Mark your calendar: 97 years ago today, on September 1, 1914 at 9:32 a.m. (Central Standard Time) the last known passenger pigeon on earth died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
The bird's name was Martha.
It is estimated that at one time, one-quarter of all birds in North America were passenger pigeons. Today, they are extinct.
- I took this photograph of the preserved Martha at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. on a visit in 2005.
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Well, I wish I'd found your blog a little earlier so that I could have properly noted the day!
ReplyDeleteHere's a part of my written family history about the passenger pigeons my great-great-grandparents had seen in Pennsylvania: "...they covered the sky until the sun was sometimes darkened; thousands of them, tens of thousands, flying to and from their roosting places in the great woods. Market men with poles and nets and guns went to these great roosts where the limbs of the trees were often broken down by the tremendous flocks. They went by night with torches and gathered in these birds by the tons and shipped them in barrels to the cities."
The account adds that my great-great-grandfather "used to discuss the fate of these flocks which reached in a solid mass for miles upon miles. They are gone." It's difficult, maybe, for folks today to understand what the death of Martha represented--I got a glimpse of it when I found this passage.