382 BULLETIN 162, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



bird has migrated to South America, but the real cause for its 

 extinction — man — is not mentioned. The natural phenomena sup- 

 posed to be causative of the extinction are: Epidemics, tornadoes, 

 earty deep snowstorms, forest fires, strong winds, while the birds 

 were crossing large bodies of water, causing exhaustion and death 

 by drowning. Some of these were reported while the bird was still 

 common in other localities. Circumstantial accounts were published 

 of immense numbers drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, a region be- 

 yond the usual range of the bird. The destruction of the forests 

 by ax and by fire undoubtedly has been a large detrimental factor 

 in the life history of the pigeons, for the forests supplied their 

 principal food as well as roosting and nesting places. These natural 

 causes had acted for countless ages but the passenger pigeon sur- 

 vived, but when the white man arrived on the North American Con- 

 tinent, and especially after the pigeon became a commercial asset, 

 its destruction, unless some curb was put on the slaughter, was 

 ordained. 



The evidence that man is responsible for the enormous destruction 

 is voluminous and convincing, but why, it may be asked, did not a 

 few escape and continue the race when the numbers became so small 

 that the pursuit of the bird was no longer commercially profitable? 

 It is believed by some that the bird still exists in small numbers in 

 remote parts of northern Michigan and in Canada. In answer to 

 this it may be said that a bird accustomed for ages to living together 

 in large numbers and close ranks, whether in feeding, migrating, 

 roosting, or nesting, might find it impossible to continue satisfactorily 

 these functions with greatly reduced and scattered ranks. It is prob- 

 ably no mere figure of speech to say that under these circumstances 

 such a communistic bird would " lose heart," nor is it fanciful to 

 suppose that sterility might in consequence affect the remnants. The 

 ease and thoroughness with which the squabs were destroyed, even in 

 preference to the adults, would alone account for the extinction. Just 

 as a forest finally dies of disease, accident, and old age if all the 

 seedlings are destroyed by intensive grazing, so any species of bird 

 is doomed in the same way to extinction if its offspring are an- 

 nihilated before they reach maturity. 



The probable final stages in the disappearance of the passenger 

 pigeon are well portrayed by W. B. Barrows (1912) as follows: 



In the opinion of the writer the most probable cause for the disappearance 

 of the pigeon lies in the fact that, through the clearing of the forests and the 

 increasing persecution by man, the birds were driven from one place to another 

 and gradually compelled to nest farther and farther to the north, and under 

 conditions successively less and less favorable, so that eventually the larger 

 part of the great flocks consisted of old birds, which, through stress of weather 

 and persecution, abandoned their nesting places and failed to rear any consider- 



