The Last Hunt
Humans are destroying some of the last wild places on earth
Early in the morning on April 8, 1873, the skies darkened over Saginaw, Michigan. They stayed dark until late afternoon, about 4:30. It wasn’t an eclipse that made the sun disappear that day, nor was it foul weather. It was birds, millions of them.
The passenger pigeon used to dominate the skies over a large part of the United States. These birds would fly in giant flocks, sometimes a mile wide, and nest in the thousands. Their weight sometimes caused branches to break off of large trees. An observer in New York recalled that “There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.”
There were probably five billion passenger pigeons in America at one point, almost as many as there are birds of all species combined today.
Twenty-seven years after the day that passenger pigeons darkened the skies over Saginaw, they had disappeared from the wild. Fourteen years after that, they were fully extinct, the final passenger pigeon passing away in the Cincinnati Zoo (she’s still there, stuffed, in the bird house).
