Page 7 - Where Have All the Birds Gone?: Nature in Crisis

stood by the grandest waterfall of America . . . yet never have my
astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I
have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from
heaven.” But by the time he wrote those words, passenger pigeon
flocks numbered in the dozens rather than the millions or billions.
The birds were almost gone.
Where did they all go?

THE LAST OF THE PASSENGER PIGEONS
In the nineteenth century, passenger pigeons collided with two
deadly forces: overhunting and destruction of their forests. The large
flocks often damaged food crops, so farmers retaliated by shooting
the birds. Some hunters killed the pigeons merely for sport. Others
shipped them across the country to be sold as food. And hunting
passenger pigeons was easy. The flocks were so thick and so vast that
a hunter could easily shoot a thousand birds in one outing.
By 1850, the year Pokagon was camping on the banks of the
Manistee River, hunters were killing the birds faster than they were
reproducing. As their numbers dwindled, some states passed laws
to limit or restrict the hunting of passenger pigeons, but people
widely ignored the laws. Meanwhile, loggers were clearing woods to
make way for cities and farms. The trees they cut down were used
as building material and burned for fuel. As large tracts of forest
disappeared from the East and Midwest, passenger pigeons lost
their habitat.
The population collapsed in a downward spiral and never
recovered. The birds’ destruction alarmed some people. “The wild
pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from
the face of the earth,” said US representative John F. Lacey of Iowa.
“We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction,
which may serve as a warning to all mankind.” Lacey introduced

7 Three Billion to Zero