction in their numbers, making up some 25 to 40 percent of the land birds in the US.
As might be assumed, the eventual decline and extinction of passenger pigeons was the result of overhunting by humans, though trapping, shooting, or otherwise securing the birds as a food source predated the 19th century by many years. Native Americans used them for meat, their fat for butter, and the birds in general for other purposes. Early European settlers relied heavily upon their meat, making them second only to the turkey as a game bird.
The ability to easily kill large quantities of them, even if one was not a great shot, combined with their huge flocking numbers, added to their usefulness. They were eventually raised domestically to increase their size and fat content, and trapping and shooting them in controlled, sport environments also emerged by the 19th century (the still contemporary term, “trap shooting,” derives from shooting contests in which passenger pigeons were released from specially designed traps).
As the “Untold Indiana” article noted, shifts in population and transportation in the US in the latter half of the 1800s added to the market for pigeons, which became something of a delicacy in cities as opposed to a rural practicality: “Roads, canals, and railroads connected the far corners of the country and created a national market. As the railroad expanded into rich game areas in the west, market hunters could capture or kill millions of pigeons at vast nesting sites in the North and ship them east for huge profits, instead of just selling a few at local markets.”
It’s worth noting, too, that many farmers considered the massive volume of passenger pigeon flocks to be something less than a gift, as they could do considerable damage to land and crops (some described the visual effect of seeing the land after a truly large flock passed by, as comparable to viewing land after a tornado touched down). Further, as prolific as the birds obviously were, it was inconceivable to many that even the most extreme cuts into their numbers could have the disastrous effect that would ensue.
Some, however, saw the possibility far ahead of its coming to pass.
As far back as 1847, when naturalist Bénédict Henry Révoil watched the town of Hartford, Kentucky spend three days with virtually every resident shooting into the passing pigeon flock (and pickling or smoking as much of the meat as they could each evening), he predicted that the rate of killing the birds was not sustainable. At the time, as noted in the “Untold Indiana” article, Révoil wrote prophetically that “if the world endures a century longer, I will wager that the amateur of ornithology will find no pigeons except in select Museums of Natural History.”
He was correct. The 1870s saw the last of the large flocks of passenger pigeons described earlier, with ornithologists and conservationists expressing fear for the future existence of the birds by the 1880s. By the time widespread calls for preservation measures, including among sportsmen, hit near the turn of the 20th century, pigeon numbers were too low. Even the 1900 Congressional Lacey Act, which prevented the hunting of wild birds for export for sale to another state, was too little, too late.
Cash rewards were offered in the 1910s for anyone who could point to a flock or nest of passenger pigeons, but to no avail.
As noted at Untold Indiana: “Historian Joel Greenberg recently found new evidence, further examined in his book A Feathered River Across the Sky, that the last verified passenger pigeon in the wild was shot here in Indiana, near Laurel, on April 3, 1902. A young boy shot the bird and brought it to local taxidermist Charles K. Muchmore, who recognized it at once and preserved it until ornithologist Amos Butler verified it was indeed a passenger pigeon. Unfortunately, a leaky roof destroyed the specimen around 1915.”
A handful of passenger pigeons were preserved in captivity, including at one of the oldest zoos in the US, the Cincinnati Zoo, where, in 1909, a female named Martha, along with two males, became the last known surviving passenger pigeons. After the last of the two males died in 1910, Martha became famous as the very last of her kind. What had become the least remarkable and uninteresting facet of the zoo’s collection in earlier decades (who, after all, would go out of their way to see the most common bird in the Midwest?), became a marvel in the final years of her life.
Martha, the last known passenger pigeon on earth, was found dead on the floor of her cage on September 1, 1914.
If there was a silver lining to the extinction of the passenger pigeon, it was a new, much more widespread eye on conservation and preservation efforts. If a species as prevalent as passenger pigeons could go extinct, surely less common animals could very realistically meet the same fate (as indeed some have).
Jeff Kenney serves as Museum-Archives Manager for Culver Academies in Culver, Ind., where he also serves on the board of the Culver Historical Society.
