The Last Passenger Pigeon on Earth

"Men still live who, in their youth, remember passenger pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”  -Aldo Leopold, ecologist. (May 1947)

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Late in the August of 1914, Claude got a telegram from a nurse he had never met, and he returned to his family farm in Iowa to watch his father die. When he arrived, his father - who had once worked the land nearly every day and used to make up poetry to tell Claude at bed time - was now a shell of a person. He had no words left by the time Claude arrived, and died a few weeks later, when the wild roses were beginning to bloom. The family auctioned off the farm to cover funeral costs and debts.

A few days after the last papers were signed Claude sat in the fading twilight on the sagging front porch of the house that his great-grandfather had built eighty three years ago. He leaned against a support pillar and watched the men fell the aspen, birch and hazelnut trees of the vast woods that were once, 15 years ago, his playground. A few crows rose from an aspen with a cavalcade of caws as the tree fell with a crash to join the others. The birds flew over the porch, making silhouettes against the dim sky, and he was overcome by a memory from nearly twenty five years past.

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It was an early September evening when Claude, then a young boy, had stood on the sagging front porch of his family’s farmhouse while his mother made biscuits inside. Above him, the sky was filled with millions of tawny birds. Horizon to horizon, the land was covered in a canopy of beating wings. He leaned on the porch railing for over an hour - head tilted upwards until his neck hurt - watching the sky darkened by migratory bodies and listening to the thrumming of wings passing above. When his mother called him in for supper he could hardly eat, thinking about the birds that were still flying over the house and fields. He imagined that they encased the earth, that everywhere children were sitting at their tables saying Grace and eating their biscuits, with the great flock connecting them all.

His father looked thoughtful all through the biscuits and green beans, and the family had just begun eating their rhubarb pie when he said, Do you know what sort of birds those are, Son? Claude shook his head. Those are passenger pigeons. They both looked out the window for a long moment before his father spoke again. I don’t think there are as many pigeons as there used to be. When I was a boy I saw flocks this big nearly every year. Once a single flock took an entire day to pass overhead. We hunted them, too. I used to get hundreds in a day. He looked back at his son. This is the first flock I’ve seen in years. I wonder where they’ve all gone? His words lingered as they finished their meal.

After supper Claude stood outside on the porch beside his father and they watched the sky. They had only been out for a few minutes when the flock began to thin out. They could see stars between the beating wings, and the whirring began to quiet. It was not long before the night fell silent and only occasional stragglers made dark outlines against the nighttime sky. A few minutes after that, the passenger pigeons were gone.

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Now Claude sat on the porch of what was once his family home, gazing into what remained of his childhood forest. It had grown dark, and the loggers had left for the night. Four hundred miles away, the last passenger pigeon on earth died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Claude stared up at the empty sky and began to cry.

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In memory of

Aldo Leopold, ecologist. 1887-1948

and

Martha, the last passenger pigeon. 1885-1914

Note: Scientists estimate that passenger pigeons once made up 25 to 40% of the birds in North America. Flocks were reported that covered the sky from horizon to horizon and blocked out the sun, stretched 300 miles long and took up to 14 hours to pass. In the early 1800s, passenger pigeon meat was sold as cheap food for slaves and servants because it was so plentiful. Hunters caught them by the hundred thousands with nets strung between trees in their breeding areas. Deforestation affected them heavily because they required large areas of forest for communal breeding grounds. Population declined sharply after the 1870s. Since they required large flocks to breed, captive breeding failed. The last passenger pigeon was named Martha, and died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1st 1914.