A Feathered River Across the Sky

You can stream or download this radio program at the following link.

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=14-P13-00011&segmentID=6

Living on Earth
Air Date: Week of March 14, 2014

In the 19th century passenger pigeons numbered in the billions across North America. By 1914 they were extinct. Naturalist Joel Greenberg has written a book about the pigeon and its extinction called A Feathered River across the Sky, and he joins Steve Curwood to talk about lessons we can learn from its demise.

CURWOOD: Well, the New World offered many other wonders besides gullible Native Americans to the first settlers. Then up to 40 percent of the continent’s birds were passenger pigeons, that travelled in flocks so massive they blocked out the sun for hours, sometimes for days. Yet the species was gone within a couple of centuries, and the very last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914. Joel Greenberg is the author of “A Feathered River Across the Sky, the Passenger Pigeon’s Flight To Extinction”,

-----

GREENBERG: That is correct. There were three things about the passenger pigeon that made it unlike any other bird that human beings have ever known. One, the huge population, almost certainly in the billions - the most abundant bird in North America if not the world. Secondly, that population was not evenly spread over the landscape. They would aggregate in huge, huge numbers, perhaps the largest flight ever reported was from 1860 near Toronto. Modern scientists have made some assumptions, and they believe that depending on how fast the birds were flying, there were anywhere between two billion and 3.7 billion birds. And third, despite that abundance, by 1900, just 40 years later, the bird was, for all intents and purposes, gone from the wild. 14 years after that, the last bird died in the zoo. So the rapidity with which deliberate human action wiped out a species of that population size is unprecedented.

-----

CURWOOD: So in the late 1800s some people begin to notice the passenger pigeons were becoming scarce. How did they explain what was happening?

GREENBERG: Different people reacted to that differently. There was an industry, and people who had a financial interest in maintaining the taking of these birds made up things like, “oh, don’t worry, the birds lay multiple eggs and they nest many times during the year.” Well, the fact is the bird only laid one egg, and they only nested once a year. The last real gathering of any size at all were a few million birds in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 1882 so people would say, see, there’s a big flock in Wisconsin, so don’t worry. When people are confronted with inconvenient truths, one approach is to deny it.

There were even more bizarre responses. One person wrote that the birds had all moved to Colombia, South America, lived in the jungles and changed their appearance so no one could recognize them. No, no, they moved to Arizona in the desert, like Americans seeking freedom have always done, they moved west. Once the birds were extinct, one guy was a pigeon hunter and wrote articles defending the industry. When the birds were gone, he wrote an article and he said, “yup, the birds are gone and, man, I don’t have any idea at all how this happened.”

CURWOOD: Joel, this is such a dark story. Why explore this now 100 years later? Why not just let this rest?

GREENBERG: Well, there’s a couple of responses to that. It’s a powerful cautionary tale. It shows that no matter how common something is, and that could be water, it could be fuel, or it could be something alive. If we’re not good stewards, if we’re not careful, we can lose it. And so, this message, this lesson is important to us today. I mean, there’s an analogue I think is the closest, and that’s pelagic fishing - removing all living things using these factory ships with their nets, depleting shark and tuna populations for the same reason the pigeon was wiped out.

-----