Life
Page 17
What is remembered most about the birds is their breeding aggregations—some flocks were estimated to contain up to two billion individuals. Such vast congregations of nesting birds were doubtless designed to overwhelm predators. Indians would gather in their hundreds whenever a nesting site was located and eat nothing but squabs for the month or so that they were available. They were joined by wolves, bobcats, hawks and a multitude of other carnivores. Despite the best efforts of these serried ranks, enough young pigeons survived for the species to thrive for thousands of years.
The pigeons met their match, however, in the Europeans, who by the middle of the nineteenth century were devising new means to harvest resources on the grand scale. Sol Stephan, the zookeeper who looked after the last passenger pigeon at Cincinnati Zoo, noted: ‘The beginning of the end began with the invention of the breech-loading shotgun about 1870. With this gun a hunter could kill fifty birds before his comrade with a muzzle-loader could prepare his charge.’ Stephan somewhat pathetically added: ‘Although the pigeon did no particular harm and was a very delectable dish, it became the popular thing to kill the birds.’ So popular was it that pigeon-killing competitions were organised in some areas, one competitor having to produce 30,000 carcasses before taking the wreath of victory.1
Nature writer Peter Matthiessen perceptively called the passenger pigeon ‘a biological storm’. An unforgettable account of a nesting colony was penned by John Audubon in the 1860s:
The sun was lost to our view, yet not a single bird had arrived. Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of ‘Here they come!’ The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea…As the birds arrived, and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked down by polemen…perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed thousands of birds beneath…It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak, or even to shout, to those persons who were nearest me. The reports, even, of the nearest guns, were seldom heard; and I knew of the firing, only by seeing the shooters reloading…the pigeons began to move off…and, at sunrise, all that were able to fly had disappeared. The howlings of the wolves now reached our ears; and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, opossums, and pole-cats, were seen sneaking off from the spot, whilst eagles and hawks, of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them and enjoy their spoil. It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying and the mangled. The pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder.2
European naturalists of the day found it difficult to accept the veracity of such fabulous-sounding accounts. English squire Charles Waterton, who read Audubon’s narrative soon after it was published, commented dryly that either Mother Nature ‘herself was in liquor, or her wooer in hallucination’, to have produced such a phenomenon. But Audubon simply wrote down what he saw, for his testimony is backed up by others, and from records of the carcasses of the monumental slaughter that were shipped east to ready markets aboard the new railroads. Oftentimes these markets were glutted and thousands of birds were dumped.
Although laws designed to protect the species were enacted, they were ignored by the populace and within a few years mass destruction had overcome mass reproduction. By 1890 the species was in serious trouble and the last wild bird was killed in Ohio in the spring of 1900. Fourteen years later, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, looked into the now empty skies that had once thronged with her kind. She died in her cage at Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914 and her stuffed skin now forms a pathetic display in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Many North Americans would simply not believe that it was they who were responsible for the end of this incredible creature. Instead, ridiculous rumours circulated to account for the absence of the great flocks, including one that they had all flown to Australia!3
The years 1914–18 were bad ones for Cincinnati Zoo, for they saw out the last Carolina parakeet, as well as Martha. The beautiful parakeet—North America’s only native parrot—was common enough in the nineteenth century to be counted an agricultural pest. This, plus its habit of returning to flutter around fallen comrades, was enough to ensure its end in a land where everyone carried a gun.
The demise of the passenger pigeon had unfortunate repercussions on other bird species. One birdwatcher remarked: ‘When the passenger pigeon began to decrease in numbers, about 1880, the marksmen looked about for something else to take its place in the market in the spring. They found a new supply in the great quantities of plover and curlew in the Mississippi Valley at that season…They were shot largely for western markets at first; they began to come into the eastern markets in numbers about 1886.’ This mad shooting spree saw the trumpeter swan and whooping crane brought within a few shotgun blasts of extinction—only a few dozen of these most magnificent birds survived by the early twentieth century. In the mad melee, even the ubiquitous herring gull was reduced in number, breeding at just a single colony on the Atlantic coast.4
The Eskimo curlew was once one of the most abundant shorebirds in North America; in the nineteenth century its flights were reported to have ‘darkened the sun’. One migratory flock that flew over Nantucket in 1863 exhausted the island’s supply of shot and gunpowder after 7000 or 8000 birds were blasted from the sky. In 1891, while searching for its breeding grounds in northern Canada, the ornithologist–explorer Roderick MacFarlane wrote that ‘among the many joyous bird notes which greet one while crossing these grounds, none seemed more familiar or pleasanter than the prolonged mellow whistle of the Esquimaux Curlew’. Since the time of Captain James Cook these birds had provided ‘the greatest delicacy’, and long before that they had been harvested sustainably by Native Americans.5
The arrival of commercial shooters, who found a desirable resource in the numbers of Eskimo curlew, presaged enormous danger. Although each curlew weighed under half a kilogram, they were keenly sought because of the great amount of fat they laid down in the fall. Marketed as ‘doughbirds’ the creatures were just the right size to fit in a tin, and canning factories were set up in Labrador in the 1880s. By 1890 commercial exploitation had led to a rapid decline in their numbers, reducing them to the verge of extinction. Today, over a century later, the species still shows no sign of recovery. The last confirmed sighting was in 1974, and the Eskimo curlew may yet prove to be America’s most recent lost bird species.
By the early twentieth century, after blasting their way through the larger species, commercial hunters were reduced to the pitiful expedient of shooting swallows, sometimes killing over a hundred of these tiny birds with one shot. Their pathetic, mouse-sized carcasses graced the markets of New York and Philadelphia in inordinate numbers because most of the larger bird species were simply no longer available.6
That venerable part of the European economy in North America, the fur trade, reached appalling proportions at this time as well. In a book written at the end of the nineteenth century to promote the International Fur Store in London, it was reported that each year England imported the pelts of 50,000 wolves, 30,000 bears, 22,000 American otters, 750,000 raccoons, 40,000 cats, 50,000 to 100,000 pine marten and 265,000 foxes. Most came from North America. Here was overexploitation of the natural resource base on the truly grand scale. As a result, by the middle of the twentieth century the grizzly and wolf would be all but extinct in the contiguous United States, with only the vastness of Canada and Alaska providing a refuge.7
‘We come now,’ wrote William Hornaday in 1887, ‘to a history which I would gladly leave unwritten. Its record is a disgrace to the American people in general, and the Territorial, State, and General Government in particular. It will cause succeeding generations to regard us as being possessed of the leading characteristics of the savage and the beast of prey—cruelty and greed.’ Hornaday was r
eferring to the extirpation of the American bison, particularly the most disgusting and wasteful stage of its slaughter, which occurred between 1830 and 1868.8
Hornaday, a veritable Boswell of the bison, records that the first European to see the creature in its native habitat was the Spanish adventurer Cabeza de Vaca. A prototypical Buffalo Bill, Cattle Cabeza, as his name translates, encountered bison in about 1530 as he wandered lost in south-western Texas, seeking a way home to Mexico. It was, however, another Spanish explorer, Francisco Coronado, who left us the most memorable early description of the ‘crookebacked oxen’. When he saw them in 1542, the Texas panhandle was as full of them as ‘the mountain Serena in Spain is of sheepe’:
The first time we encountered the buffalo all the horses took to flight on seeing them, for they are horrible to the sight. They have a broad and short face, eyes two palms from each other, and projecting in such a manner sideways that they can see a pursuer. Their beard is like that of goats, and so long that it drags the ground when they lower their head…They always change their hair in May, and at this season they really resemble lions…Their tail is very short, and terminates in a great tuft. When they run they carry it in the air like scorpions…Another thing which struck us was that all the old buffaloes that we killed had the left ear cloven…9
This extraordinary, archetypal American creature is now so unfamiliar that Coronado’s quite accurate description seems fantastical. Once found over a third of the continent, from the tidewater of the Atlantic coast to the eastern fall of the Sierra Nevada, it was, wrote Hornaday, ‘the most economically valuable wild animal that ever inhabited the American continent’.10
Bison were never accurately censused until their numbers dropped so low that they could be individually counted, but estimates of the early nineteenth-century population range between 30 and 60 million. Such vast figures can only be made sensible to us today through written accounts of this animal en masse. In 1795, a French trapper recorded that 7360 buffalo were drowned or mired along the Canadian Qu’Appelle during the spring break-up. Another recorded that drowned herds floated past his trading post, setting up such a prodigious stink that he was unable to eat his dinner. Billy Dixon crossed paths with a herd in 1874. One morning after breakfast, Dixon heard that ‘familiar sound come rolling toward me from the Plains—a sound deep and moving, not unlike the rumbling of a distant train over a bridge. In an instant I knew what was at hand. I had often heard it. I had been listening for it for days, even weeks.’ The sound was coming from bellowing bison bulls, a ‘continuous, deep steady roar that seemed to reach the clouds’. The bellowing had carried for more than sixteen kilometres over the plains, and after riding out ‘as far as the eye could reach, south, east and west of me there was a solid mass of buffalo—thousands upon thousands of them—slowly moving toward the north’.11
The story of the evolution of the bison has been told in preceding chapters, but it is important to restate its place in North American ecology. Bison dominated the vast ungulate communities of the Great Plains. These herds had assembled themselves with mind-boggling speed—only 13,000 years—and nothing like them had ever existed previously on the continent. The millions of bison roaming the plains in 1492 were critical to this new ecosystem, for the vegetational diversity of the prairie was dependent on them, which in turn benefited the lesser ungulates such as American antelope and elk, as well as many other species. There were only two significant predators in this ecosystem, the wolf and the plains Indians, both of which occurred at extraordinary densities for such large carnivores (there being an estimated 400,000 wolves in the US and 200,000 to 400,000 plains Indians). Both populations were utterly dependent upon the bison for their survival. The genus Bison, which had first appeared in North America south of the ice sheets just half a million years earlier, had thus elevated itself into a position of absolute ecological dominance, and by 1492 was a keystone species. Its near extinction was to have important implications for America’s rangelands.12
Large mammals such as bison are important to ecosystems because they have a miraculous effect on soil fertility. In general soil fertility declines once rainfall reaches 800 millimetres per year because of leaching. On African savannas that still support a megafauna, however, soil nutrient levels peak in regions receiving 900 to 1100 mm of rain per year. This is because the great herbivores act as nutrient sinks, continuously doling out the precious nutrients in their urine and faeces. In effect they store nutrients, preventing them from being lost through the water. They also trample mature vegetation, stimulating new growth. These characteristics make megafauna-dominated savannas among the most productive regions on Earth.13
The key to the bison’s role in the prairie ecosystem lay in the fact that the great grasslands were piss-driven. Buffalo urine was the critical fertiliser for the grasses, and their fertility in turn dictated where bison grazed. It was a self-reinforcing cycle that, when coupled with the vast migrations of the herd, kept the prairie an exceptionally productive place. Even bison wallows were important, for distinctive plant communities grew by them that were favoured by other herbivores such as American antelope. The whole ecosystem had in effect organised itself around the bison’s survival, and it was an ecosystem of enormous proportions, for the bison were accompanied by around nine million American antelope, 3.6 million deer, two million elk and two million bighorn sheep.14
Hornaday summarised the cause of the buffalo’s destruction as ‘the descent of civilisation’. ‘Civilisation’ was a word Hornaday uttered between clenched teeth, for the story he documented was informed by his enormous shame and contempt for the actions of his countrymen. From the very beginning, he lamented, the slaughter involved unforgivable waste. In the very early days most bison were shot for their skins, which were made into blankets or robes. Later they were shot for their tongues or from railway carriages for sport. According to Hornaday these sportsmen were ‘murderers’. The period of systematic slaughter proceeded in a ‘business-like, wholesale way’. Hornaday wrote that ‘perhaps the most gigantic task ever undertaken on this continent in the line of game slaughter was the extermination of the bison in the great pasture region by the hide hunters. Probably the brilliant rapidity and success with which that lofty undertaking was accomplished was a matter of surprise even to those who participated in it.’15
A decisive blow against the bison was struck by chemists, who in 1871 perfected a tanning process for buffalo hide. The British Army added to their perfidy by proclaiming that buffalo leather made the very best military footwear. From that moment no bison was safe. Between 1871 and 1874 ‘little else was done’ in the regions of Dodge City, Wichita and Leavenworth ‘except buffalo killing’. The hundreds of thousands of skins that Colonel Dodge saw sent to market were scarcely an indication of the extent of the slaughter. For each hide sent, five went to waste. Many animals were shot and then allowed to wander off to die, while others were skinned so inexpertly that the hides had to be discarded. Hornaday laments that the curers were so ignorant of their trade that half of the skins they obtained rotted.16
Eighteen eighty-four was the year the buffalo lost the battle for the plains. Theodore Roosevelt recalled meeting a rancher who had travelled a thousand miles that year and who related that he was ‘never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one’. The year before 40,000 buffalo hides had been shipped east, but in 1884 only 300 were sent. The days of the bison—and the bison hunter—were over.17
On 1 May 1889, as he was putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, Hornaday wrote that ‘the nearer the species approaches to complete extermination, the more eagerly are the wretched fugitives pursued to the death whenever found. Western hunters are striving for the honor (?) of killing the last buffalo.’ Were it not for the vigilance of park rangers, the 200 buffalo that found refuge in Yellowstone National Park ‘would have been shot years ago by Vic. Smith, the Rea Brothers’ and others, Hornaday sighed.18
In all just 600 bu
ffalo survived the slaughter. These had found refuge in out-of-the-way or protected places in Canada and the US, and herds were eventually brought together to act as nuclei for a new breeding program. The Custer State Reserve in South Dakota’s Black Hills played a crucial role in this process. Around 1000 of the great beasts can still be seen trudging across the grassy valleys there, the bulls uttering their peculiar lion-like roar just as they did when Billy Dixon heard them in Texas a century before. For all their magnificence there is something heartbreaking about visiting the place. To have to come so far to see a creature that was once unavoidable on the Great Plains seems wrong, and to make it worse the buffalo in Custer are carefully managed. They are all branded, and any over ten years old are culled. This rigorous strategy has maintained a virile stock that has brought the species back from the brink of extinction, for the Custer herd has contributed greatly to the 250,000-strong buffalo herd on private lands across the nation. Yet despite their muscular bodies, the mop-headed creatures lack the wildness and majesty one expects in an American buffalo.
The demise of the bison had a profound impact on both wolves and plains Indians. The decline of the wolf is a story also written in hides. In 1880, 7000 wolf skins had been sold in the US, but by 1885, the year after the last great bison massacre, just 273 skins reached market. By 1965, the year of their nadir, just 500 wolves remained in the contiguous states of the US and there is little doubt that had Americans possessed the resolve to continue their persecution, there would be no wolves left there today. In the case of the plains Indians, their discomfort seems to have been one of the principal reasons that the US government permitted the destruction of the buffalo in the first place. The massacre at Wounded Knee Creek that heralded the end of Indian autonomy occurred in 1890, just six years after the demise of the bison.19