XXV 



PASSENGER PIGEON 

 315. Ectopistes migratorius 



Dr. William C. Herman, of Cincinnati, has kindly 

 presented me with an original negative of the last living 

 Passenger Pigeon. (Fig. 36.) This bird, a female, died 

 in the zoo at Cincinnati, in 1916. Thus closed the career 

 of one of the most numerous bird hosts the world has 

 ever known. Pathetic in the extreme was this Pigeon's 

 prison death. All of its ancestors and companions had 

 died from natural causes, or from man's ruthless slaugh- 

 ter. This last survivor was captured and placed behind 

 prison bars, like a murderer or vicious criminal, where 

 it spent its last days. The National Audubon and other 

 bird-protecting organizations were too late to save the 

 Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. 



In my early life in Kentucky, near the great roosting 

 places of Passenger Pigeons, I have seen the dome of 

 the sky burnished with a continuous layer of beautiful 

 glittering necks of gold and violet iridescence, by the 

 passing of vast hordes of these birds. 



Many factors entered into the extermination of the 

 Passenger Pigeon, some of which will ever remain a 

 secret. If some equalizing methods did not govern repro- 

 duction the whole earth would become one brier patch, 

 a mass of tangled vines, a jam of buffaloes or of Pas- 

 senger Pigeons. The distribution and sustenance of any 

 given species are kept at a standard by food supply, dura- 

 tion of life and natural enemies. The larger the animal 

 or tree, the fewer are the numbers produced or surviving ; 

 yet they live the longest, as the Elephant, the whale and 

 the Sequoia Gigantia. The smelts, the moths and grass 

 seeds illustrate numerically the small things furnishing 

 food for the larger and less numerous. 



E. H. Forbush says: "This action and reaction of 

 natural forces constitutes what is known as the balance 

 of nature." 



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