100th Anniversary of Passenger Pigeon Extinction

zooboy28

zooboy28

Well-Known Member
100 years ago today, on September 1 1914, the Passenger Pigeon became extinct when the last individual, Martha, died at Cincinnati Zoo. Once the most abundant bird in America, its became an icon of extinction. Could it ever return?

Full Story on National Geographic: Century After Extinction, Passenger Pigeons Remain Iconic?And Scientists Hope to Bring Them Back

A hundred years ago on Monday, a once-mighty species became extinct. At the Cincinnati Zoo, a passenger pigeon named Martha died at the age of 29.

People coming to the zoo to see the last passenger pigeon were disappointed by the bird, which barely budged off its perch. As Joel Greenberg writes in his recent book A Feathered River Across the Sky, some threw sand into its cage to try to force it to walk around. But on that first day of September a century ago, Martha no longer had to put up with such humiliations.

It was a quiet end to a noisy species. As recently as the mid-1800s, deafening flocks of billions of passenger pigeons swarmed across the eastern half of the United States. But they proved no match for humans, whose rapidly advancing technology drove the birds to extinction in a matter of decades.

Other species were also spiraling toward extinction in the late 1800s, but the destruction of the passenger pigeon happened on full public display. "It became the icon of extinction," says Mark Barrow, a historian at Virginia Tech and the author of Nature's Ghosts.

A hundred years later, the passenger pigeon remains iconic and is inspiring extravagant new technological feats. One team of scientists is even trying to bring the species back from extinction, using genetic engineering and cloning. Others are analyzing bits of passenger pigeon DNA to reconstruct its lost ways of life. (Read "Bringing Them Back to Life" in National Geographic magazine.)

And whether scientists are able to bring passenger pigeons back or not, the birds may still offer lessons about keeping other species from following it into oblivion...
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See rest of story, including 3D gif of a passenger pigeon, on link above.
 
There is a fascinating correspondence in the Bronx Zoo archives that begins with the founding director of the Cincinnati Zoo, Sol Stephan, asking the Bronx Zoo's famous director, William Hornaday, if he knew of anyone who could provide Cincinnati with a Passenger pigeon. I don't remember whether Cincinnati was down to one individual at the time or more. But the two directors agreed that there had been no confirmed sightings of the species in years and no other zoo had any. It was touching to read this discussion written at a time when the species was probably already extinct in the wild.
 
IanRRobinson said:
By my translation from German, Knowsley held seventy birds in 1851. If only....:(
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Indeed. After the death of Lord Stanley, the Earl of Derby, the contents of the Knowsley Menagerie were sold at auction in 1851.The auction catalogue records that the sale included seventy passenger pigeons, all bred at Knowsley.

And the species bred so well at Knowsley that surplus birds were periodically liberated from their aviary.........
 
Tim May said:
Indeed. After the death of Lord Stanley, the Earl of Derby, the contents of the Knowsley Menagerie were sold at auction in 1851.The auction catalogue records that the sale included seventy passenger pigeons, all bred at Knowsley.

And the species bred so well at Knowsley that surplus birds were periodically liberated from their aviary.........
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All of which makes this an extinct species infinitely more painful to consider than the California Parakeet or Thylacine, to name but two - although I believe Knowsley did not do too badly with those either.
 
TeaLovingDave said:
All of which makes this an extinct species infinitely more painful to consider than the California Parakeet or Thylacine, to name but two - although I believe Knowsley did not do too badly with those either.
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I've never come across a reference to a thylacine in the Knowsley Menagerie; London Zoo received its first thylacines (a pair) in 1850 the year before the Earl of Derby died and his menagerie sold.

What is the source for a thylacine in the Knowsley Menagerie please?
 
Tim May said:
Indeed. After the death of Lord Stanley, the Earl of Derby, the contents of the Knowsley Menagerie were sold at auction in 1851.The auction catalogue records that the sale included seventy passenger pigeons, all bred at Knowsley.

And the species bred so well at Knowsley that surplus birds were periodically liberated from their aviary.........
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Wow. Amazing and shocking to think that something so common, and so successfully bred in zoos, could be allowed to disappear.
 
The Natural History Museum has compiled a list of 100 facts to mark the anniversary. Although "100 facts" seems to be stretching it a bit far, and I note that #92 & 93 at least are missing!

Full list here: NaturePlus: Behind the scenes: 100 passenger pigeon facts on the 100th anniversary of its extinction

A couple that I found most interesting:

17. While not strictly a specimen, we (NHM) do have another passenger pigeon - this one is a terracotta sculpture designed by Alfred Waterhouse. You can see it on the Museum side of the pillars in our fence along Cromwell Road.
18. The terracotta depictions of creatures where placed according to status: extant (i.e. living forms) on the west side; extinct on the east side.
19. Today there are two notable exceptions to this rule: the passenger pigeon which was alive when the building was erected in the late 1800s, but is now extinct; and the coelacanth, which was thought to have gone extinct 85 million years ago, but was rediscovered in 1938.
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91. Martha, who was on public display in the NMNH's Hall and Birds of the World displays until 1999, is now kept behind the scenes as part of the Museum's research collection.
94. However, to commemorate the anniversary of her death, Martha has been brought back out to star in NMNH's Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America exhibition, which runs until October 2015.
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Tim May said:
I've never come across a reference to a thylacine in the Knowsley Menagerie; London Zoo received its first thylacines (a pair) in 1850 the year before the Earl of Derby died and his menagerie sold.

What is the source for a thylacine in the Knowsley Menagerie please?
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I meant to write "the former" rather than "those" - in other words I was referring to the Carolina Parakeet! :o
 
IanRRobinson said:
According to zootiereliste, these collections in Europe held Passenger Pigeons. ZootierlisteHomepage

By my translation from German, Knowsley held seventy birds in 1851. If only....:(
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I own a copy of the volume about the 13th Earl of Derby published by NMGM (National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside) published to coincide with an exhibition about him at Liverpool Museum in 2002.
The 70 passenger pigeons were sold in 5 lots when the Earl's collection was auctioned after his death in 1851. There is a male specimen at York Museum which came from Knowsley, it was originally purchased by Audubon in New York in 1830.
The Earl's will allowed Queen Victoria and the Zoological Society of London to each select a lot before the sale started: she chose the group of 5 Himalayan monals, the Society chose the herd of 5 Cape elands. The ZSL also purchased 160 animals of 62 species for almost £1000. Amsterdam and Paris zoos bought animals too. In total 641 lots were sold for £6400.
How different things might be if one of the zoos had bought all the passenger pigeons and followed the Earl's methods - but of course in 1851 there was no concept of captive breeding of endangered species (it didn't really exist in 1951 either) and of course, the passenger pigeon was still a very common bird.
The Carolina parakeet was at Knowsley much earlier, it died in 1812, before the 13th Earl succeeded to the title (he was known by the courtesy title of Lord Stanley).

Alan
 
TeaLovingDave said:
I meant to write "the former" rather than "those" - in other words I was referring to the Carolina Parakeet! :o
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Thanks for the clarification, Dave, this makes sense now; I would have been very surprised to learn that Knowsley Menagerie did have a thylacine.
 
gentle lemur said:
The Carolina parakeet was at Knowsley much earlier, it died in 1812, before the 13th Earl succeeded to the title (he was known by the courtesy title of Lord Stanley).
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There were later Carolina parakeets at Knowsley too; the auction catalogue, for the 1851 Knowsley Menagerie sale, lists four Carolina parakeets for sale.

gentle lemur said:
Amsterdam and Paris zoos bought animals too.........
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Amsterdam (Artis) Zoo purchased the Knowsley quagga; this is probably the mounted specimen now in the Tring Museum.
 
gentle lemur said:
I
. In total 641 lots were sold for £6400.
How different things might be if one of the zoos had bought all the passenger pigeons and followed the Earl's methods - but of course in 1851 there was no concept of captive breeding of endangered species (it didn't really exist in 1951 either) and of course, the passenger pigeon was still a very common bird.


Alan
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I think even as late as this there was still a large number amongst the scientific world that didn't believe that a species could go extinct, that there would always be more somewhere.
 
jay said:
I think even as late as this there was still a large number amongst the scientific world that didn't believe that a species could go extinct, that there would always be more somewhere.
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In 1851 that would be like a program to breed field mice.
Given the wholesale slaughter of the species for food and other uses, it is clear that no one could imagine it would become scarce let alone disappear. And it we were looking at one flock of anything with 3billion individuals, would we think differently?
 
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