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I have written about many birds that we can find in Massachusetts today – here’s one that used to be here in countless numbers. It was so ubiquitous that people thought it could never become extinct. That’s right: I am talking about the passenger pigeon, the last of which, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Many scientists today consider the passenger pigeon to have been a keystone species, animals that play such a vital role in the ecosystem that their removal changes it dramatically. (More about this later.)
What was North America like when passenger pigeons lived here?
Passenger pigeons flew in such great numbers that they sometimes obscured the sunlight; they have even been compared to a solar eclipse. In 1630, Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote: “Upon the eighth of March, from after fair daylight until about eight of the clock in the forenoon, there flew over all the towns so many flocks of doves, each flock containing many thousands that they obscured the light.”
In 1663, F.C. Browne of Framingham wrote:
The Pidgeons, of which there are millions of millions. I have seen a flight of Pidgeons in the Spring, and at Michaelmas [Sept. 29] when they return back to the South-ward, for four or five miles, that to my thinking had neither beginning nor ending, length nor breadth, and so thick that I could see no Sun. They join Nest to Nest and Tree to Tree by their Nests many miles together in Pine-Trees. I have bought at Boston a dozen Pidgeons … for three pence. But of late they are much diminished, the English taking them with Nets.
So you can see that even as early as the 1600s, settlers to North America hunted these birds in such great numbers that they reduced their numbers on the Atlantic coast.
In inland regions of the country, they continued to fly, though. In 1813, John James Audubon described the massive flocks this way: “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow … Like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder, they rushed.”
It is difficult for us today to imagine both the noise and the darkness that the great flocks of pigeons produced. Ornithologist Alexander Wilson described it this way:
Happening to go ashore one charming afternoon, to purchase some milk at a house that stood near the river, I was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness, which, I took for a tornado about to overwhelm the house. The people observing my surprise, coolly said, “It is only the pigeons!”
As the number of people settling in North America increased greatly in the 1800s, so did the persecution of these birds. Although hunting for passenger pigeons by European settlers began merely as a quest for food, over time hunters reaped such enormous profits from these birds that they killed them by the hundreds or thousands. By the mid-1800s, a few passenger pigeons still visited parts of Massachusetts; by 1890, the bird was completely gone from our state.
Hunters devised many methods to catch these birds, but one of the most common methods was to use “stool pigeons” as bait. Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, described the use of stool pigeons to capture birds in the Atlantic states this way:
As soon as it is ascertained in a town that the pigeons are flying numerously in the neighborhood, the gunners rise en masse … Four or five live pigeons, with their eyelids sewed up, are fastened on a movable stick [the stool] … By the pulling of a string the stick on which the pigeons rest is alternately elevated and depressed, which produces a fluttering of their wings similar to that of birds just alighting … Passing flocks descend with great rapidity, and, finding corn, buckwheat, etc., strewed about, begin to feed, and are instantly covered by the net. In this manner ten, twenty, and even thirty dozen have been caught at one sweep.
Meantime the air is darkened with large bodies of them moving in various directions; the woods also swarm with them in search of acorns; and the thundering of musketry is perpetual from morning to night. Wagon loads of them are poured into market … Pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast and supper, until the very name becomes sickening.
Stool pigeons were special birds. By employing them, hunters could convince a flock of pigeons to abort their flight overhead and descend to the ground in front of them. Professor H.B. Roney of East Saginaw, Michigan, wrote, “A good stool-pigeon (one which will stay upon the stool) is rather difficult to obtain, and is worth from $5 to $25. Many trappers use the same birds for several years in succession.”
A 2017 study of passenger pigeon DNA shows that the passenger pigeon population remained steady in North America, darkening its skies, for 20,000 years. There were so many that all the eagles and hawks and owls and wolves and bobcats and bears and snakes and weasels and raccoons and other predators could not extinguish them – but when European predators arrived, they used the latest technology to massacre the birds: telegraphs to wire news to hunters about flock locations and railroads to transport barrels and barrels and barrels of dead ones to markets far away in the east.
There is much more to say about the passenger pigeon, including how our Northeastern forests have changed because of the absence of these birds. But I will save that for next week.
Reader thoughts on cellar spiders
I share my garage and cellar spaces with these troglodytic Pholcids and don’t mind them at all except that they are terrible housekeepers and leave about the suspended remains of their meals in old webbing, more conspicuous than the spiders themselves. – Norm Levey
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
A stronger
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