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The Passenger Pigeon is a bird that used to be widespread throughout North America. And when we say widespread, we mean a population of 3 billion in the late 1800s. The population of the Passenger Pigeon surged with the arrival of Europeans in North America, as they killed off many of the bird’s natural predators. This surge is thought to have been unsustainable, as the massive flocks of Passenger Pigeons, containing thousands or millions of birds, caused incredible damage to the environment. There’s even cases of trees so densely covered in pigeons that branches snapped, or in some cases, the entire tree. The Passenger Pigeon could fly up to 60 MPH (97 KPH), yet flocks were so massive that flyovers would take hours, during which the sky was darkened, and conversation nearly impossible. Americans would hunt the Passenger Pigeon for an easy, cheap source of meat, although “hunt” sounds a lot more active than it really was. While a flock was passing overhead, you could shoot in no direction in particular and guarantee hitting a bird, or even raise a rather large stick into the air and knock a few down dead. This spectacle is long over, however. The last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in 1901, and the last captive one died in 1914. Her name was Martha, and she was 29 years old, with palsy.

The lead cause of the Passenger Pigeon’s extinction was human activity. As mentioned earlier, it was extremely easy to hunt the pigeons. They were slaughtered en masse at their nesting sites, and by the time the damage was realized, it was already done, and nothing could stop the hunting of the Passenger Pigeon. When combined with the destruction of the forests where they lived, these impressive birds, which had always found safety in the size of their flocks, had it turned against them, and died out.