The Passing of the Passenger Pigeon

Lousi Agassiz Fuertes, male (L)

Once the most populous bird species in North America, the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius went extinct 100 years ago. The last bird of its kind, named Martha, lived in the Cincinnati Zoo until the age of 29 when she died in September, 1914.[photo below] She never laid a fertile egg in her entire life. Once migrating flocks in the 19th century were of tremendous size and often described as darkening the sky and sounding like distant thunder. Nevertheless the passenger pigeon was unequivocally hunted to extinction within recorded history by humans. Unlike dodos, pigeons were somewhat attractive but they were noisy, voracious eaters of acorns and beechnuts, and formidable excreters of waste. Anyone familiar with urban pigeons can understand the potential hazards of gargantuan flocks of pigeons that could take over entire woodlands or require an hour or more to pass overhead. To a protein scarce nation, the huge flocks were a natural and free target of opportunity. After a winter of near starvation on the frontier, the passenger pigeon's spring migration was manna from heaven and a lot better tasting. However, it was not subsistence hunting that killed off the super-abundant pigeon. After the Civil War commercial pigeon hunting began aided by the technology of telegraph and railroad. Commercial hunters and trappers could follow the flocks around the country using not only guns and nets, but whatever methods they could lay their hands on including poison and dynamite. The pigeons' natural survival strategy to travel in flocks--safety in numbers--was their undoing. In 1878 hunters reported killed a billion pigeons from a single nesting site forty miles long and 3 to 10 miles wide. Native Americans could only shake their heads in wonderment of the white man's wanton destruction of "the most beautiful flowers of the animal creation in North America." Even as pigeon numbers crashed, there was no effective effort to save them from doom. A select committee reporting on a bill in the 1857 Ohio legislature to protect the bird concluded, "The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific...no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced." The slaughter intensified until the very end in emulation of a Biblical ban. A Pike County, Ohio boy shot what proved to be the last known wild pigeon in March, 1900.

There is much debate at this time about the possibility of bringing some extinct species back to life through genetic engineering. Two species are mentioned most frequently: the mammoth and the passenger pigeon. While human predation undoubtably affected both species, the role human predation played in the extinction of the passenger pigeon is without doubt while the mastodon may have gone extinct through a combination of climate change and hunting. If species revitalization has an ethical basis it would be to correct a environmental wrong committed by man. The case for the passenger pigeon is stronger on this point as well as from the standpoint of caring for an animal without living kin or prospect of natural reproduction.

In 2012 Stewart Brand, known for creating The Whole Earth Catalogue and a genetics entrepreneur, Ryan Phelan, founded a company whose express purpose is the recreation of extinct species and the passenger pigeon is their flagship project. Of course their creature, if any, will be a hybrid since passenger pigeon genetic material will have to be cloned onto the existing genome of a closely related pigeon. The banded pigeon is slated to be the subject of their experimentation. The company admits their passenger pigeon will thus be "artificial" but defies geneticists to tell the difference between their artificial hybrid and the real, extinct bird. Biologists are not sanguine about an effort to reintroduce an artificial species into the current wild. Ecosystems have moved on and not always in a good way. Reintroducing a species from the past would, they argue, be similar to introducing an exotic species into a native ecosystem that could have negative repercussions.

Perhaps as a limited lab experiment a re-creation could be justified. Satisfying
a Frankenstein impulse seems hardly a good enough reason for ethically fraught experimentation, and commercial exploitation of a re-creation is as immoral as the original extinction. The passenger pigeon's passing does contain a lesson for the modern world: nothing in Nature is too vast not to be wrecked by man. Human folly can be just as vast as Nature.