Passenger Pigeon

On today's show, the passenger pigeon, these fast flying birds once numbered in the millions and migrated in unimaginably huge flocks all over North America. For millions of years they helped themselves to a cornucopia of fruits and seeds without a care in the world, but their feces fueled rein would soon come to a swift end. Welcome to Extinction Event, a podcast about extinct and soon to be extinct animals. I'm your host, Melissa Thomas,

and I am a guest Jack Collier. You're not a guest. And I am this weeks co-host, Jack Collier.

Ugh, Okay, so we should get started. Okay. Well I'm excited to talk about the passenger pigeon today with you, Jack.

I am excited too. I love the passenger pigeon. I actually know a little bit about it.

I'm surprised you know anything at all about the passenger pigeon to be honest.

It's just one of those wikipedia black hole type things that you hear about and then you know you start reading and then that leads to another event or another article and another. And after awhile you've works almost over and you can go home. Right.

You just kept clicking until the last click of the day

Mhmm.

Oh, right. Well let's get started. What did this passenger pigeon look like? Well, they were smaller than the modern city pigeon. The male was a dullish blue with a copper colored breast. The female was more brown or beige. They were similar to the morning dove, if you're familiar with those.

Oh yeah. Seen those.

Yeah, they were fast. It's estimated that they could fly around 60 miles per hour. Their flocks numbered in the millions, possibly even billions. And these birds would pass overhead all at once. Hence the name passenger pigeon.

Ohhhhh,

That vaguely kind of makes sense.

These mega flocks would cover the sky as far as you could see blocking out the sun for hours, possibly even up to three whole days at a time. This whole three whole days thing, I'm not sure I really believe that. It seems a bit much.

Like if it's going to last for three days, these pigeons must be pulling some shit on you because they are like turning around and coming back and like.

They're just flying in a big circle.

That's like a flock of a trillion. If it's going to take three days to fly by, you know.

Exactly. I think we just figured it out there that they are just flying in a circle around, I don't know, the tristate area. All right, well moving on. The forests they roosted and nested in would be covered like a swarm of bees. Whenever they showed up. And the tree branches would just break from the weight.

So they would just come in, swoop down on a forest and instantly cover it.

Yeah. Have you ever seen those guys who do like the bee beards where they allow a bunch of bees to cover their entire body?

Yeah, sure.

So imagine that, it's birds and instead of a man it's a tree.

Yes. Okay. So you've painted a nice picture as far as how many birds are occupying these trees? A lot.

Right. So there's a lot of birds. The areas they're in are very loud and also understandably, there's a pretty thick layer of pigeon dung. And it might seem inconvenient in the short term. Sure. They're destroying forests and it's really stinky. There's a bunch of Dung everywhere, but after some time these roosting grounds become incredibly fertile farming land.

Hey, free fertilizer. Yeah.

So what happened? Well, for thousands of years the native Americans and the passenger pigeons are coexisting pretty harmoniously together. Sure. You know, the native Americans are eating the passenger pigeons. They're pretty tasty. Also, turns out they're really easy to kill.

Not a quality you want in your species if you're trying to avoid extinction, easy to kill.

Well at this point, billions of birds, they're not really thinking about extinction and they also at this point had not evolved some of the more defensive maneuvers that you see in modern pigeons. Back then you could just poke them out of the trees with sticks or you could just grab one off of a branch with your bare hands.

They were just an all you can eat buffet. Poking with a stick as a form of hunting seems under appreciated.

Yes, it's endearing to just visualize.

Are there any other animals where that works? Poking with a stick? It's like if you're hunting a marshmallow.

It does seem kind of crazy that all it would take is one little poke and the pigeons dead. They're very fragile. These pigeons.

Yes. What are they getting startled? Ahh, that sticks getting awfully close...next thing you know. It does seem like a noble way to hunt. That I'm sure was passed down from generation to generation by Native Americans. It's like selecting a nice stick going up to the tree, thrusting the stick into the general direction of the birds. Then collecting them.

Back then it was probably poke stickers versus hand grabbers. And there was like a rivalry there.

You know, it probably started off with hands and then the first guy to pick up a stick, all the hand people are like, what are you too good to grab with your hand? Gotta use a stick?

Alright, so the native Americans and the passenger pigeons are coexisting together. They're not taking more than they can eat and all is well. But then the Europeans arrive. The Europeans first have contact with the pigeons around the 1500's and they just go wild on these things. Their thirst for pigeon blood is insatiable. I mean they're not actually drinking the blood, but you know what I mean? It's free food.

Mhmm, it is the bottomless...what do they have at Olive Garden?

Breadsticks.

It is the bottomless breadsticks of the 1500's. Indeed, once you know that there's no limit on it, you can't stop at just one.

So they go on a rampage and it's the squabs, those are the younger birds, that they want. Because they're tastier than the older, tougher birds. They're poking these pigeons with sticks, whacking them with clubs, throwing rocks at them. They're also doing some sneakier things like feeding them alcohol soaked grain setting fire to their roosting trees, capturing them in giant nets and also throwing potatoes at them.

Oh, all very time honored ways of killing birds. But,I'm especially heartened to see the throwing potatoes.

It's not as elegant is poking them with a stick. But uh, I imagine that could do some damage if you've got a big enough potato.

If you gave me a potato right now, I could definitely kill a bird with it. My aims a little off, but I feel like I can get the velocity to I can knock a bird's head off with a potato.

Yeah, that would do damage.

It's very cool. Unheralded way of extincting animals really.

There should be a flag somewhere with an emblem of a pigeon and a potato.

I'm sure somewhere in some New England town there, there is the town flag of a settler throwing a potato at a, at a pigeon.

God bless them for having that.

It's like that town that has the guy wrestling the Indian. You've seen this?

I have. I have. Is he wrestling him? That seems like a nice...

I'm being nice saying that it's a wrestling, but I don't know if it's been resolved. This came through the news like I want to say a year ago, but there was like a small town where their town crest was a guy, a white guy, like literally strangling an Indian.

Yes he's strangling him.

His hands are around his neck and it had been the town crest for like hundreds of years and they kept saying like, oh no, they're just wrestling. The Indian guys like arms are up and is like. It might as well have x's over his eyes. The other guys has ringing his neck.

I've. I've seen the flag that you're talking about and I don't know a whole lot about wrestling, but I'm fairly certain you would be disqualified for doing that move. Well, you want to keep going?

Mhmm.

Even with all of this killing, we're talking about a population of birds estimated from 3 to 5 billion making up 40 percent of all birds in North America at that time. Even at the rate we were going, we probably never could have killed them all. But then in the mid 1800's, a couple of things happened that the pigeons never saw coming.

Those stupid idiot.

Say hello to railroads and the telegraph, the railroad system starts expanding to more remote places and expansion of telegraph wires makes long distance communication possible, so now whenever a flock of pigeons is spotted somewhere remote, anyone can be notified of the location. They can go to that location, kill a bunch of pigeons, and then ship them back to a city on a railroad car.

The perfect crime.

A profitable pigeon industry is born complete with professional pigeoners. Those aren't the dudes who hang out on the top of buildings and keep a bunch of pigeons. These pigoners are using big nets and with the help of stool pigeons are trapping hundreds and thousands of pigeons at a tim.

Time out. What's a stool pigeon?

A stool pigeon is an actual pigeon that has defected to the other side.

So they made a conscious decision to betray their species.

Yeah. Well, I don't know. I think there was a sort of a trying out process, a tryouts. Not any pigeon can be a stool pigeon. You had to have certain qualities that made you good.

How do they make them a stool pigeon?

So what they were doing was blinding them to get them to be more docile I guess. They would actually sew their eyelids shut.

Oooh.

Yeah. And then just prop them up by the net and the pigeons flying by would see the pigeon down there and I guess go and check it out.

So here comes a billion birds flying by and they see one on the ground next to a net and they're like, whoa. He looks like he's having a good time. Hey everybody. That's basically the plan as I understand it.

They would sprinkle the net area with foods.

Oh, so the stool pigeon, it looks like a early adopter and it's like this guy found a budget.

Ah ha, yes.

Okay. Now I get it.

You think they noticed that his eyes were sewed shut?

I'm going to say no.

They're just thinking about the food at that point.

Yeah.

So now all the pigeons are in a net and their heads are sticking out of the holes in the net and you'd have to use pliers to break their necks at that point. A lot of people actually just found it easier to bite the neck of the pigeon with their teeth.

Gross.

Yeah.

Teeth. Nature's pliers.

Don't knock it until you tried it.

No, thanks.

What are we using these pigeons for? They're used as food. Even high end restaurants in New York had them on their menu. The fat is used is shortening and for soap. Their feathers are used in pillows and beds. Other parts are used for medicinal reasons.

They smoke them. Huh? You ever smoked a pigeon? Pigeon part?

No Sir. And of course we're shooting them just for fun. For Sport.

Go sports.

Shooting matches and trap shooting become very popular. Trap shooting is when you shove a pigeon into a little box, fling it into a shooting area. It's kind of stunned then a bunch of dudes are there to shoot it. It's pretty easy.

Yeah, I'm familiar. I have played duck hunt on the NES and there is a trap shooting.

Is there?

Yeah, but it's like more of a clay disc.

Okay.

But I assume the clay disc is based off of it.

That's called a clay pigeon.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It was like taking your duck hunt gun directly up to the screen. Shooting it point blank. Yes.

And we've all done it. If you say it, you haven't put your gun right up to the screen and fired point blank to murder those ducks. You're a liar.

Yeah, we've all. Yes.

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I know what Mammoth bar is you acting like I never had one of these things.

Oh, please oh time out everybody please. Melissa, take the stage and tell us.

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Are you kidding me?

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Dear god that's a lot of protein. Next you're going to tell me they're gluten free, dairy free, soy free with no fillers.

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No weird stuff, baby. Well, moving on. It's almost as if we couldn't physically stop ourselves from shooting them. If you did have a gun, you could shoot at a flock and actually killed dozens if not hundreds at a time they say. People even complained that the noise of guns being fired at passing pigeons was so relentless that they couldn't concentrate on their work or whatever they were doing.

Just probably trying to survive from 1800's. Battling cholera or a hangnail, which probably meant certain death.

So all of this killing along with the help of the railroad and the telegraph, start taking its toll. It's becoming obvious that their numbers are dwindling. There are only a few of the really large flocks left. One of these flocks roosts in Petoskey, Michigan, and a scene of utter carnage in ensues. People gather from great distances to Petoskey to participate in a full month and a half of unhinged killing,

A month and a half geez.

They're just taking this flock out. It's relentless. People were calling it pigeon fever.

My question is, why didn't the pigeons just fly away?

It could have been because they were nesting.

Okay, that makes sense.

It was relentless. There was just no stopping the killing, but good news at this point. Finally, public opinion starts to turn around. Not everyone approved of the insane killing spree we were on. Some states even started to employ laws to protect the pigeons. Mostly the squabs. And even hunting clubs spoke out against it. The Michigan Sportsmen Association was one of those clubs and they attempted to enforce the laws during the petoskey incident, but

I'm on edge here.

They weren't really taken very seriously and no one really paid attention to any of those laws.

They're basically the jaywalking laws of the 1800's. People were had gotten used to being able to close their eyes and shoot pigeons and basically throw potatoes and kill them, poke them with sticks, and then one day that's all fine and dandy. The next day you're telling me that's against the law? I don't think so.

By the end of the 1800's. There's only a handful left.

Wait, timeout.

I kinda skipped forward there.

We went from billions to now a handful in less than what? Fifty years?

Yes. So we know there's only a handful left. We're trying to get our hands on the handful that are left. The conservationists and zoos are trying to do this and whenever they send out a notice, hey, could somebody bring us some pigeons? They just come back dead or a hunter kills them in the process of trying to acquire one for those people.

Purely a reflex action at this point probably the conservationist are the ones killing them. You know, they start this thing feeling guilty for wiping out and it just, every time they come in contact they can't help but like bite a head off or something. Like, I'm so sorry. I just done it so many millions of times. I didn't know what I'm doing. Oh, I keep killing.

Um, so even with only a couple left, we just couldn't stop ourselves. At this point there's like around a dozen passenger pigeons in captivity.

So. Hey guys, thanks for coming to the passenger pigeon Conservation Society. It's our job to protect these last 12, ahem, 11 passenger pigeons. I know it's hard, but we got to stop killing them. It goes against every thing in our bodies. Please. We've got to save them, these last nine pigeons.

Oh yeah those pigeons, almost all of them die and we don't even bother to save the bodies. We just kind of throw them in the garbage.

You're disgusted with yourself. You put it all this time and effort to conserving these birds. You slip up one time and bite its head off and you don't want to see that headless body. You just throw it in the garbage.

It's like you takin' out that pint of ice cream in the freezer. You don't want to see that lyin' around.

Yeah. That's an empty carton like guiltily staring you in the face.

Exactly.

Just thrown it in the garbage.

You might even take it out to the curb because you don't want to see it every time you go back to the garbage and open it up.

If you're really guilty, you might bury that carton in the back yard.

Okay. There's one left.

Guy's serious this time. There's only one left. We can't kill it or eat it.

This one has a name.

Nobody. We named it, so if you kill it, you're killing something that's got a name and everyone's gonna know. They're not going to be like, did you kill that passenger pigeon? It's going to be. Did you kill

Martha Washington

It's like a, what's the name we could give it so nobody will kill it. Mother Teresa. If you kill it, everyone's going to know that you killed Martha Washington and we will spread that rumor.

So Martha's living in the Cincinnati zoo and before the other ones had died, we actually tried to hook her up with another passenger pigeon and his name was George.

Ohhh. I see. Oh, that's very nice of them to keep her integrity in tact. You know, you can't be naming a pigeon Martha Washington and then having her cheat on George with some other pigeon.

It was sweet, but they just weren't into each other and nothing came of it.

Sometimes it just doesn't jive.

They tried desperately to find her a mate that might still be out there in the wild and you know, again, they're like, we're gonna pay you money if you bring us a pigeon that Martha can have sex with please. But we just can't find one. Or what often happened is people would bring in dead mourning doves. They would confuse a mourning dove for a passenger pigeon, shoot it, and bring it in.

Oh yeah, yeah that'll work. We're trying to find this, a passenger pigeon to breed with the last passenger pigeon. And then someone brings in a dead bird, like, well, we found one and they what they throw the dead bird into the cage with Martha and hope that, hope for the best.

Okay.

You two. Have Fun. Pregnant yet, Martha?

[laughing]

Probably threw it in with the dead, the other dead one be like, well, you guys have fun, huh?

They freeze her body in a 300 pound block of ice and ship her to the Smithsonian where she is taxidermied and strangely they save her heart, which I wanted to do a little bit more research on what happened to that heart. What's the deal is that some

We know what happened. They made a little Turkey jerky out of it. Someone popped it in their mouth. Probably during the taxidermy process.

They said it couldn't be done. They said we'd never extinguish a species that numbered in the billions, but we did

u s a, u s a

And we did it in an impressively short period of time. After the fact some people didn't think we were responsible for the extinction, so let's talk about some of those alternative theories that surfaced. One of these was that they all drowned in Lake Michigan. They committed suicide by flying into flames. Another. They're hiding out in Arizona, Chile, Chile, or Australia.

I like how they've uh just given them the uh the Nazi escape.

Are Nazis in Arizona? Did they flee there?

I mean don't get me started. But you know back down in Argentina basically all the rumors of what actually happened to Hitler first were work-shopped with passenger pigeons

And one final reason. These aren't all of them, but this is the last one I'm going to give you. Their inability to learn anything new or change its habits to meet the pressures of new conditions like getting shot with a gun.

Well, if you didn't want to get killed, you shouldn't have got shot so much.

I think, deep down, we just want these animals to evolve faster. You know, rise to the challenge of humans and coexist on our level.

That's a novel way of thinking about it. It's like, oh, you're in our world now. If you want to hang with us ya better evolve real quick cuz we're going to explode you out of the air.

So how could the passenger pigeon have prevented its own extinction? I think that the younger birds, the squabs should have evolved to not taste so delicious because we're

Yeah, easy solve.

Yeah, because it was what happened there is if you're killing all of the babies, the babies aren't

growing up and having more babies

yeah and the species starts to diminish in number. So there's one.

Yeah, hey passenger pigeons don't want to go extinct then try and not being so delicious.

Exactly. I don't know what else they could have done. Do you have any, anything to throw in there?

Ohh, Um, reinforced necks. If they're getting their heads bit off, they could have worn some like protective collar. How about hey just split up? Why do you have to hang out with a billion other birds? You don't have to follow the crowd. Look where that got you.

Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things they could have done, but they didn't. So with that I got to say thanks for playing passenger pigeon, wish you didn't taste so good.

Goodbye.

Speaking of delicious animals this week on countdown to extinction, the Ganges Shark, the Ganges Shark is found in the Ganges River in India. This shark is part of the Asian shark fin soup trade. Are you familiar with that at all?

A little bit. Uh, the basketball player, Yao Ming is doing a lot of good work trying to prevent people from just basically ordering shark fin soup. So that's about the extent of my knowledge.

Okay. Okay.

And it has been very effective.

Have you had shark fin soup?

No.

Good. So the update here is that we thought they were all gone, but they weren't. We hadn't, we hadn't seen one since 2006. But this year we found one in a Mumbai fish market and it was dead. So the count was at zero. It went back to one

Briefly,

Briefly. Now it's back down to zero. Maybe. Because there might still be some out there. We don't know yet.

So wait, what are they, how are they getting these fins?

Oh, I'm glad you asked Jack. What they do is they cut the fins off of the shark and then toss it back into the water, the rest of the shark, where it just slowly sinks and dies. They don't even eat the rest of the shark. Yeah.

Brutal.

Anyway, well that about does it. To find out more about the passenger pigeon or the Ganges Shark and how you can help protect endangered species everywhere. Visit extinction event on twitter at extinction pod. Next week on extinction event the giant ground sloth. These elephant-sized stinky fur balls with claws the size of steak knives once dominated north and South America, until mysterious circumstances wiped them off the face of the earth. So what happened? Tune in next time to find out

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