Passenger Pigeon

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was once probably the most numerous bird on earth but became extinct through an extraordinary case of massive overhunting and habitat loss.

This striking blue-gray pigeon, closely related to the mourning dove, was highly social, living in huge flocks across the great deciduous forests that once covered eastern North America. At the time of the arrival of Europeans, there may have been up to 5 billion passenger pigeons, representing 25 to 40 percent of the entire continent's bird population. Their range stretched from Alberta to Nova Scotia, and south to the Gulf states, covering more than 7.25 million square kilometers. They wintered in the southern states and in the spring made spectacular migratory flights northward to their breeding grounds in the eastern mixed hardwood forests. Migrating flocks over one kilometer wide and 400 kilometers long were commonly observed well into the 19th century. Some great flocks were reported to have darkened the sky as they flew overhead, taking an entire day to pass a single point. Passenger pigeon nesting colonies could contain 100 million birds across 100 square kilometers, with dozens of nests per tree. After breeding season, large flocks of pigeons would move through the northern forests, seeking their preferred food—the mast of beech, oak, and chestnut—but also seeds, berries, worms, and insects.

Passenger pigeons had a significant impact on forest ecology. When hundreds of thousands made a long-term roost in a hardwood forest, they would consume great quantities of acorns and other tree seeds, damage or kill trees with their collective weight, and deposit tons of droppings on the forest floor. It took decades for such areas to recuperate, so the great flocks of pigeons needed vast new areas of hardwood forest each year for food, shelter, and raising their young.

When European settlers cleared the eastern forests for farmland, passenger pigeons began to lose some of the vast woodlands that they needed. It was intense commercial hunting in the 19th century, however, that caused the passenger pigeon to be essentially eaten into extinction.

The birds had long been hunted for food by indigenous peoples. In the 1800s, the demands for cheap food in the growing cities of the east led to largescale, unregulated hunting for profit. The birds were netted, shot, or gassed with pots of burning sulphur at roost sites. Young squabs were knocked out of nests with long sticks. Tens of thousands of birds were killed daily and shipped in box cars to East Coast markets where they might sell for as little as fifty cents a dozen. Game dealers in New York, for example, took in 100 barrels, or approximately 55,000 pigeons, a day.

Several thousand workers were employed in the pigeon meat industry by 1850. Thousands more were hunters. When observers noted in the 1860s that pigeon numbers appeared to be decreasing, the response was to move further inland to the still game-rich Midwest. Market hunters took advantage of the latest technology, learning the location of flocks through telegraph communications and [Page 1344]travelling to nesting sites on the railroad. Season by season, county by county, the “pigeoners” eliminated the birds. One of the notorious last large hunts took place in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. Hunters killed over 50,000 birds per day over several months, then tracked and killed the survivors when they attempted a second nesting.

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