Market hunters
prospered, devising a wide variety of techniques for slaughtering
the pigeons and collecting their succulent
squabs. Adults were baited with alcohol-soaked grain (which made
them drunk and easy to catch), and suffocated by fires of grass
or sulfur that were lit below their nests. To attract their brethren,
captive pigeons, their eyes sewn shut, were set up as decoys
on small perches called stools (which is the origin of the term stool pigeon for one
who betrays colleagues). Squabs were knocked
from nests with long poles, trees were chopped down or were set
on fire to make the squabs jump from nests. Disruption of the
colonies was so severe that wholesale nest abandonment was common
and breeding success much reduced.
(Scenes of a sporting event - Shooting
Pigeons)
Pigeon
Shooting in 1835
Pigeon
Shooting _1
Pigeon
Shooting _2
So successful were the market hunters that
pigeons became cheap enough for use as live targets in shooting
galleries. Laws intended to protect the pigeons did not help.
In 1886 an editor's note in Forest and Stream said:
When the birds appear all
the male inhabitants of the neighborhood leave their customary
occupations as farmers, bark-peelers, oil-scouts, wildcatters,
and tavern loafers, and join in the work of capturing and marketing
the game. The Pennsylvania law very plainly forbids the destruction
of the pigeons on their nesting grounds, but no one pays any
attention to the law, and the nesting birds have been killed
by thousands and tens of thousands.
As railroads penetrated the upper Middle West
after the Civil War, many millions of pigeons were shipped to
cities along the Atlantic seaboard, since, by then, clearing
of oak and beech forests and hunting had already exterminated
the birds on the East Coast. Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
me with stunning rapidity. Michigan was its last stronghold;
about three million birds were shipped east from there by a single
hunter in 1878. Eleven years later, 1889, the species was extinct
in that state. Although small groups of pigeons were held in
various places in captivity, efforts to maintain those flocks
failed. The last known individual of the species, a female named
Martha, died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo and is now on display
in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.
Of course, market hunting ended as soon as
harvesting the birds was no longer economically profitable. That
point was reached when tens of thousands of the birds still flew
within large stretches of suitable habitat. Much of that habitat
still exists today, although many of the largest nut-producing
trees that were common in the heyday of the pigeon were logged.
Why, then, did the birds go extinct? No one knows for sure, but
it appears that to survive they needed to nest in vast colonies.
Perhaps this permitted them to "swamp" predators with
their enormous numbers, so that the relatively few predators
in the area of a roost were unable to make a significant dent
in the huge breeding colonies. And since these colonies dispersed
as soon as breeding was over, predators were prevented from building
up their populations on the basis of such an ephemeral resource.
In any case, the fate of the Passenger Pigeon illustrates a very
important principle of conservation biology: it is not always
necessary to kill the last pair of a species to force it to extinction.
Sad to say, the lesson of the Passenger Pigeon
has not been learned. At the present time the White-crowned Pigeon
is threatened by the horrendous slaughter of nesting birds on
its Caribbean breeding grounds.
Copyright ® 1988 by Paul R. Ehrlich, David
S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye.
From
the Stanford University Web site on Birds
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