Page 8 - Where Have All the Birds Gone?: Nature in Crisis

This illustration from the 1870s shows American hunters shooting
passenger pigeons.

the first national wildlife protection law, which Congress enacted in
1900. The Lacey Act made it a federal crime to sell illegally hunted
game across state lines. The law came too late to save passenger
pigeons. In 1902 a hunter in Indiana shot a passenger pigeon in the
countryside. After that, no one saw any more passenger pigeons
in the wild, although some lived in zoos. In 1909 the American
Ornithologists’ Union, an association of scientists who studied
birds, offered a $3,000 reward to anyone who could locate nesting
passenger pigeons. The search lasted for three years, but no nests
or birds were found. The very last passenger pigeon, a captive bird
called Martha (named for US first lady Martha Washington), died in
her cage on September 1, 1914, at a zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio. In less
than a single human lifetime, the population of passenger pigeons
had gone from three billion to zero.

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