Page 6 - Where Have All the Birds Gone?: Nature in Crisis

Lake Superior CANADA

MICHIGAN (Upper Peninsula)

(Upper Peninsula) Lake Huron

Manistee
River

Lake Michigan = 20 million
pigeons
WISCONSIN
N MICHIGAN

Miles
0 50 100
0 50 100 150
Kilometers
Billion-Bird
Migration

The flock of passenger pigeons witnessed in 1850, if viewed from above,
would have stretched approximately this far across northern Michigan.

long and took fourteen hours, from sunup to sundown, to pass
overhead. Many years later, Pokagon described watching the birds
flow “like some great river” across the sky.
Before the nineteenth century, passenger pigeons lived a secure
existence in North America. They migrated through the eastern
forests, searching for the acorns and other nuts that nourish them.
Each spring they headed to the Great Lakes region to breed. The
birds that Pokagon witnessed on the Manistee River were part of an
enormous flock descending into the forest to mate and nest.
In 1895, as Pokagon neared the end of his life, he recalled, “I have

Where Have All the Birds Gone? 6