Last passenger pigeon
Information about the last passenger pigeon killed near Sargent's Station
It happened here in Piketon, Ohio, on just about the last day of the last winter of the nineteenth century--a day when the air was sweet with centennium spring and the creeks were full from freshets of snowmelt and a lone silver-blue passenger pigeon was sighted by an observant young boy.
Not to be confused with domestic pigeons bred from primarily European stock, the passenger pigeon, Columba migratoria, was wild and American and abundant. As late as 1870, the American wild dove, as it was also called, was the most populous bird in the world--one in three of all the birds in North America--and this valley was the center of its range. Here the silence of the central continent would be broken in the breeding season by the blended coos and flutters of the doves. Close by, on the Ohio River, John James Audubon himself was swarmed by a mile-wide flock that streamed continuously for three days. By sampling, measurement, and calculation, Audubon made count of its particles: "One billion, one hundred and fifteen millions, one hundred and thirty-six thousand" individual birds, more or less. In one cluster, as many souls as people then on earth.
But the Piketon boy had never seen such a dove, and he thrilled at its colors: throat and breast a shimmer of clay gray-green; hindneck reflections of copper, silver, and gold; head of nickel gray with radiant red eyes.
That day, the wayfarer stopped to feed near the Sargents Grain Mill, then seemed to float, with an undulatory charm, to the high tree branches above. Before this vision of grace, softly so as not to startle, the young naturalist kneeled in observance. So impressed was the bird-watcher with the bird--as it paused, for a time, to split one stolen kernel--that he drew a deep breath, he steadied himself, and then, with just one touch of the finger, BLAM!, he shot the giblets out of the thing.
That was the last passenger pigeon ever sighted in the wild.
Triumphant, the boy carried the torn body north up the road to Mrs. Clay Barnes, the former sheriff's wife, who pieced it together, stuffed it, and sewed black buttons into the eye sockets.
I saw "the Sargents Pigeon," its colors faded, enshrouded in dust, mounted on a wall at the Cincinnati Zoo. One shiny shoe-button eye was gone.
The passenger pigeon was the most communal of backboned species--"never comfortable unless it was crowded," in the words of the ornithologist Arlie Schorger. Its flocks were great colonies in which individual birds behaved like cells of a single colossal organism. It did not just coo and sing like other birds; it squawked and chattered as if to evolve a form of speech suited to its social relations. Witnesses would describe migrations as "mighty roiling rivers" and "coiling flying serpents," revealing some primal association of water, serpent, and wild dove.
The story of its quick extinction reads like a short course in genocide. Weapons: guns, clubs, poles, sticks, stones, traps, nets, smoke, fire, and sulfur-bombs. Delivery vehicle: the railroad. Command and control: the telegraph. Roosting grounds were methodically raided, nestlings massacred by the hundreds of thousands.
More than a hundred methods for slaughtering pigeons were tried and tested, all exploiting the determination of the species to congregate. Cannons loaded with grapeshot were fired into flocks. Exploding rockets were occasionally used. Elaborate mechanical nets and traps may have killed the largest numbers, and a patent was given for a mechanical cat designed to startle pigeons off the ground to save time. One innovation was to shoot down a trench laced with grain, so as to kill many birds at one shot. Sometimes the grain was soaked in whiskey to poison the pigeons and avoid any use of shot at all.
The grand mode of taking them is by setting fire to the high dead grass, leaves, and shrubs underneath, in a wide blazing circle, fired at different parts, at the same time, so as soon to meet. Then down rush the pigeons in immense numbers, and indescribable confusion, to be roasted alive, and gathered up dead next day from heaps two feet deep.
A Pigeon in Piketon.
Publication Date: 01-JAN-04
Publication Title: American Scholar
Author: Sea, Geoffrey
Copyright © 2007
Pike Co. Genealogy & Historical Society
P. O. Box 224, Waverly, Ohio 45690