On September 1st 1914, an elderly widow named Martha passed away in the home where she had
been taken care of for the later years of her life. Named after Martha Washington,
she was truly extraordinary, she lived nearly twice as long as the rest of her family. As she
aged, her caretakers had to rebuild her home because she became too old to climb stairs,
and yet she continued entertaining her many guests despite a palsy that made her quiver.
And when she finally died, peacefully of a stroke in her sleep, the world mourned. Because Martha
was one of those very rare creatures called an Ender, meaning that she was the very last of
her species. Not forty years before, Martha had had billions of brothers and sisters,
but when she died in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo it represented the end of an era. Because
Martha was the last passenger pigeon on earth, and her death represented the startling
extinction of what had only recently been one of the world's most profligate creatures. You
can't say that passenger pigeons are forgotten history. Everybody knows what passenger pigeons
are as a cautionary tale of human hubris, but they're passing changed the world in ways that
people don't understand. The life when passenger pigeons were around is different in ways that
are forgotten today. The time of the passenger pigeon is history that deserves to be remembered.
Their numbers were of course amazing. The famed ornithologist John Jay Audubon
documented a time in 1813 when giant flocks of passenger pigeons passed him for three
days straight. He tried counting the number of flocks that passed and finally gave up,
as so many flew by that keeping up was not practicable. On his first attempt he counted
a hundred and sixty three flocks, passing in a period of just twenty-one minutes. In 1866,
one flock in southern Ontario was described as being one and a half kilometers wide,
and five hundred kilometers long. The flock took 14 hours to pass and held in excess of
three and a half billion birds. There were so many birds that one American writer suggested
that if all the world's passenger pigeons flew single-file, they would have stretched around
the earth twenty-two times. These are more than just numbers; they represent a truly dominant
species. Researchers assert that when their population was at its height, passenger pigeons
may have been the most numerous bird on earth. One researcher contended that this one species
accounted for between 25 and 40 percent of the total land bird population in the United States.
And so in the cautionary tale about the bird's extinction there is another story.
How was life different in the time when passenger pigeons blotted out the Sun?
Pigeons are of course a common sight today; an estimated 1 million live in New York City. But
the pigeon experience was rather different in the era of the passenger pigeon. A terrifying
account from 1855 had residents of Columbus, Ohio so startled by a “kit”, the term for a group of
passenger pigeons, that blocked out the Sun, that women and children screamed and ran for home,
and some people dropped to their knees in prayer. After the kit passed the scene was described as
ghostly, as the bright Sun illuminated a town turned white, by being covered in pigeon poo.
And while the image of a poo covered Columbus, Ohio might be startling, it's really more
important than just some level of astonishment. The pigeons and their poo were so prolific that
they literally changed the environment of North America. Take for example, the white oak. Before
European settlement, Oaks dominated the forests throughout much of what is now the eastern United
States. And among the Oaks, the white oak reigned supreme. Its range once included every state east
of the central plains. Early botanists claimed that vast areas of the eastern forests were
nine-tenths white oak. By contrast its cousin, the red oak, generally made up only a small percentage
of Eastern forests, around maybe 5%, and the red maple was almost unknown in the forests of the
Northeast. This was important economically. White oak is a particularly valuable wood. In fact,
in terms of the quality and quantity of saw timber, white oak was arguably once North
America's most valuable hardwood species, used extensively for construction, flooring
and cabinetry. Because of its ability to resist decay, white oak is often used in boat building,
and is particularly good for outdoor use, such as decks. Moreover, due to its cellulose structure,
the lumber of white is particularly impervious to liquids making it particularly valuable for the
making of barrels and casks, used in the making of barrel aged spirits like wine and whiskey. But
there is more. Liquid spirits interact with the wood in their casts, and the seasoning
and heating treatments during the barrel making process result in the production of a pleasant
tasting oak lactones. The process for the creation of cask is a closely held secret by barrel makers,
called Cooper's, and is part of what instills the character of each distillery's unique creation.
White oak, commonly referred to as American oak, is the most commonly used variety in whiskey
cooperage worldwide. And by US regulation, bourbon whiskey must be aged in charred American white oak
barrels. Put simply, if you have a favorite scotch or bourbon, or you like a particularly
aromatic wine, you like the taste of white oak. But American white oak is disappearing. As a
one 2003 study noted, the white oak decline throughout its range has been dramatic, and
in response to this decline it is largely being replaced by less valuable red oak, and red maple.
So what, you may be thinking, does this have to do with passenger pigeons? Well actually quite a lot.
The bird is believed to have played a significant ecological role in the composition of the forests
of eastern North America, and especially the former prevalence of white oaks. White oaks
germinated in the fall, therefore making its seeds almost useless as a food source
during the spring breeding season, while red oaks produced acorns during the spring,
where they were devoured by the pigeons. The effect of the massive amount of pigeons resting
on forests was dramatic. They would leave massive amounts of broken foliage that were flammable,
encouraging both the frequency and intensity of forest fires,
which then favored fire tolerant species such as white oak over less tolerant species such
as red oak and maple. And the same pigeon poo that turned Columbus, Ohio ghostly,
was produced in such quantities that at nesting sites, it destroyed surface level vegetation,
while adding huge quantities of nutrients to the soil. This favored the white oak which requires
sunlight to thrive. By contrast, the forest today without the natural clearings that the
passenger pigeon helped to produce, favorite trees like red maple that thrive in shade.
Selective logging and fire suppression have had their effect yet the extinction
of the dominant bird species of the forest has undoubtedly had an effect
One surprising effect of the change is that the colors of the forest have changed. Eastern
deciduous forests used to turn yellows, oranges, and russets in the fall. Because
of the increasing percentage of red maple, the fall colors have turned increasingly red.
The extinction of the passenger pigeon has literally changed the color of the forest.
And another effect of the extinction of the passenger pigeon was the end of the era when
in America we very commonly ate pigeons. Pigeon was a common staple of the nineteenth-century
American diet, while in the same era chickens were mostly raised for eggs, and chicken tenders were
rare. That is to do with developments in chicken technology which radically changed chickens,
and especially their availability year-round. That occurred largely around the turn of the
20th century. Pigeons however were a critical part of frontier survival where spring flocks
returning North offered a ready supply of cheap protein as winter was ending. People survived
in winter mostly on preserved food, so fresh meat would be a cause for rejoicing. French
naturalist Benedict Henry Revoil wrote in his 1865 book, Shooting and Fishing in the Rivers,
Prairies and Backwoods of North America, that when a kit descended on the town of Hartford, Kentucky
in 1847 the population was under arms. Men and boys all carried double or single guns, and they
hid behind woods, rocks, and wherever there was a chance of shot. Prodigious quantities were killed
by these means. And that during his three-day stay at the time, nothing was eaten but pigeons.
People on the American frontier often preferred a rustic pigeon pie,
but Revoil noted that they were also eaten boiled, broiled, stewed, or baked.
As important as pigeons were to the frontier, a key technology of the era changed the way they
affected the American diet. Railroads allowed pigeons to be shipped in quantity to Eastern
markets, encouraging commercial hunting. And the demand was huge. A 1917 report to
the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture noted that at one point, the New York market alone
would take a hundred barrels a day for weeks without a break in price. Chicago, St. Louis,
Boston and all the great and little cities of north and eastern United States joined in the
demand. The report concluded, “Need we wonder, why the pigeons have vanished.” The day when
pigeon was on most everybody's diet as one of the cheapest and most available proteins is almost
unrecognizable today. Today the commercial squab industry produces less birds for consumption in a
week then the single chicken company produces every hour. And a single bird cost as much as
$25. A squab producer noted in an article in Popular Science in 2018, “A hundred years ago
everyone was eating them. Now you can't find them unless you're filthy rich.” Meanwhile,
according to the National Chicken Council, in 2018 Americans are on pace to eat ninety two
point five pounds of chicken per capita. On a side note, Popular Science suggests we not
look towards the cheaper alternative of urban pigeons. While they are not, as some assume,
particularly carriers of avian disease, their diet of essentially trash means that they likely
ingest things like rodenticide, battery acid and lead. But it was of course the demand that
eventually spelled the passenger pigeon's demise, and in that, two of the great technologies of the
19th century conspired against them. Not only did railroads allow barrels of pigeons to be
shipped to Eastern cities, they allowed hunters to travel to the flocks, having been alerted to
their locations along the new telegraph lines. In 1871, the Wisconsin newspaper the Kilbourne City
Mirror described the commercial pigeon hunting industry at a Wisconsin roost. “Hardly a train
arrives that does not bring hunters or trappers. Hotels are full. Cooper's are busy making barrels,
and men, women, and children are active in packing the birds, or filling the barrels.” In 1871,
a single seller of ammunition provided three tons of powder, and sixteen tons of shot,
to supply hunters at one pigeon roost during a nesting season. Just one town in New York was
estimated to have shipped 1.8 million pigeons to larger cities in the year 1851 alone.
Passenger pigeons were hunted and trapped for food, for sport, to a eliminate an agricultural
pest. Their habitat was chopped up, cut down for timber, cleared for farmland,
so that the patchwork of wilderness that we have today would be unrecognizable to a mid
19th century American. How such a profligate species could be driven to extinction in such
a short period of time is still a point of scientific study and national debate. It
should be. But that's the story everybody knows. But there is another story as well,
because in Martha's passing came the passing of a different time. Of the era when the nation
was still new, and when nature's bounty seemed unlimited. An era before supermarkets, when if
you wanted to eat, it depended upon what you could grow, or catch, or kill. An era when we looked at
the sky instead of at our cell phones. An era when we didn't think that we knew everything.
Even the forest today blush a different color; as if they don't quite recognize themselves. The
passenger pigeon is known in popular culture for good reason, but there is another reason
to remember them because passenger pigeons show us how very different life was just a hundred
fifty years ago. So different that we might not recognize it today. It represents a different,
a more optimistic and naive era that no longer exists, but that deserves to be remembered.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the History Guy, short snippets of forgotten history between
ten and fifteen minutes long, and if you did enjoy it, please go ahead and click
that thumbs up button. If you have any questions, or comments, or suggestions for future episodes,
please write those in the comment section, I will be happy to personally respond. Be sure to follow
the History Guy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and check out our merchandise on teespring.com.
And if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history, all you need to do is subscribe.