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Bona fide Exchanges … for Scientific Purposes Only
I can’t decide what I like more, the Bald Ibis eggs for $25 or Kennard‘s offer to trade some extra Heath Hen skins he has lying around for “first-class” Passenger Pigeons. Here’s a quiz: What is the...
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Pigeon Redivivus?
Alexander Wilson, 1766-1813 They’re gone, the hordes of gluttonous Passenger Pigeons that were so startling a part of the eastern North American landscape until the nineteenth century. But what if we...
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A Precious Package
Ninety-nine years ago today, a package arrived at the Smithsonian, dispatched by express train from Cincinnati. “Stone,” of course, is Witmer Stone, and the writer Charles Wallace Richmond, Associate...
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Supply. Demand. Extinction.
It was one of the polite fictions of the waning days of American oology that specimens were never sold but “exchanged,” traded by collectors who were guided not by anything as crass as prices but...
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Where Were You on the Morning of March 26?
March 26, 1870, that is. Wikimedia In the case of Robert Ridgway, we happen to know. The nineteen-year-old illustrator was in Washington, and he spent that morning in a visit to the city’s market,...
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A Passenger Pigeon from the Collection of Elliott Coues
In his Birds of the Northwest of 1874, Elliott Coues recalled that Some years since a great flight of Pigeons occurred near Washington, where for several days, in the fall, the woods were filled with...
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The Degenerate Dove
The Count de Buffon died 226 years ago today, making this as good a day as any to see what he had to say about what was over his long lifetime the most abundant bird in North America, the Passenger...
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Airmail from Canada
I can’t claim to have read (or to want to read) all of the vast literature on the Passenger Pigeon and its decline, but I’ve perused enough to know that it is all much of a sameness, fact after...
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Pictures of Pigeons
Remember how hard it used to be to gather image material for study or publication? No, you probably don’t. I can barely recall those days of drudgery and trudgery myself, all that time in the library...
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Mme Knip and Her Bird Book
Nicobar Pigeon by Pauline Knip Not every cause remains célèbre, but birders still recall, more than two centuries on, the noisy falling out between Coenraad Jacob Temminck and Pauline Knip, erstwhile...
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Death Watch
By the summer of 1914, the handwriting was on the cage wall. On August 19, O.S. Biggs visited Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons, at her home in the Cincinnati Zoo: She [was] dying slowly of old...
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What Have We Learned?
In the autumn of 1915, local hunters boasted to W. Lee Chambers of “how easily” they killed a favored local gamebird: The method was to fasten a dead or half-dead pigeon on a stick or wire in the top...
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A Passenger Pigeon from “Nebraska”
You can read my newly published Nebraska Bird Review article about a pigeon collected by none other than Ferdinand V. Hayden here. Many thanks to the World Museum, Liverpool, for permission to publish...
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An Early False Alarm, Unheeded
One of those Michigan pigeons of 1889. In August 1901, when that famous pigeon Martha was in her mid-teens, the New York Times Magazine published a premature — but no less appropriate — eulogy for her...
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An Extinct Individual
If that title made my readers, all two of them, look twice – Good. Individuals die; the grand word extinction can be properly applied only to the passing from existence of species and other...
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The Treadmill of Survival
Writes Louis-Pierre Vieillot, The passenger pigeons have their own unique way of plucking acorns: they climb continuously up and down the oak trees; they ascend one after another, and each beats its...
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What Remained
On August 31, 1914, the world was still inhabited by a living passenger pigeon. Two days later, all we had left were the slightly tacky ornaments of still-Victorian parlors. These two males, in the...
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Pigeons and Geopolitics
It was on this date, mid-way through the Seven Years’ War, that Generals Wolfe and Montcalm both fell, fatally wounded, on the Plains of Abraham. Even those readers not so fortunate as to be married to...
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