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Passenger Pigeon
From Billions to Zero
In 1866, observers witnessed a massive cloud of birds traveling into southern Ontario. It was a mile wide and 300 miles long and took 14 hours to pass a single point. That "cloud" may have contained more than 3.5 billion birds.
Passenger Pigeon flocks were huge. They nested by the thousands in the vast unbroken stands of North American woodland, feeding on acorns and nuts. But as settlers moved across the continent and cleared the forests, they removed large portions of the bird's habitat and food supplies.
Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), once so astonishingly abundant that no natural predator could make a dent in their numbers, were surprisingly vulnerable to human intrusion. In 1914, the last one died. |