The tintype (photo insert), probably taken in the 1860s but possibly as late as 1880, has a number of fascinating elements that are difficult to identify with absolute certainty. An important point is that this was a staged grouping (as evidenced by the painted background) and not a shot of people actually in the field catching passenger pigeons. In addition, the pigeon paraphernalia would have varied greatly, as it was not manufactured but rather made by individual hunters. I have discussed this image with a number of people, particularly Garrie Landry and art historian Susan Wegner of Bowdoin College, and the latter undertook a detailed analysis of the picture. The long pole held by the man on the left is the rod that would be attached to a fulcrum stake allowing it to be moved up and down teeter-totter like. The disk at the top is the stool where the decoy pigeon was perched. The short cross stake below the man’s hand was driven into the ground under the stool and provided the lowest point that end of the teeter-totter could reach; depending on the nature of the ground, this would prevent possible damage to the stool and the pigeon. A rope from the pole enabled the pigeoner to move it up and down. The long box with the holes—probably of wood with a canvas top—on which the rightmost pigeon preens is likely the traveling cote that held the stoolies and the fliers. (The basket might have served the same purpose.) Finally, the bag with the lumpy contents probably held the nets.
The only picture that comes close to that of the two men and their stool pigeons is the one that appeared in an article long known to passenger pigeon researchers, but the significance of the photo was not realized until February 2012 during a conversation between Garrie Landry and me. In his paper “The Last of the Wild Pigeon in Bucks County,” Colonel Henry Paxson included a photo of longtime pigeon trapper Albert Cooper of Solebury Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, posed with what appear to be three live passenger pigeons. These birds are described in the caption as “blind decoys,” referring to the practice of temporarily blinding stool pigeons by sewing their eyelids shut during their use as decoys. The photo was taken “about 1870.”
There are other photos of live birds, but over 90 percent of them are of birds in Professor Whitman’s Chicago flock. The remainder, minus the two already discussed, are from the Cincinnati flock, and most, if not all, of those are of Martha. I have never seen a photo of Whittaker’s Milwaukee birds.
RADIO, TELEVISION, MOVIES, AND THEATER
References to passenger pigeons have appeared from time to time in radio, television, movies, and theater. On April 27, 1948, the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show aired the episode “The Passenger Pigeon Trap.” McGee thought he found a living passenger pigeon despite the generally held view that the species was “stinct.” The bird in question, a rock pigeon, was perched on a bus and hence was a passenger.
In the inaugural episode of Star Trek, entitled “Man Trap” and aired on September 18, 1966, a visit to a planet virtually devoid of life elicits mention of the extinct bird. Running from 1982 to 1988, the PBS children’s show 3-2-1 Contact had a regular feature involving the Bloodhound Gang, a group of kids who solved mysteries. “The Case of the Dead Man’s Pigeon” centered on a contested will that is proved fraudulent because one provision leaves the estate to a society dedicated to the conservation of passenger pigeons; since the bird is extinct, there can be no such society and the will is a forgery. The script was written by acclaimed children’s writer and Newbery Medal–winning Sid Fleischman, whose son Paul carried on the family tradition of writing superb children’s literature, including the passenger pigeon poem printed above.
In Jim Jarmusch’s movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), a character refers to a particular bird as a “carrier pigeon” but is corrected (incorrectly as it turns out) by the owner, who yells, “Passenger pigeon! Passenger pigeon! They’ve been extinct since 1914!” Terrence Malick’s New World (2005) shows unmistakable faux Carolina parakeets, and one scene has a cloud of birds in the background that some have claimed are passenger pigeons, but a viewing of the movie indicates they could be any of the birds that flocked in huge numbers during that early period of U.S. history.
Passenger Pigeons, a feature film dealing with a coal-mining town in eastern Kentucky, was released in 2010. Writer-director Martha Stephens answered my query regarding the title: “I named the film Passenger Pigeons because … [it] represents the death of a culture that was once flourishing [but] is a much different animal than what it once was. Sadly, poverty still reigns but the work ethic and a sense of self-pride has seemed to disappear much like the Passenger Pigeon. I guess to sum it up, my movie touches upon the extinction of a place and the extinction of a person” (e-mail, April 7, 2011).
In the early winter of 1999, the Kraine Theater in New York City presented the play American Passenger written by Theron Albis and directed by Stephan Golux. Ostensibly about a family of New York gangsters, it explores the consequences of an inability to change when circumstances demand it. Mr. Golux kindly elaborated on the content of the play in response to my question: “American Passenger is a multi-layered fugue on the dangers of the failure to adapt. The title of the play refers directly to the American Passenger Pigeon, mentioned explicitly in the script and referenced implicitly in the production as the metaphor for a species that cannot evolve to meet rapidly shifting threats to life” (e-mail, April 5, 2011).
Satire
An interesting and slim volume of ornithological satire was produced by Melissa Weinstein and Jack Illingworth in 2003, entitled The Writings of Noah Job Jamuudsen on the Passenger Pigeon and purportedly published by the National Jamuudsen Society. The authors, having met in Montreal, discovered the text of this previously unknown ornithologist, the letters of whose name are coincidentally the same as those of America’s most famous bird student, “hidden inside a cask of St-Ambrose Oatmeal Stout.” Born in Sweden in the early 1800s, Jamuudsen came to the United States sometime before the summer of 1867, for that is when he first appears in “the archives of the Rhode Island Brotherhood of Ornithologists [as having been] involved in a number of disturbances.” It is the goal of Weinstein and Illingworth to place the subject of their biography on his “rightful throne: that of the Priest-King of all ornithologists.” Jamuudsen’s account of the passenger pigeon is indeed unique in the extensive literature on this species.
Urban Legend
A totally fabricated story about the final days of the wild passenger pigeon has permeated the Internet so thoroughly that it has been repeated as fact by serious authors in numerous articles and books (including one by Stephen Jay Gould). Like the most persistent of urban legends, it sounds plausible, is a narrative, and contains a moral. The claim is made that the last of the pigeons, all 250,000 of them, attempted to nest near Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1896: “In a final orgy of slaughter over 200,000 pigeons were killed, 40,000 mutilated, 100,000 chicks destroyed.” Only 5,000 managed to survive the wrath of the hunters. The 245,000 corpses were processed and packed in barrels for rail transport east. Unfortunately, however, the train derailed and all the dead birds spoiled and had to be discarded.
Unless one is steeped in the passenger pigeon record, it would be easy to swallow this story, but red flags are everywhere. First, as I document in the second-to-last chapter, there were nowhere near a quarter of a million birds in 1896. By then, all that still survived in the wild likely numbered no more than maybe a hundred or so. Second, not only don’t the numbers add up, but the purported breakdown of avian casualties is both far too precise and too high a percentage of the total to be believable. Third, and of great importance, such an event could not have escaped the knowledge of every historian and ornithologist who has ever written about the species. It would have made big news at the time. Finally, it is just too neat a story that every one of the dead birds was wasted. (The same article says a flight of over two billion passenger pigeons flew over Cincinnati in 1870; again, no such thing has ever been reported anywhere else.)
This fable is a classic type of folklore known as
the cautionary tale, which usually has three elements: a taboo or bad thing to do (killing all the birds); violation of the taboo; and a bad consequence (birds spoiled and discarded). The amazing thing to me, though, is that people are still making stuff up about a bird that has been extinct for nearly a century. I have attempted to trace this fable to its origins, and I think—although I am not sure—it first appeared in an anonymous article called “The End of the Wild: An Essay on the Importance of Biodiversity,” which supposedly ran in the now defunct Borealis magazine. The language is elegant and written in the first person; the author claims to have shared podiums with the likes of Richard Leakey. But modern authors who refuse to use their names and offer no explanation are suspect from the get-go. You can find the tale at
http://raysweb.net/specialplaces/pages/endofwild.html.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: LIFE OF THE WANDERER
1. Craig (1911) 408; New York minister in Wicks 108.
2. Craig (1911) 410; a life on the wing in French 80; John James Audubon 320.
3. Hudson Bay in Mitchell 92; Mississippi in Lincecum 194–95; Maryland in E. Grant 28.
4. “Pigeon hosts” in Forest and Stream (1913) 792; Narragansett in Schorger (1955) 254.
5. Mitchell 84.
6. A. Wilson 108.
7. “Flight was very rapid” in Mitchell 84; Heriot in Wright (1911) 350.
8. Clait Braun, e-mail, July 21, 2011.
9. Fleming in Mitchell 169.
10. King v–vi.
11. Ibid., 121–22.
12. Schorger (1955) 201–02. The three scientists referred to are John Leonard, University of Illinois (Chicago), Ken Brock, and Stan Temple, University of Wisconsin–Madison. The first two looked at the question at my request.
13. Ibid., 204.
14. Kalm 61; Bishop 54.
15. Lincecum 194–95.
16. Butler in Leonard 165–67. See Kirtland 68.
17. Forty-two genera in Schorger (1955) 36–45; Mitchell 101–02.
18. Williams 145.
19. Ibid., 143. See Lalonde and Roitberg 1303 and Sork et al. 528–41.
20. Schorger (1955) 126–27; Ellsworth and McComb 1554.
21. Thoreau in Cruikshank 104; and “bag of marbles” in Roberts 585.
22. Pokagon in Mershon 59.
23. Benkman, e-mail to author.
24. Bertram 76.
25. “Blue wave” in Schaff 107; “rolling cylinder” in Wheaton 442; fecundity of forest in Scherer 32.
26. Scott County in Viroqua Censor (WI) and Indiana Farmer; Tennessee in Wright (1911) 442.
27. Cook in Mershon 164–66.
28. Cumberland Daily News. Schorger did not think it credible that the pigeons would just sit there getting squashed as their comrades in ever-increasing quantities rested on their backs. He thought it more likely that each bird perched on a branch that bowed downward to make it appear the birds were actually on top of each other. But the illusion, if such it was, presented itself often.
29. Webber 305–08.
30. Ibid.
31. Casto 11.
32. Ibid., 11–12.
33. Indianapolis Star. Also in G. Wilson 16:442.
34. Tennessee in Wright (1911) 442; Black River in Hall 56–58.
35. Hall 56–58; chemical release in T. M. Harris 179–80; air was so impregnated in Revoil 8.
36. Gonterman 1–50. This is a virtually forgotten work, overlooked by Schorger and others. From the passion Gonterman expresses in his introduction—“the extermination of the passenger pigeon … is a disgrace to civilization”—it is easy to surmise that the story of the bird had invaded his youthful consciousness as it has so many who know it. And being from Kentucky, he had probably read the accounts of his state by Wilson and Audubon a century before and become intrigued by what had happened to the roosting places. Through questionnaires and interviews, he solicited from the old-timers firsthand information on the local status of the bird, including the location and size of the roosts.
37. Schorger (1955) 87.
38. Seton 523. See Atkinson 7.
39. Coale 254–55.
40. Mershon 50–51.
41. Craig (1911) 420–21. See Whitman (1919) 120.
42. Seventy to a hundred twigs in Mershon 205; structures often persisted in Schaff 107.
43. Pike in Wright (1910) 436; “military precision” in French 56; “avenues … one mile” in French 12–13.
44. Josselyn in Wright (1910) 436; New Hampshire in Wright (1911) 358; Sparta in Fond du Lac Commonwealth.
45. Lincecum 194–95.
46. Giraud 184–85.
47. French 49.
48. Fond du Lac Commonwealth.
49. Deane (1896) 236. Deane attributed the tilting to incubation during cold spells when the bird’s wing would cover the eggs for warmth. But pigeon experts David Blockstein and Garrie Landry both doubt that the pigeons would have incubated in that way, as no other bird does. The passage is based, however, on Deane’s firsthand account published in the Auk, so I don’t doubt he described what he saw. Landry provided the plausible explanation adopted here.
50. Detroit Post and Tribune.
51. Nutritious milk in Hegde 238; milk-laden squab in Dixon.
52. Failure to dispense in French 58; Martin (1879) 385.
53. “Like drunken men” in Whitewater Register (WI); they hiked their way in French 30–31; human disturbance in Godwin 176–78.
54. Schorger (1955) 125.
55. 1976 in Greenberg (2002) 402; 1740 in Kalm 57; Schoolcraft 381.
56. Marsden 146–47.
57. J. J. Audubon 35; Welsh 165–66. Audubon refers to foxes in Kentucky, which at that time period would likely have been gray rather than red.
58. Goshawks are the most brazen in Bent 133; J. J. Audubon 242.
59. Trautman 209–10.
60. Wrong kind of hit in Bertram 70.
61. Scott 9–10.
62. Kelly 339–42. See Ostfeld et al. and McShea.
63. The American-chestnut was a mast producer that comprised 25 percent of the trees growing in the Appalachian Mountains. Chestnut blight (Endothia parasitica), an airborne fungus from Asia first imported into the United States around 1905, infected trees at a rate of fifty miles a year. (This had no impact at all on passenger pigeons, for by 1905 the species was likely gone from the wild.) Over the next few decades, an estimated thirty billion trees died, practically the entire population. Mast-dependent organisms must have been devastated during the period between the disappearance of the chestnuts and their replacement by other trees. From an ecological perspective the loss was even more significant in that the chestnut varied much less in the quantity of its annual mast than did the oaks and hickories that replaced it. At least one study of chestnuts, based on estimates, found that over ten years chestnuts did not experience a single mast failure, and that the nuts produced during low-production years were just less than half of what appeared during high years (Diamond et al. 196–201). The forests were more stable when American chestnuts still lived. Unlike the chestnut blight, gypsy moths were deliberately brought, to Medford, Massachusetts, in 1868 to create disease-resistant hybrids with native silk moths. Some, however, escaped their confines. They found the New England woodlands hospitable enough to become a serious problem by 1889, when the first outbreak was discovered. They have since spread into the Midwest, where they are now firmly established. Gypsy moths are cyclical and can at their peak denude oaks of their foliage, eventually killing them. A major moth predator is the white-footed mouse, though The Yearbook of Agriculture 1949 took comfort in the demonstration that the aerial application of DDT effectively controlled the moth.
64. Webb 367–75.
65. Ellsworth and McComb 1548–58.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 1553.
68. Noss 234.
69. Ibid., 235–36.
70. “One of the most disastrous” in Kriska and Young 3; ideal-size food in Raithel 21–
23.
71. Life cycle of tick in Ostfeld et al. 326; Blockstein (1998) 1831. See Jones et al. 1023–32.
72. Komar and Spielman 164.
73. This discussion on lice is based on Clayton and Price; Dunn; and Friederici.
CHAPTER 2: MY BLOOD SHALL BE YOUR BLOOD:
INDIANS AND PASSENGER PIGEONS
1. Interview with Paul Gardner, Midwest Regional Director, Archaeological Conservancy.
2. Krech 183.
3. Interview with Terrance Martin, Illinois State Museum.
4. Parmalee (1959) 62–63.
5. Guilday 1.
6. Guilday and Parmalee 163–73.
7. Orlandini 73–75.
8. Jackson 186.
9. Krech 36–37; S. Nelson 8–16; Neumann 389–410.
10. Parmalee (1958) 174.
11. Mitchell 17; Wright (1910) 429.
12. Mooney 280; Mitchell 18.
13. Fradkin 415–16.
14. Hager 92–103.
15. Kalm 64.
16. Schorger (1955) 140.
17. Dodge 343.
18. Krech 24.
19. Lawson 50–51.
20. Radin 112.
21. Atkinson in Blanchard 159.
22. Bunnell 186.
23. Jackson 177.
24. G. Harris 450.
25. The remainder of the chapter is based on the remarkable paper by Fenton and Deardorff 289–315.
CHAPTER 3: A LEGACY OF AWE
1. Cook 17–18.
2. Wright (1911) 361; O’Callaghan 45.
3. Schorger (1938) 473.
4. Ibid., 471, 475.
5. Wright (1910) 431, 434.
6. Wright (1910) (Stork) 435; Watson 410.
A Feathered River Across the Sky Page 31