98 years ago today...

[jbnbsn99]

98 years ago today, September 1st, what was considered the world's most numerous bird went extinct.

Requiescat in pace Ectopistes migratorius

 

[Chlidonias]

the tale of the passenger pigeon is a truly saddening one. From the most numerous bird on the planet to extinct in the blink of an eye

Rather than typing out a bunch of statistics I'll just quote from this: The Passenger Pigeon

The passenger pigeon may have been the most abundant bird since archaeopteryx fluttered its first feather back in the late Jurassic. John James Audubon rode the 55 miles from Henderson, Kentucky, to Louisville one day in autumn 1813, and through the whole long day, he rode under a sky darkened from horizon to horizon by a cloud of passenger pigeons. He estimated that more than a billion birds had passed over him. In 1866, a cloud of birds passed into southern Ontario. It was a mile wide, 300 miles long, and took 14 hours to pass a single point. Latter-day estimates suggest something in excess of 3.5 billion birds in that flock. The continental population may have been as high as 6 billion, a number that could represent anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of all the birds in North America 350 years ago.

 

[DavidBrown]

It is very sobering that the U.S. managed to kill the world's most abundant bird and almost wipe out the bison, perhaps the most abundant large land mammal at the time.

There are still a few hundred thousand African elephants and several tens of thousands of giraffes and possibly lions left. Can we stop them from suffering the same fate as the passenger pigeons? There are now tens of thousands of bison (and the population is increasing) where there were only perhaps hundreds at the start of the 20th century, so perhaps that gives some hope.

Zoos could be a mass communication medium for helping prevent the passenger pigeon-ization of the world's remaining megafauna, but they need to get busy.

 

[gentle lemur]

The added irony is that the passenger pigeon was bred successfully in the Earl of Derby's collection at Knowsley, before the stock was dispersed after his death. If anyone had anticipated the problem early enough, things could have been different.

Alan