Passed Like A Thought

Yesterday, as I browsed the vastnesses of the new Chapters Bookshop on Parnell St., my eye was caught by a handsome hardback edition of The Audubon Reader, a selection of the work of the great American artist and ornithologist John James Audubon. Charming though the volume is, I bought it simply in order to have a copy of his famous essay on the Passenger Pigeon, a bird whose tragic fate can make me, no great animal lover, angrier than most of what I see in today’s papers. The Passenger Pigeon was once the most common bird in the world, making up 40% of all birds in North America. It is estimated that there were up to 6 billion of them at the time of the founding of the first colonies. Audubon writes of vast flocks of them, a mile in breadth, taking upwards of three hours to pass overhead. During this time, the sky would be darkened, as at night, by the density of the flocks overhead. Such was the noise of their flapping wings that nothing, even the guns of those who hunted the birds, could be heard. Where Passenger Pigeons had roosted, acres of land would be covered with a carpet of droppings inces deep. A village could eat nothing else but pigeon for weeks after a flock passed over it. Such was the Passenger’s rate of reproduction that Audubon felt that hunting, even on a systematic, industrial scale, would make no dent in their numbers. They had after all been known to double, or even quadruple their numbers in a year.

By the mid-1800s though, the bird’s numbers were in noticeable decline. In part this was due to deforestation, but the simple fact is that they were being hunted out of existence. By 1896, there was only one flock of them left, numbering about 250,000. When this flock roosted in Ohio, word got around, and hunters, fully aware that this was the last flock, went out and shot the lot for sport in a single afternoon. These men, I think we can agree, were dicks. In 1914, in the Zoo of Cincinatti, Ohio, Martha, the last passenger pigeon ever to grace the earth, died of old age. Partly an indictment of human callousness, partly a reminder of our own mortality, the story of the Passenger’s decline from the most populous bird in the world to extinction is a haunting one. Audubon, writing years before the event, caught this melancholy perfectly:

When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone.