“Unveiling the Enigma: How Mermaids May Hold Secrets to One of History’s Swiftest Extinctions”
So, what happened to these birds? How, in such a short time, could the passenger pigeon go from being more numerous than all other North American birds combined to extinct? Well, humans gonna human.
According to a hunting journal in 1913, the passenger pigeons were known to be “the gypsies of the birdom.” They traveled en masse to wherever they could find food and nesting habitats. They were known to travel up to eighty miles daily from their roost in search of food. And they ate… a lot. They had fondness for soft fruits like blueberries, strawberries, and figs. They also ate acorns and chestnuts. Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “It is a wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do.”
The plentiful chestnut, maple, oak, and pine forests of North America not only provided food to the passenger pigeon, but a home and a place to nest (or roost).
Those trees also provided ample firewood to humans. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the human population on the continent was exploding — from under four million in 1790 to seventy-six million by 1900. As human numbers grew, land was needed to accommodate. Unfortunately, this was the same land the passenger pigeons occupied.
But deforestation was only a contributing factor in the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The main reason they went from billions to zero in about a half century was because they were just so darn tasty, or at the very least, abundant and easy to kill.
When the first humans started showing up fifteen thousand years ago in the northern hemisphere, they immediately began including passenger pigeons in their diet. When Europeans began settling, they quickly figured out that passenger pigeons were a cheap source of food. By the mid 19th century, professional pigeon trapping was a major industry and massive punt guns were event invented to help the process, able to kill upwards of hundreds of birds in a single shot. By 1855, the number of passenger pigeons were noticeably declining, though the flocks were still massive as noted above, so very little was done about it.
