The passing of the passenger pigeon

It's time to talk turkey about holiday birds. The ubiquitous, shrink-wrapped, pre-basted turkey with the pop-up timer is the wildly popular un-wild bird of choice in 2010.

Let's look back 200 years at the wild birds that landed on holiday tables in 1810. Wild turkeys were on some menus, to be sure, but so were birds of a very different feather.

The wild pigeon showed up on humble holiday spreads in the country as well as in high class restaurants in metropolitan New York and even Paris. The passenger pigeon had secured its place in the emerging American cuisine by the early 1800s.

The wild passenger pigeon was an iconic species that represented the unfathomable wealth of natural resources in a rich and prosperous land. In the span of 50 years, however, the passenger pigeon was erased from the menu. Forever.

The last passenger pigeon, famously known as Martha of the Cincinnati Zoo, expired in 1914. Martha's passing marked the extinction of a species once so plentiful that no one ever dreamed it could disappear.

Passenger pigeons not to be confused with the decidedly unpopular rock doves or “city pigeons,” were remarkable birds. Nomadic, gregarious and abundant beyond belief, these birds moved in huge swathes across the forested landscape of the eastern United States.

The pigeons fed on bountiful crops of chestnuts, acorns and beechnuts in the fall, and moved in great clouds to follow the food sources across the eastern United States. Both the forests and its birds were, by all early accounts, limitless.

The astonishing abundance of passenger pigeons was documented by white men since their arrival in the New World. Even an author as prolific as James Fennimore Cooper claimed he was at a loss for words to describe the phenomenon of the passenger pigeon. An anonymous observer of the time said that the enormity of their flocks was “beyond the power of this pencil to portray,” according to Jennifer Price in her book, “Flight Maps.”

Pigeons were no strangers to Kane County. Newton Bateman and Paul Selby reported in their 1904 Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Kane County, “Immense flocks of wild pigeons … actually darkened the sky, and they passed like the sound of a mighty rushing wind.”

The noise was, by all accounts, deafening. Some likened the experience to a tornado passing overhead.

“The air rumbled and turned cold,” wrote Price.

But to one traveler in the Fox River Valley, the sound inspired classical music.

“(The flocks) came sweeping across the lawn, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged motion, more beautiful than anything of the kind I ever knew,” wrote Margaret Fuller in 1843.

“Had I been a musician, such as Mendelssohn, I felt that I could have improvised a music, quite peculiar, from the sound they made, which should have indicated all the beauty over which their wings bore them.”

How did the most numerous bird in North America disappear from the map altogether in half a century? One factor was that the passenger pigeon was tasty. In colonial America, recipes for passenger pigeons proliferated.

Due to the enormous quantities of the delectable birds, folks in the country, as well as chefs in city restaurants, came up with numerous ways of preparing pigeon dishes. They were broiled, roasted, stewed, “jellied in calf's-foot broth, and salted in barrels,” Price recounts.

Up to half a dozen pigeons would be baked in pigeon pot pie, a common Christmas dish made all the more festive by “three feet nicely cleaned” sticking up in the center of the pie “to show what (kind of) pie it is.” A precursor, perhaps, to the pop-up timer on Butterballs?

Another problem for the passenger pigeon was that they were so darn easy to kill. There are reports of Philadelphians climbing on their rooftops during a “pigeon year” and “knocking the birds out of the sky” with such unsophisticated weaponry as broomsticks. Those who used guns instead of broomsticks would easily bag a bountiful quarry.

An entry in Batavian Hugh Alexander's diary in 1859 recalls the abundant harvest in the area now known as the Dick Young Forest Preserve.

“The wild (passenger) pigeons came to the (Nelson's) Grove in multitudinous flocks, and here I had a chance to show my Nimrodic activities and secured quite a string of these beautiful birds quite often.”

Indigenous peoples took care not to hunt pigeons while the young were being reared, but most white Euro-Americans took little heed to such wildlife management.

A perfect storm brewed in the mid-to-late 1800s, and the passenger pigeon was not equipped to weather this storm. A dramatic loss in forest habitat, unregulated hunting, and wanton slaughter proved disastrous for the species.

“By 1850 the destruction of the pigeons was in full force, and by 1860 it was noticed that the numbers of birds seemed to be decreasing, but still the slaughter continued,” according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

“One of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons occurred at Petoskey, Mich., in 1878. Here, 50,000 birds per day were killed and this rate continued for nearly five months. When the adult birds that survived this massacre attempted second nestings at new sites, they were soon located by the professional hunters and killed before they had a chance to raise any young.”

Martha was one of the few birds saved from the slaughter. She eked out the last of her days, and the last days of her once-magnificent species, in solitary confinement. She was found dead on the bottom of her cage at 1 p.m. on Sept. 1, 1914. Thus, the most abundant bird on earth was declared extinct.

There are no pigeon pies for the holidays in our brave new world, but there are lessons to be learned. Lesson number one: Be grateful for our natural resources every day, not just on holidays, and never take nature's gifts for granted.

Lesson number two: Seemingly inexhaustible resources can indeed be exhausted. Which leads to lesson three: extinction is forever. Neither the extinct passenger pigeon, nor any of its comrades in oblivion, can be resurrected.

Last, but not least this holiday season, lesson number four: Combat homelessness: preserve habitat. Even if Martha had not died a lone spinster in the Cincinnati Zoo, the vast forest ecosystem that passenger pigeons required had been severely compromised by the mid-1800s. Fragments of forest cannot support billions of gregarious birds, nor can tiny remnants of prairie support billions of bison. Thus, our challenge today is to protect species by restoring and preserving healthy, intact ecosystems.

This holiday season, as you contemplate charitable contributions, consider a contribution to the earth. Participate in the preservation of our natural resources by attending a work party at a local forest preserve. Check out habitat restoration activities near you on our website, www.kaneforest.com.

You may not be able to put passenger pigeons on the Christmas table, but you can rest assured that you are helping numerous species that are hanging on the brink.

Here's to wildly happy holidays!

Valerie Blaine is a naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. You may reach her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.