Passenger Pigeon Q & A with Joel Greenberg, Our Speaker on March 12 at Yale
Joel Greenberg, with a Passenger Pigeon specimen.
At the end of each summer, thousands of Tree Swallows swoop over the lower Connecticut River, hawking insects in massive, dark clouds. Autumn still sees big flocks of Common Grackles noisily moving through our woodlands and suburbs in search of food. Communal crow roosts and boisterous gull rookeries can still amaze us.
But nothing we experience now can come close to the encounters that Americans from 150 years ago and earlier had with Passenger Pigeons, which numbered in the billions. Indeed, it is estimated that one flock, passing south of Toronto in 1860, contained from one billion to three billion individual birds. They darkened the sky for two days.
In his terrific new book, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction, author Joel Greenberg gives other examples:
The early residents of Connecticut called the first crisp mornings of early fall “pigeon mornings,” for those were the days when the flocks of pigeons would be expected as they migrated down the coast. In preparation for the birds, hunters climbed the low hills east of New Haven and secured long poles to the tops of the largest trees so they would jut out at a 30 degree angle. On the forest floor, the gunmen constructed blinds where they could hide until the poles were filled to capacity with resting pigeons. During a good flight the withering fire dropped enough pigeons to fill a hay wagon before breakfast.
An Englishman named John Josselyn, visiting New England in 1638 and 1663, wrote: “I have seen a flight of Pidgeons in the spring and at Michaelmas when they return back to the Southward for four or five miles, that to my thinking had neither beginning nor ending, length, or breadth, and so thick I could see no sun.” Around 1659, in September, Rev. Andrew Bernaby was leaving Newport, Rhode Island, when the pigeons caught his eye: “I observed prodigious flights of wild pigeons: they directed their course southward, and the hemisphere was never entirely free from them. They are birds of passage, of beautiful plumage, and are excellent eating. The accounts given of their numbers are almost incredible.”
As late as the years after the Civil War, an estimated one billion Passenger Pigeons still populated the eastern part of North America. But by 1914, they were gone.
On Wednesday, March 12, at 7 p.m., Joel Greenberg will be giving a presentation for us at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies’ Kroon Hall. It is free and open to the public. RSVP to tandersen@ctaudubon.org.
In preparation, we asked him a few questions, via email.
Connecticut Audubon Society: In a couple of sentences, why did the Passenger Pigeon become extinct?
Joel Greenberg: The passenger pigeon became extinct due to unrelenting exploitation to supply national markets with the cheapest terrestrial protein available. This was made possible by the expansion of telegraph and railroad lines, facilitating transport and allowing rapid dissemination of information as to the birds’ whereabouts. Loss of habitat indirectly aided this process by limiting the places the birds could gather for breeding or roosting and making those places more accessible. Once the population decreased to a certain point, other factors related to the bird’s biology might have come into play.
CAS: What lesson is there for today’s conservationists in the demise of the Passenger Pigeon?
JG: To me the greatest lesson provided by the passenger pigeon is that no matter how abundant something is – be it water, fuel, or something alive – it can be depleted if we are not circumspect in our use of it.
CAS: If you could see one extinct North American bird (other than the Passenger Pigeon), what would it be and why?
JG: That is hard question in part because what is extinct and there aren’t that many to choose from. I would like to have seen an ivory-billed in the Singer Tract: an extraordinary bird in an extraordinary place (I think it is
possible that the species is still extant) Maybe Carolina parakeet.
CAS: What are your favorite books about birds?
JG: Among my favorite books on nature/ birds are Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (powerful ideas and gorgeous prose); the Arthur Cleveland Bent series on North American birds (wonderful amalgam of ornithological writings from a time when the scientific literature was imbued with feeling and color); Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway (objectively, because I think it is a fully engaging depiction of birding, and subjectively, it is interesting to
read another’s description of events in which I was a participant); Thomas Roberts’ Birds of Minnesota (one of the best state bird books).
CAS: As far as writing a book goes, why Passenger Pigeons and not Labrador Ducks or Ivory-billed Woodpeckers or Carolina Parakeets?
JG: The passenger pigeon was unlike any bird humans have ever known for three principal reasons: 1) over all abundance; 2) often concentrated in spectacular aggregations; and 3) a population collapse that went from probably a billion or more to virtually zero in 40 years. Because of its numbers and its presence over the skies of urban US and Canada, it also had a strong impact on culture. Its extinction was a key factor in spawning the country’s first great environmental movement that left in its wake the Migratory Bird Act and the Lacey Act.
CAS: What was the most eye opening, amazing or unbelievable thing you learned about Passenger Pigeons?
JG: Probably the most amazing thing I learned was that how late in time the bird still had a huge population and how quickly that was totally depleted. It is still difficult to get my mind around it.
CAS: What do you make of efforts to bring Passenger Pigeons back from extinction?
JG: I think that one aspect of the bird’s legacy is the power of its story and how it continues to move people. There are some top flight geneticists who think it is possible so perhaps something like a passenger pigeon can be recreated. But they can certainly never bring back “the feathered tempest” that Leopold writes about: I doubt modern Americans and Canadians would tolerate a hundred million birds darkening the sky.
Join us at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12, at Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect st., New Haven.
