Monday marks a century to the day that a legendary species of bird perished from the face of the earth. Martha, the very last surviving passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
With her death, the passenger pigeon officially went extinct.
Martha was estimated to be 29 years old when she was found lifeless on the floor of her cage.
No passenger pigeon had been seen in the wild for years beforehand, and none was ever seen afterward.
By November 1907, Martha and two male companions were the only known surviving passenger pigeons left in the world.
One of her companions died in April 1909 and the other in July 1910, leaving her all alone.
Martha thus spent the last four years of her life as an "endling," an individual that is the last living specimen of a subspecies or entire species. When an endling dies, a unique genome that has survived and evolved across hundreds of thousands or millions of generations dies out with it.
Once it became known that Martha was the very last of her kind, she achieved a certain morbid celebrity status. Visitors flocked to see her, and there were even offers of a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find her a mate.
Zoologists estimate about 320 species or subspecies of land vertebrates have been driven extinct since 1500, virtually all of them from human actions related to overpopulation: habitat destruction and fragmentation (to make way for agriculture, and also because of dams, cities, roads and logging), indiscriminate hunting, and, to a smaller extent, invasive species, pollution and pesticides.
Each of these extinguished creatures was special, but the passenger pigeon was especially distinctive, making its passing all the more poignant. Half a century before they all vanished, passenger pigeons were the single most abundant bird species in America, if not the world. There were an estimated 3 to 5 billion of them, one out of every four birds north of Mexico.
Audubon magazine shared the story of a Potawatomi Indian, Simon Pokagon, who in May 1850 was camped near Michigan's Manistee River when he heard an approaching sound, as if "an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me."
It could take hours for a single gargantuan flock, darkening the sky and numbering in the hundreds of millions, to pass a single spot; it was impossible to hold a conversation beneath them. In 1813, naturalist and painter John James Audubon recorded another flock that took three days to cross over the Ohio River.
Euro-American settlers came, first by the thousands and then the millions, armed with guns, saws, axes and plows. Passenger pigeons plummeted from the sky. Pigeon meat was tasty, and at first the flocks were so dense that just waving a pole in the air could kill some.
After the Civil War, the expansion of the telegraph and railroad facilitated the growth of a commercial pigeon industry that butchered birds by the billions. By the 1880s the passenger pigeon was in serious trouble. Even as their numbers plunged, "there was virtually no effort to save them," naturalist Joel Greenberg told Audubon. "People just slaughtered them more intensely. They killed them until the very end."
Yet misgivings over the passenger pigeon's dramatic demise helped spur the nascent wildlife conservation movement at the start of the 20th century. The pigeon's fate has served as a cautionary tale for biologists and policymakers alike as they ponder the implications of mindless human folly for all of nature.
Today, Project Passenger Pigeon is using the centenary to commemorate the bird and the significance of its story. One group, Revise & Restore, is underwriting a controversial project to produce a passenger pigeon using DNA extracted from museum specimens.
The abundance of the passenger pigeon and its man-driven demise is a story that should be taught. The lessons to take away are that we can make a difference through conservation, and we can learn from our mistakes, even staggeringly monumental ones. ■