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Passenger PigeonThe American Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is one of the most powerful symbols of humanity's destruction of nature and indifference to the animal world.
Early European settlers described the bluish-grey birds as countless and infinite and that their migratory flights at 100 kilometres per hour (60 mph) darkened the sky overhead for days. Estimates at the beginning of the European settlement of America put the passenger pigeon at three billion to five billion individuals, possibly numbering over a quarter of the total number of individual birds living in America. One nesting site in Wisconsin was said to contain 136,000,000 birds covering 2,225 square kilometres (850 square miles).
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Male (red brest) and female passenger pigeons. From The Passenger Pigeon by W B Mershon, Outing Publishing, New York, 1907. Illustration by John James Audubon.
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The passenger pigeon died out in the early twentieth century. The birds could not withstand shooting and destruction of their habitat. Their use as bushmeat for city markets was especially severe. Bird collectors at one nesting site in Michigan slew 50,000 birds every day over three months for the meat trade. The fate of the passenger pigeon was a tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is a resource everyone overuses and no one looks after so that ultimately it is severely degraded. Laws to save the passenger pigeon were too late and ineffectual. The last bird died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 aged 29 years of age. Several searches and rewards for survivors came to nothing.
Science has examined and named just a fraction of Earth's millions of species. No one can be certain of the exact number and no one may ever know. Man-made pressures are exterminating so many species that they are disappearing without us knowing they even existed.
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