FLIGHT OF FANCY
In memoriam
PASSENGER PIGEONS
by JOHN JAMES AUDUBON
Sixty years before Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon
Ectopistes migratorius, died in Cincinnati Zoo (at 1pm
on 1 September 1914), the Ohio State Legislature considered a law to protect the species, but a Senate Select
Committee reported it “…needs no protection. Wonderfully
prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food,
it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary
destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.” With a common name reputedly derived from the French passager, or “passer by”, a word,
ironically, that also translates as “fleeting”, ubiquity played a key role
in their downfall. Simply no one believed the birds could disappear.
Indeed, the author, William King, a soldier based at Fort Mississauga in
Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Ontario, Canada, reported having seen “grand
migration of the Passenger Pigeon” in May 1860. He estimated that passage numbered millions, in a rolling flock that was a mile wide and 300 miles
long and that took some 14 hours to pass overhead. So, in not much less than
half a century, an extraordinary bird disappeared for good. Although hunted
for eons – indeed the Seneca, who lived south of Lake Ontario, called them
jahgowa, or “big bread” – it was the arrival of European settlers and deforestation, along with the hunting, that led to their extinction.
only four years after Martha was
lost that the National Audubon Society (BirdLife in the US), named in the
artist’s honour, was established. Since 2004,
the society has leased the house in Montgomery
County, Pennsylvania where Audubon lived in the early 1800’s.
It was here that he developed the wiring technique for mounting
specimens that made his paintings so vividly lifelike; and here where
he fell in love with and married his wife, Lucy Bakewell, who lived
next. A centre devoted to the arts and conservation will open there in
early 2018. For more, see johnjames.audubon.org
John James Audubon’s celebrated Birds of America, which includes 453 lifesized paintings, was completed in 1838. His wonderful depiction of a pair of Passenger Pigeons, the female above, and the male below, has a terrible poignancy.
Audubon’s own writings speak of sightings that left him “struck with amazement”, but when he died in 1851, they were already hanging in the balance. It was
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John Fanshawe
BIRDLIFE • DECEMBER 2016
DECEMBER 2016 • BIRDLIFE
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