A Feathered River Across the Sky

by Joel Greenberg

  The nattily attired dandies had decided to plunder the pigeons in style. The timber company that owned most everything else in the area had just purchased the local general store and discovered an attic filled with silk hats dating from 1851, when the establishment first opened. They were of a design once marketed by P. T. Barnum and called Jenny Lind, in honor of the Swedish songstress with whom the shop’s longtime owner had been infatuated.8

  The night before French’s arrival, the group of men with their fancy headgear had entered the pigeon city and begun firing. They did not stop until the woods were bereft of flying pigeons: “That was the death-blow to pigeons in Pennsylvania. They left in the night, which was clear, with a full moon, so the birds could see where to go in a northerly direction.”9

  What happened on Pine Creek had become the norm: as hunters invaded the nestings blasting away, birds would leave before fledging progeny. The connection between shooting and abandonment was perhaps first explicitly noted in 1869, when pigeons left a nest site in Wisconsin after being assaulted by armed attackers. Ornithologist Ludlow Griscom and others claimed that the major reason the species became extinct is that it was incapable of adapting to the ever-more-intense slaughter. But, in fact, the birds had changed: they were now less tolerant of these disruptions and would increasingly flee at their commencement.10

  No one knows for sure where the retreating pigeons went when they left Pine Creek that night in 1886. It is possible that some relocated a short distance to the east and nested near Blossburg, on reforested timber land where “thousands of squabs were killed with poles in the little trees during the bark-peeling time.” Others surmised that the birds, in their northward flight, traversed the skies of New York to settle somewhere in the remote vastness of Ontario or Quebec. One experienced pigeoner said that six hundred bred that year in a swamp near Lake City, Michigan. Naturalist Vernon Bailey found several nests along the Elk River, in Sherburne County, Minnesota, from the end of April to the middle of May. A tally of game killed in Missouri over the twelve months ending March 1, 1886, listed 8,129 “turtle doves” (presumably mourning doves) and 4,929 “wild pigeons.” But the origins of the data are not given.11

  The species tried to nest in at least two states in 1887. During late May and early June, groups of unknown size abandoned their efforts at sites near the Wisconsin towns of Wautoma and Sparta respectively. In both instances, the birds suffered harassment from shooting. The trappers had already arrived at Wautoma, but were once again deprived the opportunity to ply their trade by the thoughtless gunners. An unexpected location for breeding pigeons was Tyler County, Texas. Fourteen pairs nested and laid eggs, six of which were collected by Edmond Pope. One egg survives in the collection of New York’s Columbia-Greene Community College, providing the only physical proof that the species did ever nest in Texas.12

  By 1888, most ornithologists who thought about passenger pigeons probably lamented that the bird might well disappear without ever having been scientifically studied in the wild. When William Brewster, curator of birds at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, learned that big flocks of pigeons were settling in to nest near Cadillac, Michigan, he jumped at the opportunity to “learn as much as possible about the habits of the breeding birds, as well as to secure specimens of their skins and eggs.” He grabbed a colleague and headed straightaway to Cadillac, where they arrived on May 8. To their great disappointment, however, they found that the flocks had moved on to points unknown. They were just a few weeks too late! But the netters, already poised for action, urged patience. The birds would certainly set down somewhere within reach; in due time that place would be discovered and the news would rapidly spread. After two weeks, however, the secret pigeon haunts remained hidden: “One by one the netters lost heart, until finally most of them agreed that the Pigeons had gone to the far North beyond the reach of mail and telegraphic communication.” Indeed, those vernal flocks that had lured both scientists and pigeoners were the last large aggregations of passenger pigeons ever seen in Michigan. A mere decade had elapsed since Petoskey.13

  COUNTDOWN TO EXTINCTION: 1890–99

  Wild passenger pigeons still existed in 1890, but in pitifully low quantities. A. W. Schorger suggested a population of a few thousand. But as Brewster discovered, there was no place one could go and be assured of seeing the species in nature. The birds were too few and scattered. It seems, though, there was one place where one could see pigeons in the early nineties: the Boston market. During 1891, its purveyors received on one occasion twelve hundred birds from Pennsylvania and Missouri, and on another two thousand live individuals captured near Fayetteville, Arkansas.14

  A number of reports come from 1892. While the pigeon supply dipped well below what could sustain national markets, early shoppers in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 16, 1892, could have indulged their taste for the species as both “wild pigeons and watermelons were among the delicacies exposed for sale in the city market this morning.” A few birds supposedly nested in an old stand of hemlocks along Young Woman’s Creek in Clinton County, Pennsylvania. The third record came from Bethel, Connecticut, where G. L. Hamlin watched seven birds in August and September as they regularly foraged in a tract of buckwheat. He shot one individual, but discarded it because it was in full molt and thus unlikely to make an attractive mount. Over the winter of 1892–93 “several hundred dozen” pigeons reached the St. Louis market from the Indian Territories. These may have been the last pigeons offered for sale in a big city, for a shipment arriving in New York City about the same time was condemned as being unfit for human consumption.15

  Five reports of passenger pigeons were made during 1893. In late April, word came from Highgate, Virginia, that a few pigeons were breeding in the vicinity and, what is most remarkable, that an effort was under way to protect them. About the same time, twenty or so birds lingered in Maynes Grove, Franklin County, Iowa. One was discovered dead. A lone individual was taken at Morristown, New Jersey, on October 7. Also in the fall, a Mr. Riddick of Heywood County, Tennessee, saw eight birds, of which he shot one.16

  A detailed and well-written account describes one of the two sightings from Illinois that year. To his great amazement Edward Clark discovered a male passenger pigeon in April 1893 as he birded in Chicago’s expansive Lincoln Park. Clark was a writer on the staff of the Chicago Tribune and a graduate of West Point who rose to the rank of colonel. The pigeon rested on the branch of a maple, fully illuminated by the early-morning sun: “There were no trees between him and the lake to break from his breast the fullness of the glory of the rising sun … The sun made his every feather shine. Not a single feather was misplaced, and about the neck there was the brilliancy of gems.”17

  Clark had hoped to flush the bird so that it would fly to the north and out of the city. But, instead, to his dismay, the bird “winged his arrowy flight straight down the Lake Shore drive toward the heart of the city.” But even if the pigeon had flown in the direction Clark thought safest, it might not have mattered; just a few months later in September, somebody shot a pigeon out of a flock of three near the Des Plaines River, in Lake County, a little to the north and west.18

  Indiana hosted more pigeons during 1894 than it had in the previous two or three years. There were five sightings, including a flock of fifty in La Porte County. An even larger group, 150 in all, reportedly appeared in Whitewater, Wisconsin, one day in early May. Massachusetts lost its last known passenger pigeon on April 12 when Neil Casey shot a female at Melrose. October 20 is the date on which a pigeon would intersect speeding lead in North Carolina for the final time. She met her fate in Buncombe County.19

  With the dawning of 1895, the passenger pigeon as part of the North American landscape entered its final phase. Almost every record marked a “last.” A question that needs to be addressed is by what standard should reports be included here. Schorger believed that the last records needed to be based on “specimens with credible data,” a conclusion with which I agree. Sight records won
’t do, although with the endorsement of a local expert of known repute they are worth noting.20

  The need for a corroborating specimen is particularly acute in the case of the passenger pigeon, which so closely resembled the widespread and common mourning dove. In numerous published instances, passenger pigeons miraculously became mourning doves once they were shot and examined in the hand. And sometimes even a bird in the hand or expert testimony was not enough to convince the true believer. W. DeWitt Miller and Ludlow Griscom of the American Museum of Natural History made an on-site investigation of purported passenger pigeons nesting in York County, Maine. The year was 1919, but “no reports that we have ever seen were so plausible or circumstantial, nor could we have encountered greater certainty in our correspondents.” As further corroboration, one of the elderly witnesses was supposed to have been an experienced pigeoner in his younger days. But even after the two scientists observed the birds in question and identified them as mourning doves, the former hunter refused to concede. No doubt, to him they would always be passenger pigeons.21

  During a cold spell in late January or early February 1895, two pigeons were shot at Mandeville, Louisiana, one of which is now in the collection of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. Pigeons continued to visit several places in Wisconsin that year. In Prairie du Chien hunters shot them. Michigan claimed ten birds sighted in West Branch and a young female taken on October 1 in a forested portion of Delta County. One flock of sixty and another of twenty-five spent some time in Indiana. Yet another pigeon ventured into Lake County, Illinois, this time reaching the tony suburb of Lake Forest. It was killed by a boy on August 7 using a rifle ball that mutilated the carcass. Fortunately, the young man brought the bird to a neighbor, John Ferry of the Field Museum, who, realizing its significance, preserved the skin anyway.22

  Nebraska’s final specimen fell to the Honorable Edgar Howard of Papillion, Sarpy County, when he shot it out of a flock of about twenty on November 9. Another flock supposedly appeared later in the month at Omaha. Two birds became specimens in New York: a taxidermist recalled mounting a male killed in the spring at North Western, while another was shot in September at Clinton. A pair were noted in Grey County, Ontario, in mid-August, the last of the species the observer would ever see. Another bird shot that year, in Putnam County, West Virginia, is deemed the last reliable record for the state. When Oliver Jones collected a male, a nest, and an egg on June 21, 1895, near Minneapolis, he established the last verified record of both the species for the state and nesting in the wild anywhere. He would later donate the pigeon material and the rest of his extensive collection to the University of Minnesota’s Museum of Natural History (the Bell Museum).23

  A number of reports come from 1896, spread widely across pigeon range. Professor W. P. Shannon observed the wings of a bird taken at Greensburg, Indiana, either in the winter of 1895–96 or the following spring. No month or day is given, but market hunters are said to have taken three birds at Houston, Texas. Observers in Ontario reported two flocks, one on April 15 consisting of thirteen females or young birds, and one of eleven on October 22. Frank Chapman, editor of Bird-Lore and the creator of the Christmas Bird Counts, examined a mounted young female molting into adult plumage that had been obtained on June 23 in Englewood, New Jersey. Frank Rogers shot one near Dexter, Maine, on August 16. Wisconsin, once home of vast nestings, surrendered its second-to-last bird when a hunter shot a young male that rested on top of a dead tree. This occurred on September 8 near Delavan Lake, Walworth County, an area rich in acorns and grasshoppers, as evidenced by the contents of the pigeon’s full crop. Iowa yielded its last passenger pigeon specimen when a male was shot near Keokuk on September 7 or 17. About a month later, on either October 23 or 25, the last fully corroborated specimen from Pennsylvania was taken north of Canadensis, Monroe County. Frank Cushing Norris shot the bird, an adult male, as it perched alone in a pine tree.24

  The year 1896 would also mark the final recorded presence of the species in Louisiana. Just two days after Thanksgiving, A. E. McIlhenny, whose father invented Tabasco sauce, was pursuing prairie chickens in Cameron Parish. As he stalked his quarry, he came across a large group of mourning doves foraging in a field of corn and peas. Fraternizing with the doves was a lone passenger pigeon, which he shot. Hunting quail in Oregon County, Missouri, on December 17, Charles Holden encountered a flock of fifty pigeons skittering across the sky above him. He managed to collect two and sent them in the flesh to Ruthven Deane, the Chicago businessman who did so much to document the last passenger pigeons. These birds are now among the holdings of the Chicago Academy of Science’s Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and I can attest they are both stunning males. Chief Pokagon wrote to Deane in October 1896 that he had been “credibly informed that there was a small nesting of Pigeons last spring not far from the headwaters of Au Sable River in Michigan.” Deane tried to seek corroboration by contacting the state game warden, Chase Osborn. Osborn did not know anything about the Au Sable nesting but mentioned other recent sightings and expressed the belief that a few birds did continue to nest in the northern reaches of the state.25

  Although in 1897 a small handful of passenger pigeons were still eking out a living in the great outdoors, at most only two are known to have been killed that year. Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has one bird that was taken on April 26 in Meridian, Wisconsin. The Chicago Academy of Sciences holds the other specimen, but the date of demise is less certain. The label lists the origin as Evanston or Rogers Park (that part of Chicago that borders Evanston) and the time as “around 1897.”26

  Margaret Mitchell accepted on good authority that in spring of 1898 a group of twelve to twenty pigeons nested in maple and beech near Kingston, Ontario. Their fate was not recorded, but at least eight pigeons did have fatal encounters with humans during that year. It seems a bit odd that of these eight birds, only one was taken in the spring. That occurrence was evidently never published, but fortunately the corpse wound up in the Harvard collection. Number 248528 died in Adrian, Michigan, on April 19, 1898.27

  According to the Osprey (“An Illustrated Magazine of Birds and Nature”), sometime in 1897 or so an unnamed newspaper concocted a story that the Smithsonian Institution was offering generous remuneration for passenger pigeon specimens and/or information on where live birds could be found. Other papers disseminated the falsehood and it reached innumerable readers, many of whom responded with various claims and offers of their own. One cunning soul declared that he knew the secret hideout of numerous passenger pigeons but would divulge the information only upon first receiving payment. But amid all the bogus claims, there arrived at the Smithsonian an immature pigeon, killed on July 27, 1898, two miles east of Owensboro, Kentucky. In November another Kentucky passenger pigeon was reportedly shot in a hemp field near Winchester, but unfortunately the hunter cooked it and served it to his infirm wife for lunch. Afterward, he lamented his mistake and wished he had kept the feathers.28

  In Michigan the lives of three passenger pigeons came to an end in 1898. The first two were a pair reportedly shot in July near Grand Rapids. No one would have known of this record had not the outdoor writer Emerson Hough mentioned it in his Forest and Stream column “Chicago and the West.” Decades later, Schorger sought more information about the Grand Rapids birds and contacted the daughter of the man who had them in his possession at the time Hough wrote his article. Although she remembered the two mounts from her childhood, she could not tell him where they wound up.29

  The final Michigan bird of 1898 was shot on September 14 and was for a number of years considered the last verified collection of a wild passenger pigeon. Nobody has questioned the identification or the date, but a major prevarication runs through the record. The event was announced to the world in two different notes published in 1903. (Note the five-year delay in publishing.) One of the papers was published in the Auk by James H. Fleming. He merely recorded the date, that the bird was immature, and the name of who
mounted it. The second of the 1903 papers was penned by Philip Moody and appeared in the Bulletin of the Michigan Ornithological Club. He noted that Frank Clements shot an immature pigeon a few miles outside Detroit and that the bird was in Fleming’s collection.30

  Seven years later, J. Clair Wood published another article on the specimen, also in the Auk. He provided more details on the collection based on conversations he had had with Dr. Moody. Moody is quoted: “Mr. Clements and I were in the thick woods when we noticed three pigeons. They were flying above the tree tops, two abreast and the third behind and lower down. The latter bird lit near the top of a tall tree but the others continued their flight without a pause. I could have shot it but thought it was a Mourning Dove.” A careful reading of the article reveals that Moody never says explicitly that Clements shot the bird, but since Moody did not and someone did, that can only be Clements. All was well and good until 1951 when Norman Wood (Clair’s brother) published The Birds of Michigan and informed his readers that Frank Clements is a pseudonym for Philip Moody. What is going on here? Did Moody lie in his first paper and then later to Clair Wood? At least part of the answer can be found in the statute Michigan enacted in 1897. Under this law, Michigan became the only state to ban all killing of the passenger pigeon. Thus killing a pigeon in 1898 within the borders of Michigan would have been in violation of state law. That is clearly why the announcement of the specimen wasn’t made until 1903. And even at that date Moody was obviously not comfortable admitting that he broke the law, so he created Frank Clements. But Moody’s motivation for getting the story republished in the Auk twelve years after the event and repeating the falsehood remains obscure.31