Information about Ectopistes

Passenger Pigeon
Male Passenger Pigeon--chromolithograph Male Passenger Pigeon--chromolithograph
Conservation status
Extinct  (1914) (IUCN)
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Aves Order: Columbiformes Family: Columbidae Genus: Ectopistes Swainson, 1827 Species: E. migratorius
Binomial name
Ectopistes migratorius (Linnaeus, 1766)

The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) or Wild Pigeon was a species of pigeon that was once the most common bird in North America. It is estimated that there were as many as five billion passenger pigeons in the United States at the time Europeans colonized North America.^[1] They lived in enormous flocks, and during migration, one could see flocks of them a mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long, taking several days to pass and might contain a billion birds.^[2][3] The species had not been common in the Pre-Columbian period, until the devastation of the American Indian population by European diseases.<ref > "Prior to 1492, this was a rare species." Mann, Charles C. [2005-08-12]. "The Artificial Wilderness", . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 315–8. ISBN 1-4000-4006-X.  Over the 19th century, the species went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction.^[4] At the time, Passenger Pigeons had one of the largest groups or flocks of any animal, second to only the Desert Locust.

Some decimation in numbers occurred as a result of loss of habitat, when the Europeans started settling further inland. However, the primary factor emerged when pigeon meat was commercialized as a cheap food for slaves and the poor in the 19th century, resulting in hunting on a massive scale. There was a slow decline in their numbers between about 1800 and 1870, followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890,^[5] at the end of which they were rare and beyond the point of recovery. 'Martha', thought to be the world's last passenger pigeon, died on September 1 1914 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In the 18th century, the Passenger Pigeon in Europe was known to the French as "tourtre" but in New France, the North American bird was called "tourte". In modern French, the bird is known as the pigeon migrateur.

In Algonquian languages, it was called amimi by the Lenape and omiimii by the Ojibwe.

Description

During summer, passenger pigeons lived in forest habitats throughout North America east of the Rocky Mountains: from eastern and central Canada to and northeast USA. In the winters, they would migrate to southern USA and occasionally to Mexico and Cuba.

The passenger pigeon was a very social bird. It lived in colonies stretching over hundreds of square miles, practicing communal breeding with up to a hundred nests in a single tree. Pigeon migration, in flocks numbering billions, was a spectacle without parallel:

Insert the text of the quote here, without quotation marks.

Causes of extinction

While the extinction of the passenger pigeon is the result of multiple causes, the primary cause is held to be the commercial exploitation of pigeon meat on a massive scale.^[1]

Even prior to colonization, native Americans occasionally used pigeons for meat. In the early 1800s, commercial hunters began netting and shooting the birds to sell in the city markets as food, as live targets for trap shooting and even as agricultural fertilizer and .

Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale. The bird painter John James Audubon described the preparations for slaughter at a known pigeon-roosting site: "Few Pigeons were then to be seen, but a great number of persons, with horses and wagons, guns and ammunition, had already established encampments on the borders. Two farmers from the vicinity of Russelsville, distant more than a hundred miles, had driven upwards of three hundred hogs to be fattened on the pigeons which were to be slaughtered. Here and there, the people employed in plucking and salting what had already been procured, were seen sitting in the midst of large piles of these birds. The dung lay several inches deep, covering the whole extent of the roosting-place."^[6]

Pigeons were shipped by the boxcar-load to the Eastern cities. In New York City, in 1805, a pair of pigeons sold for two cents. Slaves and servants in 18th and 19th century America often saw no other meat. By the 1850s, it was noticed that the numbers of birds seemed to be decreasing, but still the slaughter continued, accelerating to an even greater level when more railroads and telegraphs, both of which allowed the species to be tracked and hunted more easily, were set up after the American Civil War. Three million pigeons were shipped by a single market hunter in the year 1878.

Other significant reasons for its extinction include deforestation. The birds relied on acorn and beech mast for breeding and shifted or occupied their breeding colonies in accordance with the food trees' mast year cycle. Indeed, it is with the decimation of forests that the passenger pigeon was forced to hunt for grain on newly established farms, where their large numbers caused considerable crop loss. Many farmers took to shooting them and using their meat for food. However, this did not seem to seriously diminish the total number of birds until the commercial exploitation began.^[1]

Possibly, the birds may have suffered from Newcastle disease, an infectious bird disease that was introduced to North America; though the disease was identified in 1926, it has been posited as one of the factors leading to the extinction of the passenger pigeon.

Attempts to revive the species by breeding the surviving captive birds were not successful. The passenger pigeon was a colonial and gregarious bird practicing communal roosting and communal breeding and needed large numbers for optimum breeding conditions. It was impossible to reestablish the species with just a few captive birds, and the small captive flocks weakened and died. Since no accurate data were recorded, it is only possible to give estimates on the size and population of these nesting areas. Each site may have covered many thousands of acres and the birds were so congested in these areas that hundreds of nests could be counted in each tree. One large nesting in Wisconsin was reported as covering 850 square miles, and the number of birds nesting there was estimated to be around 136,000,000. Their technique of survival had been based on mass tactics. There was safety in large flocks which often numbered hundreds of thousands of birds. When a flock of this huge a size established itself in an area, the number of local animal predators (such as wolves, foxes, weasels, and hawks) was so small compared to the total number of birds that little damage would be inflicted on the flock as a whole. This colonial way of life and communal breeding became very dangerous when man became a predator on the flocks. When the passenger pigeons were massed together, especially at a huge nesting site, it was easy for man to slaughter them in such great numbers that there were not enough birds left to successfully reproduce the species^[7]. As the flocks dwindled in size with resulting breakdown of social facilitation, it was doomed to disappear ^[8].

The extinction of the passenger pigeon aroused public interest in the conservation movement and resulted in new laws and practices which have prevented many other species from going extinct.

Methods of killing

Alcohol-soaked grain intoxicated the birds and made them easier to kill. Smoky fires were set to nesting trees to drive them from their nests.^[9]

One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock would land near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger. This was the origin of the term stool pigeon. ^[10]

One of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons was at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. Here 50,000 birds were killed each day and the hunt continued for nearly five months. When the adult birds that survived the slaughter attempted second nestings at new sites, they were located by the professional hunters and killed before they had a chance to raise any young.

Conservationists were ineffective in stopping the slaughter. A bill was passed in the Michigan legislature making it illegal to net pigeons within two miles of a nesting area, but the law was weakly enforced. By the mid 1890s, the passenger pigeon had almost completely disappeared. It was too late to protect them by passing laws. In 1897, a bill was introduced in the Michigan legislature asking for a ten-year closed season on passenger pigeons. This was a futile gesture. A highly gregarious species, the flock could initiate courtship and reproduction only when they were gathered in large numbers; it was realized only too late that smaller groups of passenger pigeons could not breed successfully, and the surviving numbers proved too few to re-establish the species.^[1] Attempts at breeding among the captive population also failed for the same reasons.

Last wild survivors

The last fully authenticated record of a wild bird was near Sargents, Pike County, Ohio, on 22 March, 1900,^[1][11] although many unconfirmed sightings were reported in the first decade of the 20th century[1][2][3]. From 1909 to 1912, a reward was offered for a living specimen;^[12] the fact that the reward was never claimed indicates that they were more likely than not gone in the wild by that point. However, unconfirmed sightings continued up to about 1930[4].

Reports of passenger pigeons being sighted kept coming in from Arkansas and Louisiana, in groups of tens and twenties, until the first decade of the 20th century.

The naturalist Charles Dury, of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote in September 1910:

Insert the text of the quote here, without quotation marks.

Martha

In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the passenger pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating "The passenger pigeon 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" (Hornaday, W.T. 1913: Our Vanishing Wild Life. Its Extermination and Preservation)

Fifty-seven years later, on September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati, Ohio. She was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned and mounted. Currently, Martha is in the museum's archived collection, and not on display. Martha was named after Martha Washington.

Popular culture

The dramatic story of the passenger pigeon has taken a strong hold on popular imagination.

• The musician John Herald wrote a song about Martha, "Martha (Last of the Passenger Pigeons)".
• The April 27, 1948 episode of the Fibber McGee and Molly radio program is titled "The Passenger Pigeon Trap", in which McGee claims to have seen a passenger pigeon (he insists that the bird is "stinct") and plans to trap it in order to sell it to the highest bidder. It turns out to be nothing more than a rock pigeon (Columba livia) sitting on top of a bus, which in McGee's mind makes the pigeon a passenger.
• In "The Man Trap", the premiere episode of , Professor Crater likens the near-extinction of the inhabitants of planet M113 to the demise of the passenger pigeon.
• Stephen King makes a number of references to the passenger pigeon in the 2005 novel Cell. He uses the pigeon as an allegory to the new human hive mind that develops after the pulse hits the United States.
• In the 1999 movie by Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Louie (John Tormey) identifies the bird owned by the titular character as a "carrier pigeon". He is corrected by an elderly mafioso who shouts, "Passenger pigeon! Passenger pigeon! They've been extinct since 1914!" (The bird was in fact one of the homing pigeons Ghost Dog used to transport - "carry" - notes, which explains Louie's misidentification).

• The term "stool pigeon" was first coined when passenger pigeons were captured, had their eyelids sewn shut, and were tied to stools. The birds sitting on the stools would be used as live decoys so pigeon hunters would have an easier shot at their quarry. Today, it is a term used for an unscrupulous person giving information about someone's misbehavior or illegal activity http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/335600.html.
• Ectopistes migratorius is the second chapter of the novel Havana Glam (2001) by Wu Ming 5. The reappearance of the pigeons in 1944 is the first signal of the arrival of time travelers from the 21st century USA.
• A description of the passage of a flock of passenger pigeons, and the killing of large numbers of the birds, is given in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers. Although this was published in 1823, Natty Bumppo expresses outrage at people's "wastey ways" and concern about the possible future extinction of the bird.
• The Australian poet Judith Wright wrote a poem called "Lament For Passenger Pigeons."
• The Indie-Rock band PAIN(t)bynumbers wrote a song called "Martha, Sweet Martha" in memory of the last passenger pigeon.
• The alt-country duo The Handsome Family have a song called "Passenger Pigeons" featuring on their 2001 album Twilight

Place names

Across North America, place names refer to the former abundance of the passenger pigeon. Examples include:

• Crockford Pigeon Mountain, Georgia
• Mimico, a neighborhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The name means "The Place of the Passenger Pigeons" in the language of the Mississauga Indians.
• Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
• Pigeon Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin
• Pigeon Point: Minnesota
• Pigeon Rivers in: Minnesota-Ontario, North Carolina/Tennessee, Michigan (four), and Wisconsin
• Pigeon Roost, Indiana
• Pigeontown, Pennsylvania, now known as Blue Bell
• White Pigeon, Michigan.
• Pigeon Hill, Marietta Georgia.
• Ile-Aux-Tourtes, an island west of Montreal Island on the Trans-Canada Highway-Autoroute 40. It means, Passenger Pigeon Island (in French-Canadian).

Coextinction

An often-cited example of coextinction is that of the passenger pigeon and its parasitic lice Columbicola extinctus and Campanulotes defectus. Recently,^[13][14] C. extinctus was rediscovered on the Band-tailed Pigeon, and C. defectus was found to be a likely case of misidentification of the existing Campanulotes flavus.

See also

• Extinct birds
• List of extinct animals

References

Further reading

• Weidensaul, Scott (1994). Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing. ISBN 1-55591-143-9.
• Eckert, Allan W. (1965). The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Lincoln NE: IUniverse.com. ISBN 0-595-08963-1.
• New York Times; August 18, 1901, Wednesday; The Hon. Charles T. Dunning of Goshen, ex-Chief Clerk of the New York State Senate, has a fine collection of mounted specimens of birds, and among them is one of a bird that is today extinct, so far as any one has been able to discover, although less than fifteen years ago it was abundant on this continent and to the people of this State was as familiar as sparrows now are.
• Schorger, A.W. 1955. The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. Reprinted in paperback, 2004, by Blackburn Press. ISBN 1-930665-96-2. 424 pp.

External links

• Songbird Foundation: Passenger Pigeon
• The Extinction Website
• Passenger Pigeon Society
• The Demise of the Passenger Pigeon (as broadcast on NPR's Day to Day)