Flock Together by B.J. Hollars

Flock Together by B.J. Hollars

Author:B.J. Hollars [Hollars, B.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, NAT043000 Nature / Animals / Birds
ISBN: 9780803296428
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2016-11-29T07:00:00+00:00


Stanley Temple has hardly left the lectern before Joel Greenberg leaps to take his place. Greenberg is in many ways the opposite of the more reserved Schorger: a loquacious, booming-voiced man fully at ease before the crowd.

“Do I need the mic?” Greenberg hollers, and though he most certainly does not, a naysayer in the back demands he use it. He acquiesces, though I get the sense he’s more comfortable working the room than remaining tethered to a microphone cord.

The white-haired, bespectacled Greenberg speaks with an air of confidence, and for good reason. He’s the author of the 2014 book A Feathered River across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. It is, perhaps, second only to Schorger’s work on the species, though it’s more accessible to a general audience, as is Greenberg himself.

He begins his lecture by describing a familiar scene: vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons darkening the skies—at least until the flocks diminished.

“They were killed in many ways,” Greenberg explains, “torches, clubs, nets, guns, boots. Killing them was too strong a human virtue to withstand.”

He moves from one PowerPoint slide to the next, eventually coming to a portion of the story I’ve never heard before: technology’s role in the bird’s undoing.

“Two technologies, in particular,” Greenberg explains, “the introduction of the telegraph and the railroad.”

They worked in tandem—the telegraph allowing scouts to offer reconnaissance on the flocks’ positioning, while the railroad allowed hunters to dramatically increase shipping speeds, thereby expanding potential markets. The process allowed professional hunters to “kill without interruption,” Greenberg explains, and was so successful in its efficiency that the hunters soon ran out of supply.

Yet the Passenger Pigeons’ problems transcended technology, Greenberg continues. The birds also had a less than robust breeding pattern, one that limited each breeding pair to a single egg per nest per season. Thus, as the number of birds dwindled, so too did the breeding pairs, and as the pairs dwindled, so too did the number of eggs. In some ways, the situation illustrated the converse of the old causality dilemma: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Though in this instance, we’re left wondering which vanished first, and the answer is obvious: the pigeons did.

For decades the birds’ numbers continued to diminish, and by the turn of the twentieth century, it was all but impossible to spot a Passenger Pigeon in the wild. These sightings became even more difficult after April 3, 1902, when the last confirmed wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Laurel, Indiana. However, it’s death hardly kept others from claiming to have spotted the birds themselves. Even sitting president Theodore Roosevelt claimed to have observed a small flock in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the spring of 1907. Despite these occasional wild sightings, within a few years’ time, even the chance to see Passenger Pigeons in captivity would fade.

Such was the case on September 1, 1914, when Martha—the world’s last known Passenger Pigeon—died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo.

“We can pinpoint the last,” Greenberg stresses to the crowd.



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