Passenger Pigeon
(Ectopistes migratorius)
“But the most remarkable characteristic of these birds is their associating together, both in their migrations, and also during the period of incubation, in such prodigious numbers, as almost to surpass belief; and which has no parallel among any of the other feathered tribes on earth, with which naturalists are acquainted.”
At its peak, the Passenger Pigeon was likely the most numerous bird in the world, yet it declined to extinction within the span of a single human lifetime.
Passenger Pigeons once dominated the skies and forests of eastern North America. By most estimates, the species numbered in the billions of individuals.
Even experienced early ornithologists like Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon struggled to describe their numbers, resorting to metaphors of rivers and storms as vast pigeon flocks streamed overhead for hours or even days.
In the spring, single nesting aggregations might cover 400 square miles, within which every tree was so densely packed with pigeon nests that branches broke under their weight and the ground below became covered in inches of pigeon guano. This astonishing ecological exuberance was rooted in a highly specialized ecology. Passenger Pigeons were tightly linked to the masting cycles of hardwood forests, feeding primarily on acorns and beechnuts that these trees produced irregularly, but in immense pulses.
Wherever mast was abundant, pigeons converged in their enormous flocks to exploit it, breeding in the spring in places where the seeds from the previous fall’s mast crop still lay there for the taking.
What is Masting?
Many trees do not produce seeds in similar quantities each year. Instead, they “mast,” releasing an enormous crop of acorns, beechnuts, or other seeds in one fall season, followed by years of seed scarcity. The advantage to the trees is that this pulse-pause pattern disrupts the populations of insects and many other seed predators, and for highly mobile species, like the Passenger Pigeon was, mast years can be ecological jackpots, as they are able to move long distances to find this abundance.
The pigeons depended on vast, unbroken forests capable of producing large mast crops, and which supported flock sizes so large that predators were overwhelmed when they were breeding. Abundance itself was the Passenger Pigeon's main defense. When numbers fell too low, the system unraveled.
“It may not, perhaps, be out of place to attempt an estimate of the number of pigeons contained in one of those mighty flocks, and of the quantity of food daily consumed by its members. ... Let us take a column of one mile in breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned above of one mile in a minute. This will give a parallelogram of one hundred and eighty by one, covering one hundred and eighty square miles. Allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have one billion, one hundred and fifty millions, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock”
While nesting, these birds were highly vulnerable themselves to many kinds of predators. Each pair raised only a single chick, but synchronized nesting by millions of pairs made that strategy viable because any natural predators would soon eat their fill of pigeons. Although this strategy supported immense number of pigeons under natural conditions, it carried hidden vulnerabilities. Small flocks could not locate food as effectively, could not reproduce successfully, and could not dilute predation. What had once been an advantage became a trap. During the nineteenth century, those vulnerabilities were exposed at a devastating pace.
The spread of railroads and telegraphs allowed industrial-scale market hunting to target pigeons at their roosts and nesting colonies, killing adults and squabs by the millions. At the same time, eastern forests were steadily being cleared and fragmented for agriculture, timber, and settlement, eroding the very mast-producing landscapes on which the species depended, since every year they needed a new mast-rich site in which to breed.
By the 1870s, the great nesting aggregations were shrinking and becoming ever more rare. Within just a few decades, the vast flocks that once defined the species had collapsed into scattered remnants.
With flock size falling below a critical threshold, reproduction faltered and then failed entirely. By 1900, the Passenger Pigeon was effectively gone from the wild, and in 1914 Martha, the last known individual, died in captivity.
“[W]hen the woods are filled with these pigeons, they are killed in immense numbers... Persons unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that such dreadful havoc would soon put an end to the species. But I have satisfied myself, by long observation, that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease...”
The passenger pigeon was itself long a vital food source in the Northeastern woodlands. The Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nih harvested the birds using nets, arrows, and snares during the massive spring nesting migrations. This time marked the end of winter hunger.
Passenger pigeons were both dietarily and culturally important to Indigenous peoples in the Finger Lakes. Springtime was a point when many foods that had been put up for storage in the fall (whether domesticated foods like maize or wild foods like venison and nuts) could be running low, and the amount of resources available (particularly fats) in the environment was extremely low. Many Indigenous populations (hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists alike) regarded the early spring as a “hungry time” and there was danger of starvation in bad years. This is exactly when the passenger pigeon migrations took place, providing a bountiful source of nutrition that proved that the hungry time was over. That some fish migrations took place at close to the same time also helped. Local Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nih people commemorated the passenger pigeon migrations with a specific song and called the ‘Pigeon Dance’.
There are 60-70 separate verses for the Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nih Pigeon Dance (Tsa?gowáhegha:?) song, according to Stephen Henhawk, a traditional Cayuga faithkeeper who teaches Gayogohó:nǫ? language at Cornell. These are still known and performed even though Passenger Pigeons have been extinct for over one hundred years, reflecting the importance the species once had for the Indigenous people of this region.
“Pigeon Dance” is included on Songs and Dances of the Eastern Indians from Medicine Spring & Allegany by New World Records released January 1, 1985. This track was recorded on the Allegany Reservation in New York.