Remembering Martha

From the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto

Martha died alone, the last of her kind—the last Passenger Pigeon remaining on earth.

Next Monday, September 1, marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of a species that once was so numerous that a single flock could blot the noonday sky, the advance guard of a multitude that formed a vast majestic undulating river of birds.

Named for George Washington's wife, Martha died at age 29 in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her corpse was placed on ice and rushed to the Smithsonian Institution where it remains on display. When she was born in 1885, Passenger Pigeons still existed in the wild, though their numbers were declining precipitously.

The naturalist John James Audubon identified the Passenger Pigeon as a species in 1813, having witnessed a mile-wide mass of the birds moving at 60 miles per hour in a flock that took three days to pass by him. The name he gave the bird was apt: Ectopistes migratorius.

Passenger Pigeons did not settle in one place for any length of time. They couldn't. Their numbers were so profuse that the pigeons consumed enormous quantities of food. When the nuts and forest fruits ran out, they flew off, en masse, to find another location.

In Pennsylvania's Northern Tier a flock alighted in 1870. The roosting, which occupied a mountain ridge in Potter and McKean counties, zigzagged for 40 miles, with a width of one-half mile to 2 miles, according to an account in John C. French's 1919 anthology The Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania. Locals reported it to be the largest roosting in that region since 1830.

Even bigger flocks were found in the Great Lakes states. In a 1955 book naturalist A.W. Schorger says one nesting site in Wisconsin in 1871 contained 136 million breeding adults covering an area of 850 square miles. That is more territory than Lehigh and Northampton counties combined.

No one knows for certain how many Passenger Pigeons lived during the bird's heyday. Reliable estimates place the population at 3 billion to 5 billion birds, an astonishing number that can be appreciated only with comparisons. Today the most prolific bird in the United States, the European Starling, numbers 200 million. House Sparrows have a total of just 70 million. The Passenger Pigeon's distant cousin, the Rock Dove that you see in cities, numbers only 260 million worldwide. One ornithologist calculated that 40 percent of all bird life in North America in the 1880s consisted of Passenger Pigeons.

One final statistic: The global population of humans did not reach 3 billion until the 1940s.

How could a species with such a huge population decline so suddenly? It took just 70 years for the Passenger Pigeon's population to collapse beyond recovery. A boy who witnessed one of these enormous flocks—hundreds of millions of pigeons passing him one day and the next—was able to tell his grandchildren about what he saw. They could see a Passenger Pigeon only in a museum.

Stability in the early 1800s

Native Americans killed and ate Passenger Pigeons only for their needs. The same was true of the Europeans who arrived in the 1500s. And that was true, too, in the United States well into the first half of the 1800s. Much of nation's populace at the time were subsistence farmers. The pigeons provided sustenance in times of plenty and of hardship. The bird contained an ample portion of meat. The bird was twice the size of today's Mourning Doves. The meat was tasty and easily obtained. It was welcome in the spring, when frontier pantries became bare after a long winter.

Bird's territory; map by Terry Sthol; data from NatureServe

Having wintered in the southern states, Passenger Pigeons arrived in Pennsylvania in March. The snowfall melt uncovered the previous autumn's bounty of tree nuts. The "mast"—a collective name for beechnuts, chestnuts, acorns and other hard fruits of the forest—formed the staple of the pigeon's diet. Mast was abundant in the early 1800s, a time when forests stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles. As vegetarians, pigeons also feasted on corn, maize, cherries, grains and berries, among other foods.

When the advance scouts located a suitable feeding area, the rest of the flock would gather, descending as an army to form a "city" on tree limbs and the forest floor. For all the damage that humans did to the ecosystem back then, the Passenger Pigeons did a good job of causing their own havoc as well.

"Flock followed flock, sitting at the tops of trees or lighting on the ground, and moving forward still, as if impelled by the momentum gained in flight," Edwin Haskell wrote in the Potter County Journal in northern Pennsylvania. "Hopping, tumbling, flitting over one another, in the eagerness of each one to keep in the front rank."

The birds often would weigh down tree limbs so much that they'd snap, killing their flock mates below and causing nests and nestlings to tumble down. Their droppings were enough to be toxic to some trees. Alexander Wilson, the eminent Philadelphia ornithologist, called the roosting "a perpetual tumult."

As numerous as they were, Passenger Pigeons had a surprisingly low reproductive rate. Usually a female would produce just one egg, which was incubated by both parents in a platform-like nest of sticks high in a tree. If food was plentiful, a pair might raise a second or third brood, doing so in a new locale each time as the summer passed. The nestling—a squab—would be fed with high-fat curd known as "pigeon milk," which was produced and regurgitated by both parents.

Two weeks after hatching, the squabs would depart with their elders—that is, if they could manage. The squabs often were too fat to fly. They'd tumble to the ground and, after slimming down for awhile, gain the power of flight and join the flocks.

Those that couldn't get away quickly faced almost certain death. "Wild beasts of prey devoured the young and fought over them through the night, making a hideous uproar, and owls and hawks attacked the old birds upon the roosts above the nests," recalled Jeremiah French, the grandfather of John C. French, the Potter County historian and author.

Slaughter is intense

But an even greater slaughter came at the hands of humans. The growth of cities on the East Coast starting in the 1820s created an increased demand for meat. Passenger Pigeons were a cheap, plentiful and seemingly inexhaustible source. Finding the pigeons was another matter. Sometimes they wandered close enough to the city. But more often, locating them was by happenstance. By the time word got out that a pigeon city had settled, hunters arrived to find the forest a mere clutter of debris.

Two inventions solved their handicap. The telegraph guided hunters to prime roosts. The railroad provided a quick means of reaching the site and of shipping the harvest to market.

By 1855 professional pigeon hunters—"pigeoners" as they became known—were sending 300,000 birds a year to New York City alone.

In 1868 the townspeople of Coudersport, in central Pennsylvania, learned that "wild pigeons" had arrived in the woods nearby. They, and plenty of newcomers, reached the site en masse.

"The presence of so many people near the town, engaged in killing, catching, buying and shipping pigeons has caused such an influx of money that the dealers in hunters' and sportsmen's supplies soon ran out of shot," Haskell said. "On entering the town, its streets, usually so quiet, presented a novel spectacle. Men carrying guns were coming into town from various directions. They came in carriages, buggies, lumber wagons, and on horseback and foot. A motley crowd."

Pigeon-shooting was a family affair. As the men and boys shot, the women collected the birds, removed the finest feathers and helped packing hundreds of birds in barrels. The barrels were taken immediately by wagon to the nearest railroad station, where the birds were placed in ice or salt to preserve them for shipment to the cities.

The machinery of death

By the 1870s hunting developed on an industrial scale.

Shooting was the method preferred in heavily forested lands. Some flocks were so thickly packed that a single round of birdshot could bring down 30 or 40 pigeons. 

Knocking down squabs from nests was another technique. It made pigeoners a lot of money. Fine dining had become a fixture of urban life. Restaurants from Boston to Milwaukee were eager for the squabs.

Colored woodblock image of a shoot in Louisiana, 1875 

But nets proved to be the most effective method. Reporting in the Pennsylvania Sportsman in Scranton, R.P. Robinson described the scene: The pigeon net, covering 200 to 300 square feet, would be placed in a high, open field. One side of the net was secured by stakes driven into the ground; the opposite end was on a long, taut rope stretched between stakes. "Grain was scattered on the group for the birds to peck at. By pulling a string the net was fully unfurled, covering the full extent of the feeding ground," he said.

Two decoys were used to attract the pigeons—a "flier" and a "stool pigeon." The flier was a live bird whose feet were secured to the ground by a long cord. The bird would try to fly away but would be held back by the cord. Its struggle would help catch the flying pigeons' attention. The stool pigeon, also alive, would be made to hover as a further enticement. It was tied by the foot of the stool—a 5-foot-high pole—to seduce the other birds to circle it. They came nearer and nearer until they were caught in the net.

"At once there would be a mass of fluttering, struggling pigeons, with heads erect and protruding from the meshes of the net," Robinson said.

Hundreds of birds would be caught at a time in the net and easily killed by hand. The birds would be cleared away, and another round would begin.

"The cruelty of this method of procuring game birds was party in the treatment of the stool pigeon, the poor bird's eyes being sewed shut to cause it to hover more readily," Robinson said.

Pigeon-netting reached its apex in Michigan. During 1869 pigeoners in that state collected 7.5 million birds. Each year their haul increased. Their greatest haul occurred in 1878: somewhere between 10 million and 15 million birds, most of them harvested from one of the last big Passenger Pigeon breeding grounds along Crooked Creek near Petoskey.

That year marked another innovation that hastened the birds' demise: the refrigerated railroad boxcar. This meant that fresher pigeon meat and an even wider distribution to cities thousands of miles away. Immediately there were boxcars and boxcars of birds heading to market.

A new environment

Pennsylvania's last big pigeon city formed in April 1886 along the west branch of Pine Creek in Potter County. Attracted by a prolific beechnut crop, millions of birds arrived. Thirty or 40 men and boys entered the forest, guns firing into the treetops. After three days, no more fluttering could be heard. The people collected their catch and moved on.

"That was the death blow to pigeons in Pennsylvania," C.W. Dickinson, of nearby McKean County, reported.

A few astute observers realized that the slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon could not go on indefinitely. As early as 1857, an Ohio state legislator proposed restrictions on pigeon hunts. After considering the matter, the Legislature filed a report: "The Passenger Pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow."

Twenty years later, in 1878, the Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized against the springtime shootings of "wild pigeons."

"The system is inhumane, unsportsmanlike and must if continued assist materially in exterminating the pigeon race ... In this state the law forbids the shooting of the birds within a half mile of the nesting ground, but that provision is useless even if enforced, for the mature birds must fly far from the nests to get food, and can then be slaughtered at will. Killing them at all during the breeding season should cease," the newspaper said.

Compounding the indiscriminate killing was the loss of the pigeon's feeding, breeding and roosting grounds. Large swaths of forests were being clearcut to furnish lumber for railroad ties, barns, houses and other necessities of a growing, industrializing country.

At one time the American chestnut tree comprised one-third of Eastern hardwood forests. The trees grew as tall as 100 feet, with trunks 12 feet in diameter. Its nuts were a staple for the pigeons. Extensive logging and a blight brought the tree to near-extinction. The American beech, perhaps the single most important food for the pigeons, was logged heavily. The species survived but never again produced as many nuts as the bigger, older trees that preceded it. Hemlock, too, was devastated by loggers. Railroads built a labyrinth of tracks deep into the woods to bring the logs to sawmills. This helped hasten the forests' demise.

Towns and farms now dotted the thousands square miles that had been unbroken, virgin forests.

Final flights

In 1885, the year Martha was born, the Passenger Pigeon's population was declining precipitously. The nature of the species required ample food and a large population base for breeding and protection. When pigeons were plentiful, hawks and eagles had trouble taking pigeons on the wing because the flock swarmed and dodged, confusing the predators. Even though Passenger Pigeons flew at 60 miles per hour, isolated individuals became prey to fast and clever predators.

Martha, at the Smithsonian Insitution

It is widely believed that the last Passenger Pigeon in the wild was killed in 1900 by a boy in Pike County, Ohio, who shot it out of a backyard tree with a 12-gauge shotgun. However, that story is disputed by the painstaking research of Joel Greenberg, the author of the 2014 book A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction. Greenberg identified the last wild specimen as expiring in 1902.

By then the only remaining Passenger Pigeons were in zoos. They did not breed successfully. Martha laid a single egg in her lifetime and it was infertile. Her mate died in 1910. In failing health, Martha eventually succumbed. Zoo keepers found her lifeless body on the bottom of her cage on September 1, 1914.

A handful of people couldn't believe that such a prolific species had simply vanished. Some speculated that the birds fled to the Arizona desert, or South America, or the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Supposedly 30 were seen in 1917 in Pennsylvania's Delaware County. C.F. Hodge, a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, offered a reward to anyone who claimed to have seen a Passenger Pigeon. He repeatedly traveled to validate those claims, only to discover that each was a "wild goose chase." He rescinded his offer in 1912.

The world had moved on. European armies were clashing in The Great War, "the war to end all wars." The United States proudly opened the new Panama Canal to commercial shipping. Women were attempting to get the right to vote; the Anti-Saloon League was agitating for the prohibition of alcohol nationwide.

At the time, only naturalists treated Martha's death as an important passing of an era.

"The Passenger Pigeons shrank in numbers, as did the bison on the plains, but no one realized that a race was being exterminated," wrote author John C. French of Potter County. "The decline was slow at first; but from 1865 to 1886 it was remarkable—and then the deluge!"


Tomorrow: Upcoming exhibits and events on the Passenger Pigeon