GLEN VAUDREY: Another visit to The Savage World

So far (see yesterday) The Savage World had failed to notice that the extinction of one bird, the great auk, had already happened. However, regarding today’s bird, the passenger pigeon, the author seems to have been more on the ball.

‘The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is our best know American bird of the pigeon genera, though within the last few years it has so nearly disappeared that it is seldom seen except in the Indian Territory, where one or two large roosts are still visited. When a boy I have seen the pigeons flying overhead in such enormous flocks that the sky would be fairly shut out from view by their bodies for hours at a time. These migrations were very frequent, caused by the very great devastations the birds wrought, requiring almost constant change of place to produce food. It is perfectly within the bounds of reason to say, as did Wilson, that as many as a billion wild pigeons have been seen to pass over a single course in three days, and that the consumption of food by these birds in the same time was equal to seventeen million bushels. Incredible as their numbers were twenty-five years ago, only a bare remnant now remains and within a like period they will probably become extinct. So quickly do they leave their feeding places and so great is their speed of flight that specimens have been shot in the northern New York with crops yet filled with rice taken from the savannas of the far South. As digestion is accomplished in these birds in less than twelve hours, the distance of more than one thousand miles must have been traversed in less than that brief time’

While sightings of wild passenger pigeons crept all the way up to 1930 it is unlikely that any actually managed to hang on that long. Certainly the last captive example, Martha, died on 1 September 1914 at Cincinnati Zoo. As an example of both the numbers of birds involved and the scale of the slaughter it is recorded that in 1878 at a site in Petoskey, Michigan, there was a daily slaughter of 50,000 birds that carried on for nearly five months, perhaps then it is hardly surprising that the author could see that the end was nigh for the passenger pigeon.

DALE DRINNON: Passenger pigeons in Indiana

Dale started at IUPUI hoping for a degree in Biology before changing to Anthropology and as a result, has a very diverse background in Geology, Zoology, Paleontology, Anatomy, Archaeology, Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Latin, Popular Culture, Film criticism, Mythology and Folklore, and various individual human cultures especially mentioning those of the Pacific and the Americas. He has a working knowledge of every human fossil find up until his graduation and every important Cryptozoological sighting up to that point. He has been an amateur along on archaeological excavations in Indiana as well as doing some local tracking of Bigfoot there. Now he is on the CFZ bloggo....

Passenger Pigeon information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon





We are living in the core area where the passenger pigeons once lived year-round, the breeding area of their range, and sporadic reports of Passenger pigeons have been made since their supposed extinction, including in Ohio and Kentucky.

What I saw did look exactly like a Passenger pigeon: a large greyish pigeon with a bright salmon-pink front. I saw it feeding on the ground within a few feet, and this morning I saw it fly overhead from below, associating with a large flock of park pigeons but keeping apart from them. Once again the pink belly was distinctive. The noise of the wings when it took off from the ground was also louder than usual when I saw it close up.

What I am assuming is that either Passenger pigeons were conspecific with mourning doves or that they had crossbred in the past and enough genes remain in the gene pool that they can be accidentally recreated by genetic recombination. Either that or they never really became extinct.

The Wikipedia entry also states that it is possible that the incredible numbers of the Passenger pigeons in the 1800s could have been a freakish population explosion, in which case it is possible that the freakish population was the one that became extinct while a few "normal" individuals remained.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

FLEUR SENT US...

...this collection of natural history specimens from a Texas museum. Good stuff.

Donated by the Nations family and collected by D.A. Cleveland starting in 1880, there are more than 150 species of bird eggs on display. Three of the species are extinct. B.F. Hicks – Mt. Vernon Historical Society “Knowing that there were 161 Passenger Pigeon eggs left on the planet earth, and only 27 Carolina Parakeet eggs left, we spent $55,000 making this small room with the climate control and the lighting, and up to national archive standards and brought in Smithsonian experts and consultants to do it right.”...

Read On

OLL LEWIS: An Auk-ward Silence

Now, over to Oll Lewis, the CFZ ecologist (who also happens to be the bloke living in my spare room) who - every day - tells us about `Yesterday's News Today` with a bevy of bad puns....


Whenever a species becomes extinct it is a truly lamentable occurrence. I often wonder, late at night when I’m having problems getting to sleep, if the last survivors of a species are aware of their plight; did the last woolly mammoth endlessly trudge the icy tundra looking for others, cheerfully thinking that he might find a mate the next day or did he ever truly accept there would be no more of his kind? Perhaps I’m anthropomorphosising a bit much but if a last survivor of a species was aware of his plight it would be truly tragic.

The tragedy is only compounded when it is human activity that caused the extinction. Humans have caused many extinctions; two that spring readily to mind are that of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) and the great auk (Pinguinus impennis). Both species were huge in numbers until man started to hunt them intensively, but the story of the final demise of the great auk is a particularly sad one.

Ever since humans first encountered the great auk they hunted it, even as far back as 100,000 years ago; bones from great auk have been found in the remains of Neanderthal fires and the bird has appeared in a number of cave paintings. This predation was not a problem until the sixteenth century because the numbers taken by humans were easily eclipsed by reproduction. However, things were soon to change. Ships began to stop off at great auk breeding sites while en route to and from the Americas. At first these stops off would just be to replenish food stocks, but soon some ships would go as far as to herding hundreds of birds on board ship for needless mass slaughter.

The bird's feathers were in demand as well as its meat and many birds were probably killed for no greater reason than stuffing a rich mans pillow with its down or so its feathers could make a fetching decoration in a woman’s hat. The trade in the feathers and down of the great auk in Britain and Europe was so great it led to the near eradication of nesting sites on the east side of the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually the killing of great auks for their feathers was banned by Britain in 1794, but this was long after the species had started a terminal decline. A further blow came to the species on the west of the Atlantic when the eider duck was forced into near extinction and down collectors from North America switched their attention to the great auk in the late eighteenth century. The fact that great auk eggs were highly sought after by egg collectors did little to help the species’ long term survival prospects too, especially when the egg collectors found out that the great auks laid their eggs over a number of days so a collector could take considerably more eggs if he was prepared to wait around.

The last great auk ever found in Britain came ashore on Stac An Armin, St Kilda, Scotland and was tried as a witch by locals. It ended its life in July 1840 tied up for three days and beaten to a bloody pulp by locals armed with sticks.

Around this time, a single colony of great auks survived on the small volcanic island of Geirfuglasker, which was near Iceland and was inaccessible to humans. Disaster struck in 1830 when an undersea volcanic eruption caused Geirfuglasker to sink beneath the waves. Most of the surviving birds made it to the nearby island of Eldey, which unfortunately was accessible to humans. When news spread of the great awks' presence on Eldey several museums commissioned collecting parties to bring back as many dead great auks as possible to add to their taxidermy collections; the birds would fetch a high price due to their rarity. On 3rd July 1844, less than ten years after the colony had been discovered, the final breeding pair was located. The last two birds were strangled just before the egg they had been incubating was smashed.

One last solitary great auk was seen after the murder of the last breeding pair and their unborn chick. The last great auk was seen on the Grand Banks of Newfoundand in 1852. I wonder if he ever questioned where all the others like him were or if he knew he was alone.

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's Internship Diary Weeks Four and Five

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

It has been a hectic two weeks both at work and at home, so I can only apologise for the missing week from my internship diary.

Last week started with me in Launceston; I had wanted to be allowed to help the curators to see how they work. Tony Eccles, the curator of Ethnography let me help him take down an exhibition about the great plant collectors of the Veitch nurseries. They had by the outbreak of World War one introduced 1281 plants to the west, including over 200 orchids and the Pocket Handkerchief tree we have one of in our garden.

The rest of the week was taken up with more shells including the prettiest ones yet and more herbarium. On the Friday I was again helping Tony, we took some rather ace objects to be photographed. My favourite was a Tongan club.

This week we have been doing a variety of things, yet more shells, even more herbarium action and condition checking the Cuvier's Beaked whale skeleton which is being remounted.

On being told that there was a Moa skeleton in the stores, I found it whilst looking for a whale rib and took a few pictures. On Friday I also saw a specimen of Passenger Pigeon, a bird whose story I'm sure you're all familiar with. It looked ordinary; not being an ornithologist I wouldn't have thought it unusual if it appeared in my garden. But nonetheless seeing it in such close proximity was quite emotional, it was on a table, between a pair of hummingbirds and the shell of a small turtle.

Friday afternoon found Catherine crawling around finding bits of bamboo under a tiger (one of 39 shot in 10 days by George V, the git), and found me checking pest traps as we had found a couple of live booklice, in one of them were two odd looking insects I couldn't identify, on asking some of my superiors they couldn't identify it either although the Assistant Natural History curator thought it was a type of winged Psocid (booklouse) however we were unsure if he was right and may send photographs of it to an expert. It was a rather long legged, bristly winged beastie of about 2 or 3 mm in length. Maybe I shall include a pic of it next week if I can.

So all in all I am still loving my work placement and hope that I can get a job in a museum like the one I'm working at now.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

THE PASSENGER

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was once the commonest bird on the planet. Flocks numbering one billion were known from North America. During migration these flocks could be one mile wide and 300 miles long. They became such a threat to farmers that in 1703 the Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated them!

In 1854 in Wayne County, New York, a local resident wrote that. `There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.' On 8 April 1873 at Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7.30 in the morning and 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Other reports describe flocks a mile wide flying overhead for four or five hours at a time during their migration in the early spring from the south to their breeding areas in New England, New York, Ohio and the southern Great Lakes area. The flocks were so thickly packed that a single shot could bring down thirty or forty birds and many were killed simply by hitting them with pieces of wood as they flew over hilltops.

It was these great numbers that were to be their downfall. The species would only breed in titanic flocks. In smaller numbers, they seemed to have no interest in breeding, possibly because they felt unsafe.

The trees on which these flocks fed and in which they roosted were cut down. The pigeons laid only one egg per year and were apparently very easy to hunt. Indians captured them in nets and Europeans shot them as target practice. The birds were a cheap source of meat once railways linking the Great Lakes area with New York opened in the early 1850s. By 1855, 300,000 pigeons a year were being sent to New York alone. The worst of the mass slaughter took place in the 1800s and 1870s. The scale of the operation can be judged by figures that seem almost incredible but which were carefully recorded as part of a perfectly legal and highly profitable commerce. On just one day in 1860 (23 July) 235,200 birds were sent east from Grand Rapids in Michigan. During 1874 Oceana County in Michigan sent over 1,000,000 birds to the markets in the east and two years later was sending 400,000 a week at the height of the season and a total of 1,600,000 in the year. In 1869, Van Buren County, also in Michigan, sent 7,500,000 birds to the east. Even in 1880, when numbers had already been severely reduced, 527,000 birds were shipped east from Michigan. Once the numbers had fallen below a tipping point there was no going back.

On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati, Ohio.