Loss of the Passenger Pigeon

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Another bird that bit the dust a long time ago was known as the passenger pigeon. It was in the early 1800s that you could see flocks of these birds and in these flocks were a billion individual passenger pigeons. If the flock was flying overhead it would take over an hour before you would see the last bird fly through the sky. Unfortunately, as it is with most extinct birds these were hunted for meat.It got so bad that in 1878 in the U.S. state of Michigan up to 50,000 passenger pigeons were being killed every day for nearly five months. Finally, in 1896 the last flock of 250,000 birds was killed in just one day. There was one survivor left a female pigeon named Martha. She could be seen at the Cincinnati Zoo and died in 1914. It makes me think that an over excess of anything is just too much. I cannot understand why hunters would have to kill so many passenger pigeons in a days time. To me, this just seems like uncontrolled activity but then probably no one really cared. It is such a shame when this happens and future generations cannot get to know and delight in birds they would otherwise have never seen.