Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious By Nature.
I'm Nicole and this week we're going to be checking out the Museum's collection with Dawn.
Today, she'll be showing us a few of the preserved birds that are part of the collection.
Let's see what she has.
Hi everyone, I'm Dawn.
I'm out here at the Collections Facility for the Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
Today, I'm going to talk with you about extinct species.
So what does that mean for something to be extinct?
Well, quite simply it means that there are no more.
For animals and plants, they once lived perhaps in great abundance.
But now you cannot find them anywhere around the world.
Now, in Earth's 4.5 billion year history, there have certainly been a lot of extinctions.
Anybody who likes dinosaurs or ice age mammals
knows there's no dimetrodons or giant sloths in their neighborhood.
But today, I want to talk with you about some species
that have gone extinct within a much closer period of our history.
The first one that we'll take a look at is called the passenger pigeon.
Now this bird used to be one of the most prolific and abundant animals around the Earth.
The passenger pigeon, reportedly you could see flocks of this species flying overhead
and it would darken the sky for days at a time.
There's even journals in archives where people have recorded
that they saw the flock coming and everyone went inside because there were so many birds coming through
that after the flock passed they came out and everything was covered in bird poop.
That would not be a mess I would want to clean up.
This species, take a look at it, see if you can see the iridescence around the neck.
It's quite spectacular in body form and just to compare,
Let's take a look...
at a rock dove, your normal sidewalk pigeon.
If you can, take a look at the body shape.
What do you notice?
The common sidewalk pigeon, I'm sure everybody has seen one of those, they're not very fast are they?
The passenger pigeon's body is so much slimmer and longer.
It's more aerodynamic.
It can fly, or it could fly, much, much faster.
Look at the length of the tail even.
There were reports that passenger pigeons could fly upwards of 60 miles an hour.
That's faster than probably my first car.
Now in a scientific collection, all of our specimens have labels like this that tell us what it is,
so what species it is, where it was collected, and when it was collected.
Those are really key pieces of information.
This one was collected in Illinois, December 10, in 1890.
The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914.
Now, one of the big purposes for a scientific collection like this one,
is that all of these specimens have individual stories
and we use these to take a look at nature's history in the past,
to learn about what's going on presently,
and then also potentially be able to extrapolate what could happen in the future.
One of the things that scientists and biodiversity studies are pointing to
is that because passenger pigeons had been so numerous that their extinction
didn't just affect this one species, but it had a ripple effect throughout ecosystems.
In fact, the American burying beetle, which is a lovely little beetle and used to be in great numbers
around North America, it had a pretty severe population crash
and a lot of scientists think that the American burying beetles' population decline
is actually tied to the extinction of the passenger pigeon.
Let's take a look at another extinct bird species that we have in the collection.
This one you can see is a lot more colorful.
This is the Carolina parakeet.
Now, this species also went extinct in the early part of the 1900s, in 1917 as a matter of fact.
Here is one that was actually collected in Illinois in 1857.
This species definitely had a majority of its range around Florida and Georgia,
the warmer southern states.
They also were very social like almost every other parrot species that I am familiar with.
But they did come up to the northern areas, up into Illinois,
where we have physical documentation physical records of them being here,
but then also even up into New York and even the southern parts of Canada.
So, why do we retain extinct species in our collection?
What purpose do these specimens and the stories attached to them have in our understanding of nature today?
Well, understanding human impact on nature is a definite part of the equation
that scientists and biodiversity managers seek to understand.
It is really important that we understand how we influence the environment
and the world around us in positive ways, as well as negative.
These species, the more we learn, even now a hundred years after their extinction,
the more we learn about how they may have interacted in their ecosystem, with plants,
with insects, with other vertebrates, with people,
that can fill in that story and help us understand all of the relationships that we see
out our window and in our neighborhood today in nature.
Thank you, please join me again.
That's our show for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We really hope you enjoyed learning about the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode.
We'll see you next time on Curious By Nature.