Page 5 - Where Have All the Birds Gone?: Nature in Crisis

He stood as still as a statue,
with birds flying all around
him. “They passed like a
cloud through the branches
of the big trees, through
the underbrush and over
the ground,” he later wrote.
They were passenger pigeons
(Ectopistes migratorius),
pretty birds a little bigger
than mourning doves. The
males were slate blue on top
with coppery undersides.
The females were brownish.
The birds flapped their long,
tapered wings and landed all
around—on the branches,
on the ground, on his head,
American artist John James Audubon
on his shoulders. The
made this painting of male and female
fluttering of their wings and
passenger pigeons in the early 1800s.
the ringing of their chatter
were deafening.
Pokagon had watched passenger pigeons all his life. In the early
nineteenth century, when he was a boy, they were likely the most
numerous birds on the planet. Year after year, roughly three billion
passenger pigeons migrated north and south through the eastern
and midwestern United States and Canada. They flew as far north
as Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia and as far south as Texas,
Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
The size of the flocks was staggering. They were so immense
that they darkened the skies for days as they passed overhead. One
flock, estimated at one billion birds, stretched 300 miles (483 km)

5 Three Billion to Zero