![]() ![]() The effort failed, and Martha died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.įour years after the passenger pigeon was declared extinct, The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was enacted to deem it unlawful to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell nearly 1,100 species of birds in North America. The very last passenger pigeon, named Martha, lived at the Cincinnati Zoo where zoo officials offered a $1000 reward to locate a male mate. A few lingering birds, however, remained in captivity. The last reported passenger pigeon in the wild was shot in Pike County, Ohio on March 24, 1900. The last passenger pigeon nesting sites were reported in the Great Lakes region in the 1890s. By the late 1800s, ornithologists were reporting tremendous declines in pigeon numbers, despite efforts to initiate hunting restrictions. It is not entirely known what caused the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed.” After the feathered storm had passed, the landscape was left whitened by a colossal blanket of pigeon droppings. “Children screamed and ran for home,” it said. One account from Columbus, Ohio, in 1855 described a “growing cloud” that blotted out the sun as it advanced toward the city. These gargantuan flocks created a density that was said to darken the sky for hours as the birds passed overhead. They travelled in large numbers throughout the eastern and midwestern United States and Canada, with flocks reaching up to a mile in width and three hundred miles in length. Population estimates from the nineteenth century ranged from one billion to close to four billion, comprising up to forty percent of the total number of birds in North America. Passenger pigeons were once considered to be the most abundant bird on the planet. Casting its sharp gaze across the auction gallery, the taxidermied pigeon appears alive and unscathed, despite the mass extinction of its species more than one hundred years ago. Carefully perched amongst the late Don Blyth’s treasures to be offered in Miller & Miller’s October sale of Firearms, Sporting & Canadiana is a rare male passenger pigeon mount. ![]()
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