Resurrecting the Story of the Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania

The passenger pigeon was the most impressive species of bird that man has known. Elegant in form and color, swift and graceful of flight, it moved about and nested in such enormous numbers as to confound the senses.

—A. W. Schorger, The Passenger Pigeon and Its Extinction (1955)

Only a handful of centenarians can recall the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, but generations of school-children know that the incident launched World War I. Two months later, in September of that year, another notable death occurred. Martha, the world’s last remaining passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha’s remains, accompanied by a sign reading “EXTINCT” in large block letters, graced the bird exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution for almost eighty years.

Martha’s death received considerably less attention than the archduke’s. Although the Smithsonian was prepared for her passing—officials arranged for the bird to be frozen in a three-hundred-pound block of ice and shipped to Washington, DC—the nation’s major newspapers did not lament Martha’s demise. Their silence was understandable. Her death may have marked the formal extinction of the passenger pigeon, but the critical years for the species were the 1860s to the 1880s, when Americans slaughtered them by the millions.

Figure 1.

“Martha” on display in the newly opened “Bird Hall” at the Smithsonian Institute, circa 1956. (Originally from Smithsonian Institution Archives, available online at http://www.mnh.si.edu/onehundredyears/featured_objects/martha2.html.)

America’s most famous bird expert, John James Audubon, estimated that an average flock contained more than a billion birds, and he described in vivid detail the transit of enormous flocks that blanketed the skies over Louisville, Kentucky, for three days in 1813.¹

A bird that had formed a staple of the national diet for centuries, and whose stupendous nestings (it was not uncommon for large flocks to settle over tens of thousands of acres of forest) were stamped indelibly on the memories of generations of Americans, seemingly disappeared overnight.² For a species whose essence was defined by the vast numbers in which it assembled, the death of its final living representative could only be described as anticlimactic.

The demise of the passenger pigeon is not a familiar story to the college students in my environmental history courses. Almost none of them learned about the pigeon in high school. History textbooks in the United States—on both the high school and college levels—generally have room for only one story of animal extermination, and that’s the buffalo. Given the time constraints and the breadth of coverage that instructors are expected to provide, the exclusion of the pigeon is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, the pigeon’s absence from the curriculum is unfortunate, particularly in Pennsylvania, a state the birds regularly visited and site of some of the last major nestings. There are at least four compelling reasons why instructors of Pennsylvania history should introduce their students to the story of the passenger pigeon.

Figure 2.

Painting of male and female passenger pigeons by Audubon. (John James Audubon, Birds of America, 1840.)

The first reason is simply that the pigeons were an amazing physical phenomenon, unlike any today’s students are likely to have experienced. The flocks were so large that they literally blackened the skies. A Pennsylvania resident recalled one particularly abundant year:

In the year 1856 this neighborhood was visited by Wild Pigeons in vast numbers. In the early morning they would fly eastward from the Laurel Hill mountains . . . alighting in cornfields to feed; and about the middle of the afternoon they would commence their return flight to their roosting place in the mountains. They would come sometimes in such immense flocks as to almost shut out the sky, like a cloud, and two or three hours would pass during each morning and evening migration.³

Two decades later, pigeons still ruled the Commonwealth’s skies:

In the morning they would fly from their roosts and...