II. SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY
Cloning
Claims of cloning have been made for a frog, carp, and maybe twenty species of mammals. In many cases, the “successful” clone lived but a short time due to defects that are almost inevitable when shortcutting the intricate steps that have developed over millions of years of evolution. No bird has ever been cloned, not even those that are economically important, although poultry have been genetically manipulated.
All successful clones have been from tissues taken from living or freshly killed animals. The freezing and thawing of such tissues damages cells and destroys their suitability for cloning unless specific cryoprotectants are used. Still, the prospect of bringing back to life an extinct bird and releasing it into the wild is exciting enough for scientists and others to give it serious consideration. The Long Now Foundation hosted a meeting at the Harvard Medical School to discuss that possibility in January 2012. Of various theoretical approaches, the one with the most promise involved the extraction of DNA from passenger pigeons and using that to create passenger pigeon traits in a band-tailed pigeon. A host of challenges were identified, such as:
1. At what point, if ever, does a genetically altered band-tailed pigeon become a passenger pigeon?
2. If a handful of passenger pigeons could be created for life in a zoo, is that even worth doing?
3. Are vast flocks an essential attribute of passenger pigeons?
Even if all the scientific problems inherent in producing live passenger pigeons could be mastered, a host of political and other challenges of perhaps even greater difficulty would remain in creating wild, reproducing populations of the species. As of June 2013, additional discussions are being held and genetic research is moving forward.
(Based on my attendance at the meeting referred to, as well as additional information provided by Jennifer Schmidt, associate professor of biological sciences, University of Illinois–Chicago, and Ben Novak, lead researcher for de-extinction with the Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore Project.)
Collections
Paul Hahn (1875–1962) first learned of the passenger pigeon through an article he read when he was twelve years old and living in Württemberg, Germany. He saw his first mounted passenger pigeon in 1902, four years after he and his family had immigrated to Ontario. The sight had a profound impact on him: “I was struck by its beauty and saddened by the knowledge that no one would ever again see the magnificent flocks which once darkened the sky.”
As a personal memorial to the species, Hahn devoted himself to combing attics, bars, cellars, and every other kind of human habitation to collect passenger pigeons. From 1918 to 1960 he acquired seventy specimens, all of which he conveyed to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Largely through his efforts, as well as those of James Fleming and others, the museum has 152 passenger pigeons (including ten egg sets), more than any other institution in the world.
This is known with certainty because of Hahn’s other great work. In 1957 he became curious as to how many passenger pigeon specimens were known to exist, and he attempted to find out. At the suggestion of James Baillie at ROM, Hahn also included in his search comparable information on the great auk, Carolina parakeet, Eskimo curlew, Labrador duck, ivory-billed woodpecker, and whooping crane. Over five years he contacted collections all over the world, receiving responses from over a thousand. His final tally of passenger pigeons came to 16 skeletons and 1,532 skins and mounts. The work was published in 1963 as Where Is That Vanished Bird? Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of these specimens are in the United States and Canada. Based on my knowledge, which is certainly incomplete, there are specimens in every province except Newfoundland/Labrador (and none in the three territories) and every state but Georgia (had one but it was lost when Science Hall at the University of Georgia was destroyed in a fire), Hawaii, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma (Schorger includes a photo of a lovely male from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, but it is no longer there), Virginia, and Wyoming. It seems likely that collections within at least some of these states have passenger pigeon specimens. If you know of any, please contact the Project Passenger Pigeon website or the author in care of the publisher.
Almost all of the European countries have at least one. Other totals—Mexico: four birds in two museums; Australia: three birds in two museums; Japan: two birds; New Zealand: four birds in two museums; Guyana: one bird; and Sarawak, Malaysia: one bird. This last location stands out like a severe case of rhinophyma: How did a passenger pigeon get to Borneo? After a couple of letters to the Sarawak Museum failed to elicit any response, I contacted Frederick Sheldon of Louisiana State University, who conducts much of his research on Borneo. On his next visit, he met with the appropriate people in Sarawak and determined that, alas, no passenger pigeon was in the collection, nor any record of there ever having been one. But since Hahn received the information from the longtime director (now deceased), a passenger pigeon did undoubtedly once grace the collection. One can only imagine what happened to it.
George Lowery was a nationally prominent ornithologist who taught at Louisiana State University for many years. He was also a good friend of Schorger’s, and they corresponded frequently. In May 1960, Lowery had just returned from New Zealand, where he was hosted most generously by a local ornithologist. They agreed to trade specimens, but the New Zealander badly wanted a passenger pigeon for his university’s collection. Lowery sought Schorger’s advice: “I now have a corner on the world’s market of Whooping Crane eggs, thanks to the apparent infertility of good ole Crip and egg laying propensities of Josephine in the Audubon Park in New Orleans. Do you have any idea who might have an extra mounted specimen of a Passenger Pigeon to swap for a Whooping Crane egg?” Schorger responded by suggesting Lowery contact the Royal Ontario Museum, given its large collection of passenger pigeons: “Write Lee Snyder [of ROM] that nothing could promote the solidarity of the British Commonwealth more than the exchange of one for the egg of a Whooping Crane.” That transaction was apparently never consummated, as ROM’s only whooping crane egg is an early donation from James Fleming. But a trade was completed some years ago when a museum in Rhode Island gave up two passenger pigeons for a polar bear cub.
As one would expect, the amount of money it takes to acquire a passenger pigeon has increased dramatically over the years. In March of 1954 George Bachay from Edgerton, Wisconsin, wrote Schorger offering to sell one of his two “priceless” birds for $500. Schorger replied, “I … wish you luck in your attempt to get $500 a piece for the Passenger Pigeons. This figure is far beyond any that I have ever heard of. I bought a pair a few years ago for $75.00” (Schorger Papers).
No one keeps a closer eye on passenger pigeon sales than Garrie Landry, a botanist at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. In 1982 he recalls a bird went for $500. Today, birds typically go for around $5,000, although on occasion specimens can still be had for closer to $3,000. The highest price Landry knows of that anyone has spent on a single bird in the United States is $12,000; this purchase occurred around 2003–04. As someone at Sotheby’s explained, the price is determined by how badly a potential buyer wants the bird rather than any generally accepted value based on previous sales.
To this day a goodly number of birds remain in private hands, and more turn up regularly. Ideally, these birds would all wind up in educational or scientific institutions, through gifts, sales, or loans. Meanwhile, a registry should be established of these privately held birds. If anyone is interested, let me know via the Project Passenger Pigeon website or the publisher.
Bachay, George. March 29, 1954. Schorger Papers, University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.
Baillie, J. L. “In Memoriam: Paul Hahn.” Auk 82 (April 1965): 323–24.
Hahn, Paul. Where Is That Vanished Bird? Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.
Extralimital
Archaeologists have discovered passenger pigeon bones in places well beyond their historical range. These in
clude Dark Canyon Cave, New Mexico; Charlie Lake Cave in northern British Columbia; Stansbury II site at the Great Salt Lake of Utah; and at least two sites in Southern California, including La Brea Tar Pits. Bird bones don’t preserve well, so the presence of even a few in the far west suggests the possibility that the species once enjoyed a significantly wider range than that documented in the historical record. If that is true, the size of the total population might have been double or more the mind-boggling numbers that we do know about. Live birds were recorded in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, southern British Columbia, and southern Alberta.
The only documented instances of the bird in Mexico were the handful that showed up in the states of Veracruz and Puebla during the winter of 1872–73. Cuba hosted at least two passenger pigeons, a female shot in mangroves on the western part of the island and a male that turned up in a Havana market. Pigeons have been shot in France, England, Ireland, and Scotland, but Schorger doubted that any of the birds crossed the Atlantic on their own. Various people released passenger pigeons in all of those countries except possibly Ireland, but a species with the population and flight abilities of the passenger pigeon might well have made the trip on occasion, as have other North American birds.
To me, the most wayward of all passenger pigeons was the young male that appeared on Captain John Ross’s vessel Victory, as she bucked in the heavy seas off Baffin Island on July 31, 1829. The bird arrived with a storm that roared out of the northeast. From that direction, the closest land was Greenland, as inhospitable to a passenger pigeon as most any place on earth. The waif might have been doomed, but it gave hope to the crew, as noted by Ross: “If the sailors called it a turtle dove, and hailed it as an auspicious omen, we were well pleased to encourage any of the nautical superstitions which served to keep up their spirits and furnish them with subjects of discussion.”
Chandler, Robert. “A Second Record of Pleistocene Passenger Pigeon from California.” Condor 84 (1982): 242.
Harington, C. R. “Quaternary Cave Faunas of Canada: A Review of the Vertebrate Remains.” Journal of Cave and Karst Studies 73, no. 3 (2009): 162–80. doi:4311/jcks2009pa128.
Howard, Hildegarde. “Quaternary Avian Remains from Dark Canyon Cave, New Mexico.” Condor 73, no. 2 (March–April 1971): 237–40.
Ross, John. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage and of a Residence in the Arctic Region During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. Brussels, 1835.
Serjeanston, Dale. Birds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 384–85.
Genetics
Despite the similarities in appearance between the mourning dove and the passenger pigeon, DNA analyses—based on material extracted from toe pads—indicate that the closest living relatives to the passenger pigeon are those in the New World genus Patagionenas, which includes the band-tailed pigeon of western North America. According to one study, it is likely that both species originated from one of the cuckoo doves of Asia (Macropygia). Under this scenario the birds crossed the Pacific into the Beringean Region (Alaska) during the Miocene, millions of years ago, although this would be one of the few instances known of North American land birds having Asian origins. A later paper suggested that these pigeons might have originated in the neotropics.
Fulton, Tara, et al. “Nuclear DNA from the Extinct Passenger Pigeon Confirms a Single Origin of New World Pigeons.” Annals of Anatomy, 2011. doi:10.1016/j.aanat .2011.02.017.
Johnson, Kevin, et al. “The Flight of the Passenger Pigeon: Phylogenetics and Biogeo-graphic History of an Extinct Species.” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 57 (2010): 455–56.
III. THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN HISTORY AND CULTURE
A. W. Schorger
Most of us have our heroes. For a long time now Arlie William “Bill” Schorger (1884–1972) has been one of mine. No one looms larger in the world of historical natural history. Schorger is the only person I know of who perused every newspaper ever published in a state in search of articles on wildlife (excluding waterfowl because there were too many stories on people hunting them). Even cutting off his searches at 1900, the exercise took fifteen years, produced 795 typed pages, and yielded a trove of information on the changing status of wildlife in Wisconsin that is unsurpassed for any other state. This remarkable database, augmented by other historical and scientific literature, enabled him to write a series of articles with such titles as “The Black Bear in Early Wisconsin,” “The Prairie Chicken in Early Wisconsin,” and “The Rattlesnake in Early Wisconsin.” Out of this mass of material emerged two books as well, The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction (1955) and The Wild Turkey: Its History and Domestication (1966). (His first book, published in 1926, is The Chemistry of Cellulose and Wood.) Of The Passenger Pigeon, Schorger said that if the twenty-two hundred books and journal articles he read were added to the newspaper accounts, he consulted over ten thousand sources. Seven packed three-ring binders hold the notes from which he composed the manuscript.
Schorger was born in Republic, Ohio, in 1884 and received a master’s degree in chemistry from Ohio State University. After a stay in Washington, D.C., he relocated to Madison, where he worked at the federal Forest Products Laboratory and pursued his doctorate in chemistry. Moving into the private sector, he started at the C. F. Burgess Laboratories in Madison and ascended the corporate ladder to become president of Burgess Cellulose Co., which had a factory in Freeport, Illinois. When he retired in 1950, he had to his credit thirty-four patents. But as one more testament to his lifelong interest in natural history and his affinity for data collection, he kept track of all the dead birds he encountered on his weekly drives between Madison and Freeport. He made the trip 693 times and recorded 4,939 individuals of 64 species.
During Schorger’s short tenure at the Forest Products Laboratory, he met and befriended another young scientist, Aldo Leopold. The two of them formed a group with several others who also enjoyed canoeing, fishing, hunting, and other outdoor activities. Leopold was one of the great thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. His A Sand County Almanac is an amazing amalgam of science and philosophy expressed in some of the most beautiful and powerful English prose you will have the pleasure to read.
It is impossible to say how Leopold’s career would have evolved had he left Wisconsin, but Schorger and other friends succeeded in ensuring that such a move never happened. In 1933, the University of Wisconsin hired Leopold as the nation’s first professor of game management, and he joined the Agricultural Economics Department. Research by Stan Temple and Curt Meine (who authored the definitive biography of Leopold) revealed that coincident with the hiring, Schorger and other group members made substantial donations to the university. It is thought that these funds went toward Leopold’s salary. The same nucleus of patrons stepped up when Leopold was offered a high-level federal position in Washington, D.C. Due to their lobbying and financial generosity, the school created a whole department for him: Leopold was the sole faculty member of the country’s first Department of Wildlife Management.
After his retirement from business, Schorger joined the department in 1951 as professor of wildlife management. He evidently team-taught but one course, and he earned a token amount rather than an actual salary. Four years later he became an emeritus, but remained a presence at the department until the year before his death in 1972. He left an estate in excess of $6 million, at the time one of the largest in Dane County history. Fifty thousand dollars went to the department to help add books for the library, and a like amount established a scholarship for the study of Italian art, a subject of great interest to his wife. Marie McCabe explained, with a dollop of humor, that at Schorger’s death, colleagues heard about the endowment and praised the generosity, but when they later learned how much the estate was, the accolades turned to grumbling.
A. W. Schorger. Courtesy of Stan Temple and the University of Wisconsin Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology; photo by Tim Wallace
Schorger married Margaret Dav
ison, the daughter of a small-town banker, in 1912. Margaret was physically large and possessed a strong personality: two different people who knew her described her as “formidable.” One next-door neighbor suggested that Bill was quiet because Margaret was so loud. She was apparently the only reviewer of his written work whose suggestions he accepted. In gratitude and with humor, he dedicated the passenger pigeon book to Margaret, “whose patience surmounted extinction.” She died in 1961, a loss he struggled with for the remaining decade of his life. They had two sons, William and John. William served on the anthropology faculty at the University of Michigan for many years, and John taught writing and language at the Minnesota Metropolitan State College.
Two stories are worth relating, for one pertains to Schorger’s tenacity as a natural historian and the other as a businessman. Wisconsin’s only extant specimen of a cougar was an individual killed near Appleton in 1857. For many decades its mounted carcass graced the biology department of Lawrence University. But the faded cat was eventually deaccessioned into the trash, from which it was rescued by a tavern owner who thought it would make a nice addition to his establishment. It would undoubtedly have stayed there until the next remodeling had not the story been recorded in an old newspaper that Schorger examined as part of his ongoing research. He drove to the bar and for $50 liberated the scarred and odoriferous hostage. It now resides in the beer-and smoke-free confines of the University of Wisconsin’s zoology collection. In honor of Schorger’s efforts, another Badger, Hartley Jackson, christened the animal a new subspecies, Felis concolor schorgeri, a designation no longer recognized.
Toward the end of World War II, the U.S. military found itself low on sleeping bags, due to shortages of the feathers and kapok that were used as fillers. A request went out for proposals for substitutes. Schorger believed he had found one: cattail seeds. He rented a large warehouse at the corner of University and Whitney Way in Madison and hired students to collect masses of cattail heads. Apparently the building was literally brimming with the plants and could hold no more. But before Schorger had concocted an adequate technique for processing, other sources of stuffing became available and the bedding crisis passed. For Schorger, though, a new challenge arose: the dried cattail heads had discharged their seeds, and every inch of the building was covered in fluff. It was described as a sleeping bag with a tin exterior.
A Feathered River Across the Sky Page 28