Books: History’s Pigeon

THE SILENT SKY by Allan W. Eckert. 243 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

One March morning in 1900, a small boy crouched along the bank of Ohio’s Scioto River, sighted down the barrel of his BB gun, and sent a pellet smashing into the brain of a big red-breasted, blue-backed bird. It was the last wild passenger pigeon ever to be sighted. In this indignant, touching book, Allan W. Eckert, author of The Great Auk, details the wanton greed that extinguished this remarkable species and imagines a biography for the last wild survivor that died that morning on the Scioto.

In mid-19th century America, nothing was more ordinary than the passenger pigeon, which numbered in the billions, and may have accounted for nearly 40% of the country’s bird population. Each year they swept across the central and eastern U.S., from the Gulf Coast to Canada and back again in roaring migratory swarms that sometimes darkened the entire sky. They could fly for 20 hours on end with bursts of speed up to 90 miles an hour; yet it sometimes took three days for a flight to pass a given point.

Tree Tenements. They were elegant and graceful in flight, slow and stupid-seeming on the ground, and fatally gregarious. When they settled in to feed or rest, they would funnel down, out of the sky, filling every branch and foothold, stacking up on one another’s backs a dozen deep, splintering weak branches, toppling whole dead trees to the ground. They nested in only slightly less congestion, spreading out over scores of square miles, making every tree a kind of arboreal tenement.

Man was their only important enemy. Passenger pigeons were good to eat, fun for sport shooting, and almost entirely salable: their dried gizzards were thought to cure gallstones; their powdered stomachs were a nostrum for dysentery; and their feathers were in great demand for use as ticking. During the 1870s, when the slaughter reached its peak, hard-working hunters could net 15,000 birds in a single day—at a market value of $1,250. News of a nesting was spread by telegraph; hunters came from miles around, and the pigeons were trapped, bludgeoned or shot (a single shotgun blast once brought down 187 birds). Squabs were knocked down from their nests with long poles or burned out with fire. In one three-week period, 5,000,000 pigeons were wiped out at a single nesting site.

Plumed Reproof. The pigeons had no legal protection. Their gregariousness was an instinctive need, and as their numbers dwindled, so did their will to live. Small surviving groups would desert their nests, leaving new-laid eggs untended. Eventually, they refused to nest at all.

Three passenger pigeons, captive in the Cincinnati Zoo, were still alive when the wild bird was shot in 1900. The last of these, a female named Martha, died in 1914 at the age of 29. Her body was frozen into a 300-lb. cake of ice, and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where she still perches under glass, a plumed reproof to man’s destructiveness.