Aegis 2015
66
Book Review >>> Taylor Bailey
A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction Greenberg, Joel. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014. 290 pp.
Published on the one-hundred-year anniversary of the death of Martha—the last passenger pigeon who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914—A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction by naturalist Joel Greenberg is a poignant memorial. Greenberg’s detailed historical analysis provides readers with a comprehensive account of the events leading up to the disappearance of the magnificent bird, whose flocks numbered in the range of three to five billion birds pre-European colonization. A Feathered River Across the Sky tells a cautionary tale, providing us with critical historical knowledge to inform the current extinction crisis. The passenger pigeon—although it resembled a common mourning dove—is unlike any North American bird alive today in both appearance and behavior. Passenger pigeons ranged from fifteen to eighteen inches in length, approximately “one and a half times the size of the [mourning] dove” (2). Males possessed “slaty-blue and gray upper parts and a throat and breast of rich copper glazed with purple,” whereas in the drabber females beige replaced copper, most likely as a means of camouflage (2). Perhaps most distinct, however, were the massive flocks passenger pigeons congregated in to migrate. Following known food source locations, massive flocks of millions of birds would traverse eastern North America, stopping only to feed or roost. The naturalist and painter John James Audubon famously recorded a passenger pigeon flight along the Ohio River that was said to have “eclipsed the sun for three days” (1). In the spring, passenger pigeons nested as a flock for a period of four to five weeks. The density of birds at nesting sites was so great that “their sheer volume imposed severe damage on the trees that supported them.” (13). One account from Indiana recalls the “nightly crash of breaking limbs from a pigeon roost in a nearby maple grove” (13). Some nesting sites were so large that the noise of the birds could be heard six miles away, while the stench of pigeon dung—which “permeated the atmosphere with the scents reminiscent of a poultry farm”—drifted for over a mile (13). Not only did these great nestings impact the ecosystems of eastern North America, they represented a striking phenomena within the North American ecological consciousness. Passenger pigeon nesting behavior, which clearly evolved as defense mechanism, also made the birds incredibly easy to catch. The historical accounts, which Greenberg deftly weaves together, tell a tragic tale. Passenger pigeons were caught and slaughtered for food in a variety of ways, often in a systematic and inhumane fashion. The memoir of George D. Smith—a resident of Auglaize County, Ohio—recollects one particular night in which the Smith family came upon a pigeon roost in a marsh near their home. Upon finding a strand of
