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 .
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
10 BIRDLIFE • DECEMBER 2016