Download A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction AudioBook Free
In the first 19th century traveler pigeons accounted for 25 to 40 percent of North America's birds, journeying in flocks so substantial as to stop the sun all night. Although men and women weighed only twelve ounces, they nested and roosted in the millions, destroying large oaks as though hit by hurricanes. Their favorite foods were the seed products and nuts of beech, chestnuts, and other forest trees and shrubs, nonetheless they also raided farmers' buckwheat, whole wheat, corn, and rye crops. John Adam Audubon, remarking on the acceleration and agility in trip, said a lone traveler pigeon streaking through the forest "passes like a thought." The observation was prophetic, for although a billion pigeons streamed over Toronto in-may of 1860, a mere forty years later traveler pigeons were almost extinct. Martha, the previous of the varieties, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Their congregation in large numbers managed to get easy to get rid of them en masse, and the development of railroads and telegraph lines facilitated large hunting functions that provided pigeons by the hundreds to help feed people in growing places. Audubon, novelist Gene Stratton-Porter, and Adam Fenimore Cooper were among those who advocated keeping the traveler pigeon, but it was too overdue. Naturalist Joel Greenberg's wonderfully written report of the traveler pigeon provides a cautionary tale that no matter how numerous a reference is - family pets, water or engine oil - it can be destroyed if we are not careful.
