The recent USA newspaper special “Paradise Lost” (Sunday, September 22) laments the loss or decline of America’s bird population. Rhode Island has shared in this avian attrition, the most notable example of which was the eradication of the passenger pigeon.
The passenger pigeon was more abundant than any American mammal or bird. It numbered in the billions. This migratory pigeon measured about 16 inches long and was multicolored – its eyes were orange, its head and neck were bright slate blue, its lower parts were reddish or chestnut, and its wings were black spotted. Its long tail feathers were white or bluish. Females had similar coloring though much more dull-and-drab than the male, as is the case with most bird species. They reproduced slowly and laid few eggs.
These pigeons ate vegetable matter, berries, nuts, acorns, and insects. By devouring caterpillars, moths, inchworms, beetles, and other pests, the pigeons protected the forests where they roosted.
In 1643 Roger Williams observed that the bird bred “abundantly” in Rhode Island in the “Pigeon Countrie”, by which he presumably meant the forested northern and western areas of the colony. “In that place these fowle breed abundantly,” writes Williams, “and by reason of their delicate food, especially in strawberry time, when they pick up a whole large Field of the old grounds of the Natives, they are a delicate fowle, and because of their abundance, and the facility of killing them, they are and may be plentifully fed on.” Williams’ Massachusetts contemporaries reported seeing “flocks . . . so thick they obscure the light,” containing so many “millions of millions” that it took hours for the flight to pass over them.
Reverend Andrew Burnaby, an English clergyman, wrote a perceptive account of his Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America in the Years 1759 and 1760. He rendered this description of the pigeons during his visit to Rhode Island: “Towards evening they generally settle upon trees, and sit one upon another in such crowds as sometimes to break down the largest branches. The inhabitants at such times go out with long poles and knock numbers of them in the head upon the roost; for they are either so fatigued by the flight, or terrified by the obscurity of night, that they will not move, or take wing, without some great and uncommon noise to alarm them.”
The passenger pigeon arrived annually in Rhode Island in March and migrated to the upper South in December. The bird’s general range extended from the high plains east of the Rockies to the Atlantic coast and from Canada to the Gulf states.
From the early 17th century, until baseball replaced it in the late 19th century, pigeon hunting and killing was the national pastime – or so it seems. Like the dodo (who suffered a similar fate) the passenger pigeon generally disregarded the presence of human beings in its roosting and nesting places. Small wonder that a naïve, trusting person is known to con men as “a pigeon.”
This once ubiquitous bird has provided other phrases to our language. A “stool pigeon” or “stoolie” was a bird trained by a hunter to attract passing flocks. These living decoys were used to lure their fellow fowl into death traps where they were slaughtered for market as food or fashion.
Every conceivable method of destruction was used against the hapless pigeons. They were gunned down, especially by “birdshot”, clubbed with long poles; grabbed manually and decapitated; netted; and poisoned. The trees in which they roosted were set afire causing their babies (squabs) to fall to the ground. Those young birds were seized and sold as a culinary delicacy.
This widespread and relentless unholy war against the passenger pigeon produced the inevitable result – extinction. The end came quickly. Extermination moved from the populous East, where the bird’s habitat had been reduced, toward the North and West. In 1886, as Rhode Island celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding, the last passenger pigeons were taken, one by Walter A. Angell and a dozen in Warwick by J. M. Flanagan. In the years immediately following, a few were seen but not hurt.
By this time, some friends of wildlife made a belated attempt to save the species by breeding passenger pigeons in captivity. The American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), formed in 1883, led the campaign to protect the pigeon and other wildfowl from human exploitation.
By 1900 at least three captive flocks of the critically endangered species had been established. One of these, at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens, is where Martha, the last pigeon, uttered her final coo-coo on September 1, 1914.
Other avian visitors to Rhode Island suffered the same fate as the passenger pigeon. The Labrador duck’s demise came during the late 19th century, and the heath hen succumbed a few decades thereafter. The latter, once abundant in New England, was an excellent source of food and easily killed. The hen’s decrease was rapid and reached the point of extinction on Martha’s Vineyard where the last of this species died in 1933.
Late in the 20th century, Rhode Island environmental officials moved to preserve another very endangered species, the piping plover, under the aegis of the federal and state Endangered Species Acts. Thanks to protective restrictions along the state’s southern shore, especially in the plover’s nesting area on Moonstone Beach, where nude bathing had become a custom, the piping plover barely survives.
The one local bright spot in the battle of man vs. bird is the fate of the wild turkey, once nominated by Ben Franklin to be America’s symbol (rather than the bald eagle). Initially shy and easily approached, by the mid-20th century the turkey was expunged, not only from Rhode Island, but from 70 percent of its original range. Its local reintroduction in 1980 has been a dramatic success. Wild turkeys are now plentiful in Rhode Island, a fact for which we can all be thankful.
Ironically, the passenger pigeon has received far more sympathy and affection as an extinct species than it did while extant. There are now four memorials to the famous fowl, several songs and poems, at least three novels, children’s books, some poetry, and dozens of place names (but none in Rhode Island).
To that litany of recognition and nostalgia, I would like to add this commentary. For once, those readers who think that my views are “for the birds” can claim to be dead right!
Dr. Patrick T. Conley
Historian Laureate of Rhode Island