Patrick McShea, an educator with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, pulled open a shallow metal drawer in one of the specimen cabinets of the museum's extinct bird collection. He checked his catalog list of passenger pigeon specimens in the collection and began checking tags on the taxidermy mounts, skins and other specimens.
Coming to the skin he was seeking - a passenger pigeon obtained from a private collection in Franklin County - he carefully lifted it from the drawer.
"These were parts of enormous flocks crisscrossing the continent and now it's briefly in your hand," he said with reverence for artifact of a species that passed into extinction 100 years ago, on Sept. 1, 2014. "But, even if it was something as common as a great horned owl skill, it was something that was in some wonderful places, some incredible places. All that wonderful stuff and you have a connection to it in your hand."
McShea and others at the museum recently explored the museum's collection, which includes a range of passenger pigeon mounts, skins, eggs and more, to put together a museum guide to passenger pigeon-related exhibits in various areas of the museum.
Among the artifacts they found was a glass dome enclosing four taxidermy-mounted passenger pigeons, including one acquired from a collection in Berks County in 1876, and one mounted mourning. They pulled that display piece from the backroom collection to use as part of an interactive, introductory exhibit for the guide near the entrance to the museum entrance.
Other stops on the museum-wide tour they compiled include a "Pennsylvania Insects: Common and Rare" display case that holds an American burying beetle, which is an endangered species that declined precipitously in the wake of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Some experts believe the loss of large numbers of dead pigeons on the forest floor may have contributed to the decline of the beetle, which buries small dead things as food for its larvae.
Another stop is a four-season diorama of a Native American village in the museum's Alcoa Hall of American Indians. In spring quadrant, the exhibit includes a scene of a Seneca man using a pole to knock passenger pigeon squabs (flightless babies) from their nests. Native Americans ate great numbers of passenger pigeons, both adults and squabs, and rendered oil from them.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg also has a passenger pigeon on display just now, part of an exhibit titled "A Fondness for Birds: Pennsylvania's Alexander Wilson," about the Scottish immigrant who came to Philadelphia in 1794, became the first artist-writer to scientifically capture and document American birds from life in naturalistic poses in the early 1800s, and eventually published the nine-volume "American Ornithology" and became none as the "Father of American Ornithology."
Part of the exhibit displays a taxidermy mount of a passenger pigeon with sketches of the species by Wilson. The exhibit will run through March 2015.
According to Project Passenger Pigeon, other collections in Pennsylvania that include passenger pigeon artifacts can be found at Nixon County Park Nature Center, Jacobus, York County; Visitors Center at the Pennsylvania Game Commission's Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, Kleinfeltersville, Lancaster and Lebanon counties; Reading Public Museum, Reading, Berks County; the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; and Everhart Museum, Scranton, Lackawanna County.