A Feathered River across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction.

• Author: Whaples, Robert
• Position: Book review

A Feathered River across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction

By Joel Greenberg

New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Pp. xiii, 290. $26 hardcover.

Joel Greenberg, research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago, has written an utterly fascinating and thorough account of the forces that drove the passenger pigeon to extinction. His goal is to use the centennial of this event "as a teaching moment to inform people about the passenger pigeon story and then to use that story as a portal into consideration of current issues related to extinction, sustainability, and the relationship between people and nature. It is hoped that this tragic extinction continues to engage people and to act as a cautionary tale so that it is not repeated" (p. xiii).

But what are the lessons to be learned from the passenger pigeon? Was its demise a tragedy? Was it a tragedy of the commons? Are these events likely to be repeated?

The passenger pigeon's extinction was almost completely unexpected because these birds were not merely common but unbelievably numerous--the most abundant bird species in the world. When European visitors to North America returned with descriptions of the magnitude of passenger pigeon flocks, they were justifiably met with incredulity, and they sometimes kept quiet, suspecting that no one would believe them anyway. Yet credible accounts tell of virtual rivers of migrating birds. One observer, English hunter and naturalist W. Ross King, recounted around 1860 that early in the morning he was awakened to see "the sun obscured by millions of pigeons ... darting onwards in a straight line ... in a vast mass a mile or more in breadth, and stretching before and behind as far as the eye could reach. Swiftly and steadily the column passed over with a rushing sound, and for hours continued in undiminished myriads.... The duration of this flight being about fourteen hours ... the column (allowing a probable velocity of sixty miles an hour) could not have been less than three hundred miles in length" (qtd. on p. 5). Experts now estimate that this flock would have contained about 3.7 billion (not a misprint) birds. About half a century later, not a single pigeon was left.

Indeed, the passage of these pigeons could evoke apocalyptic descriptions. When pigeons flew over Columbus, Ohio, in 1855, "children screamed and ran for home.... Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped to...