![]() Attempts were made to breed the species in captivity, but none succeeded. Unchecked hunting, combined with ongoing habitat loss, caused Passenger Pigeon populations to dip below the threshold necessary for the species to breed successfully in the wild. Although they were always an important source of food for native peoples and early settlers, the onset of large-scale commercial hunting in the 1800s signaled this species' drastic and irreversible decline. Unfortunately, these large flocks and communal roosts made the species very easy to hunt. Passenger Pigeons were highly social, living in colonies that covered hundreds of square miles and breeding communally, with up to a hundred nests in a single tree. Passenger Pigeon shooting in Louisiana by Smith Bennett Sign up for ABC's eNews to learn how you can help protect birds The air was literally filled with Pigeons the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse …” I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. In a short time, finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. “I dismounted … and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. This account of migrating Passenger Pigeons, by ornithologist and artist John James Audubon, expresses the vastness of the flocks: A cautionary tale, the story of the Passenger Pigeon and other extinct bird species inspires our work and one of the main tenets of ABC's efforts: to safeguard the rarest species. These seemingly numberless flocks were considered an infinite resource and exploited so drastically that the species was driven to extinction in mere decades. It's hard to imagine now, but at one time this species was the most numerous bird on earth, with a population of 3 to 5 billion birds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |