A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HNVHSLS | Format: EPUB
A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction Description
In the early 19th century passenger pigeons accounted for 25 to 40 percent of North America's birds, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours. Although adults weighed only twelve ounces, they nested and roosted in the millions, destroying large oaks as if hit by hurricanes. Their favorite foods were the seeds and nuts of beech, chestnuts, and other forest trees, but they also raided farmers' buckwheat, wheat, corn, and rye crops.
John James Audubon, remarking on their speed and agility in flight, said a lone passenger pigeon streaking through the forest "passes like a thought." The observation was prophetic, for although a billion pigeons streamed over Toronto in May of 1860, a mere forty years later passenger pigeons were almost extinct. Martha, the last of the species, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.
Their congregation in large numbers made it easy to kill them en masse, and the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines facilitated large hunting parties that supplied pigeons by the thousands to help feed people in growing cities. Audubon, novelist Gene Stratton-Porter, and James Fenimore Cooper were among those who advocated saving the passenger pigeon, but it was too late. Naturalist Joel Greenberg's beautifully written story of the passenger pigeon provides a cautionary tale that no matter how abundant a resource is - animals, water or oil - it can be wiped out if we are not careful.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 17 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible for Bloomsbury
- Audible.com Release Date: January 7, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HNVHSLS
On 1 September 2014 there will be a centennial of a sad event. One hundred years ago, the very last passenger pigeon died. We have wiped out plenty of other species, but we know for sure the very date that this one left forever, and we also know just how much we lost because of the huge numbers and economic importance the birds once had. It has been many decades since a book was devoted to passenger pigeons and their fate, and this one seems as if it will be definitive: _A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction_ (Bloomsbury) by natural historian Joel Greenberg. For all the sadness of its subject (and all the reflections it must bring about what humans are doing to other species all around the world), this is a fascinating collection of passenger pigeon lore for those of us who will never see the enormous flocks of the birds, or (given what people do) get to taste one.
It is astonishing to read about the huge numbers of these birds; there are some tall tales about their populations, but even the verified reports will strain a reader’s credulity, as we simply do not know anything comparable now. John James Audubon in 1813 recorded a flight along the Ohio River that blotted out the sun and took three days to pass. The birds (unlike the rock pigeons that were brought here by Europeans) were native to North America, and had evolved to rove over the billions of acres looking for nut-bearing trees, like oaks. The birds were tasty, and the indigenous people knew it and appreciated the meals on the wing that were easy to catch, as did the earliest settlers. Not only were they tasty, but they were just so available. Shoot into the flock and bring down dozens, or wave a club through the mass, or throw rocks, or use nets or traps.
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