Judy Wilson age l0, of st. Albans W. Va.., for her question:
What are passenger Pigeons?
Some people suspect that the passenger pigeon and the carrier pigeon are one and the same bird. The words passenger and carrier suggest travel and certainly the carrier pigeon is a most talented traveler, but the two pigeons are not the same, and one lived a story of heartbreaking sadness.
During World Wax I, $l,000. was offered for a pair of passenger pigeons. This reward money was never collected because the last one of these American birds had perished. He lived his final days in the Zoological Gardens of Cincinnati and bade farewell to the world in l9l4. Nature never repeats herself and passenger pigeons will never again appear in the world. When an entire species of any animal Perishes it becomes extinct and never returns.
The passenger pigeon became extinct only half a century ago so. We have records to remind us what he was like. He was an elegant, slender pigeon., Measuring about l7 inches from his perky beak to his pointed tail. His back and wings were ordinary pigeon gray, but his eye catching breast shimmered with iridescent feathers of rusty brown. This is why he was known also as the red breasted pigeon. One of the handsome birds is stuffed and on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History.
The extinction of any creature is always sad. It leaves a vacant space in the world and often upsets the give and take balance of nature. However, many people shed no tears at the loss of the passenger pigeon. The farmers, in fact, were glad to see the end of him and the Indians who farmed here before we did would have rejoiced also. The elegant bird and his teeming kinfolk were greedy plunderers of all the fruit, seeds and grain crops.
A few hungry pigeons do no great harm, but these fellows loved to flock in a crowd of perhaps two billion. The whirring wings of such a hungry horde could be heard approaching from a distance of three miles. The famished flock would descend on the farmland and devour every ear of corn., every grain of cereal, every leaf and every blade of grass. Then the hungry horde lifted in a dense cloud of whirring wings to visit the next banquet in a devastating path of destruction.
One shot from a shotgun might bring down more than 20 of the plundering pigeons, and farmers destroyed many of them with firearms. Many others were trapped in nets. Fowlers raided their breeding grounds where 50 to l00 nests would be crowded in a single tree. The teeming numbers were reduced to a few, and they failed to survive when they lost their crowded flocks of relatives.
Passenger pigeons were good to eat. During the years of the last round up, young birds Were sent to market as squab and the dish became very fashionable. One of the last big hunts took place in Michigan in l878, No one counted the passenger pigeons caught on this raid, but it was reported that l5 tons of ice were used to pack merely the young squabs and send them to market and the very last of the passenger pigeons departed 36 years later.