The Great Destroyer
By Matthew Massey

Over 28 miles long, 3 miles wide, taking over 14 hours to pass over one location, blocking out all sunlight for several miles, and containing over 2 and a half billion birds. And this was just one flock. The desolation of Ectopistes migratorius, better known as the Passenger Pigeon, is almost equal to that of the dinosaurs. The fact that we live in a world without passenger pigeons is, if anything, what makes the human race the greatest destroyer known to all mankind.

The range of the passenger pigeon in its migrations was from central Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia south to the uplands of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. They traveled in flocks of ridiculous proportions, which often contained a couple hundred million or so birds and darkened the sky in their thickness. Their movements in the sky when assaulted by airborne predators could be compared to those of a large school of fish, weaving in and out of each other to avoid being persecuted by a pod of dolphins.

For thousands of years, the passenger pigeon had been the most numerous bird of North America. Individual passenger pigeons outnumbered every other individual land bird of every North American species; one out of every two birds found in North America would most likely be a pigeon. Their breeding grounds were often hundreds of miles in perimeter. Predators isolated to the ground feasted on fallen infant pigeons, much like fallen bats found on the ground of caves.

Colonial Americans hunted these birds in every generation since their arrival from Europe. The real decline of the passenger pigeon began in the 1800’s. Technology of firearms and man’s ignorance of conservation had advanced to a threatening level for the passenger pigeons. At this time, the pigeons had learned about crop fields. When any flock of them passed a field, they devoured it and left it in shambles. People would shoot at their flocks; they would succeed to kill a few, but only a few out of millions.

The real damage was dealt at the pigeons’ breeding grounds. The birds were slaughtered by baited traps, beaten out of their nests, shot, and even knocked unconscious by the fumes of burning pots of sulfur. The prototype of the infamous pound-gatling machine gun which would massacre Native Americans out of their final sanctuaries was tested on these birds. Hunters would harvest the birds from their breeding grounds and sell their meat by the dozen for fifty cents.

By 1878, Petoskey, Michigan had become one of the last greatest breeding grounds of the passenger pigeons. At this point, 50,000 birds were killed a day for about 5 months. This butchery was brought to a screeching halt by a conservational bill that outlawed the killing. Very few of the adult birds which came to these breeding grounds left them. They failed to repopulate themselves and withered away by the 1890’s. The last known passenger pigeon died on September 1st, 1914.