What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone on the Cincinnati Zoo that late-summer day in 1914, all the opposite passenger pigeons gone from the face of the Earth, having as soon as crammed its skies with an immensity of beating wings, so many who John James Audubon likened their migration to an eclipse? And what made the distinction between the individuals who killed them with glee — like the person in Austin who bragged about slaying 475 birds with a single stick — and people who reverenced their magnificence, their majesty, their symphonic expression of life itself? A mere technology earlier than Martha was born in captivity, Margaret Fuller had exulted:
Each afternoon [the pigeons] got here sweeping throughout the garden, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged movement, extra lovely than something of the sort I ever knew. Had I been a musician, akin to Mendelssohn, I felt that I may have improvised a music fairly peculiar, from the sound they made, which ought to have indicated all the wonder over which their wings bore them.
They have been emissaries of the chic, migrating by the tens of millions, showing like an immense blue wave rolling towards you, sounding like thunder — an expertise we will by no means know first-hand. One of the vivid and poetic accounts of it, present in Joel Greenberg’s altogether fascinating and bittersweet ebook A Feathered River Throughout the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (public library), comes from the Potawatomi Chief Pokagon, who wrote with such touching tenderness in Could 1850, as throughout America the birds have been being killed for meals and for pleasure:
One morning on leaving my wigwam I used to be startled by listening to a gurgling, rumbling sound, as if a military of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing by way of the deep forests in direction of me. As I listened extra intently I concluded that as an alternative of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and but the morning was clear, calm and exquisite. Nearer and nearer got here the unusual comingling sounds of sleigh bells, combined with the rumbling of an approaching storm. Whereas I gazed in surprise and astonishment, I beheld transferring in direction of me in an unbroken entrance tens of millions of pigeons, the primary I had seen that season. They handed like a cloud by way of the branches of the large bushes, by way of the underbrush and over the bottom… Statue-like I stood, half-concealed by cedar boughs. They fluttered all about me, lighting on my head and shoulders; gently I caught two in my palms and thoroughly hid them underneath my blanket. I now started to understand they have been mating, preparatory to nesting. It was an occasion which I had lengthy hoped to witness; so I sat down and thoroughly watched their actions, amid the best tumult. I attempted to grasp their unusual language, and why all of them chatted in live performance… The bushes have been nonetheless crammed with them sitting in pairs in handy crotches of the limbs, every now and then gently fluttering their half-spread wings and uttering to their mates these unusual, bell-like wooing notes which I had mistaken for the ringing of bells within the distance.
Inside two generations, the bells had fallen silent.
As a result of the world is a kaleidoscope of qualia, as a result of every creature has a singular sensorium not shared and by no means absolutely comprehended by creatures formed by a unique biology, with the lack of any species a selected approach of seeing and a selected approach of being is misplaced, a verse redacted from the poetry of the universe.
The destiny of the passenger pigeon stands as a haunting monument to the deadliest defect of human nature — the hubris of seeing ourselves not as fractals of nature however as its overlords, the identical hubris that gave us the atomic bomb. It’s greater than a cautionary story to be heard within the thoughts — it’s a mirror, harsh and clear, held as much as the soul of humanity, a stark and sobering incantation to recuperate our reverence for all times in all its myriad manifestations.
The erasure of the passenger pigeon by the human hand comes alive with disquieting poignancy on this 1935 poem by Robinson Jeffers, half indictment and half invitation to revise our regard for the remainder of nature:
PASSENGER PIGEONS
by Robinson JeffersSlowly the passenger pigeons elevated, then out of the blue their numbers
Grew to become huge, they might flatten ten miles of forest
After they flew right down to roost, and the cloud of their rising
Eclipsed the dawns. They grew to become too many, they’re all useless
Not one stays.
And the American bison: their hordes
Would conceal a prairie from horizon to horizon, nice heads and storm-cloud shoulders, a torrent of life —
What number of are left? For a time, for a couple of years, their bones
Turned the darkish prairies white.
You, Loss of life, you look ahead to these items.
These explosions of life: they’re your meals.
They make your feasts.
However flip your nice rolling eyes
away from humanity
These grossly craving black eyes. It’s true we enhance.
A person from Britain touchdown in Gaul when Rome
had fallen
He journeyed fourteen days inland by way of that stunning
Wealthy land, the orchards and rivers and the looted villas: he experiences he noticed
No dwelling man. However now we fill the gaps.
Regardless of wars, famines and pestilences we’re fairly out of the blue
Three billion folks: our bones, ours too, would make
Large prairies white, a ravishing snow of unburied bones:
Bones which have twitched and quivered within the nights of affection,
Bones which have shaken with laughter and hung slack
in sorrow, coward bones
Worn out with trembling, robust bones damaged on the rack,
bones damaged in battle,
Broad bones gnarled with exhausting labor, and the little bones
of candy younger youngsters, and the white empty skulls,
Little carved ivory wine-jugs that used to comprise
Ardour and thought and love and insane delirium, the place now
Not even worms stay.
Respect humanity, Loss of life, these
shameless black eyes of yours,
It’s not essential to take all of sudden — in addition to that,
you can not do it, we’re too highly effective,
We’re males, not pigeons; you might take the outdated, the ineffective
and helpless, the cancer-bitten and the tender younger,
However the human race has nonetheless historical past to make. For look — look now
At our achievements: now we have bridled the cloud-leaper lightning,
a lion whipped by a person, to hold our messages
And work our will, now we have snatched the thunderbolt
Out of God’s palms. Ha? That was little and final 12 months —
for now now we have taken
The primal powers, creation and annihilation; we make
new components, akin to God by no means noticed,
We are able to explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left
however pure vitality, we will use it
In peace and warfare — “Very intelligent,” he answered in his skinny piping voice,
Merciless and a eunuch.
Roll these fool black eyes of yours
On the field-beats, not on clever man,
We aren’t in your order. You watched the dinosaurs
Develop into horror: they’d been little elves within the ditches
and presently grew to become huge with leaping flanks
And tearing enamel, plated with armor, nothing may
stand in opposition to them, nothing however you,
Loss of life, and so they died. You watched the sabre-tooth tigers
Develop these enormous fangs, pointless as our sciences,
and presently they died. You might have their bones
Within the oil-pits and layer rock, you’ll not have ours.
With ache and surprise and labor now we have purchased intelligence.
We now have minds just like the tusks of these forgotten tigers,
hypertrophied and horrible,
We now have counted the celebs and half-understood them,
now we have watched the farther galaxies fleeing away
from us, wild herds
Of panic horses — or a trick of distance deceived by the prism —
  ;we outfly falcons and eagles and meteors,
Sooner than sound, larger than the nourishing air;
now we have huge privilege, we don’t worry you,
We now have invented the jet-plane and the death-bomb
and the cross of Christ — “Oh,” he stated, “absolutely
You’ll stay without end” — grinning like a cranium, protecting his mouth
together with his hand — “What may exterminate you?”
A decade later, the poetic conservationist Aldo Leopold memorialized the vanished hen in a transferring speech delivered on the opening of a monument to the passenger pigeon erected at Wyalusing State Park by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. Lamenting that “for one species to mourn the loss of life of one other is a brand new factor underneath the solar,” he writes:
There’ll at all times be pigeons in books and in museums, however these are effigies and pictures, useless to all hardships and to all delights. Ebook-pigeons can’t dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for canopy, nor clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. They know no urge of seasons; they really feel no kiss of solar, no lash of wind and climate; they stay without end by not dwelling in any respect.
[…]
Man* is barely a fellow-voyager with different creatures within the Odyssey of evolution… We must always, within the century since Darwin, have achieved a way of neighborhood with dwelling issues, and of surprise over the magnitude and period of the biotic enterprise.
Reflecting on this “monument to a hen now we have misplaced, and to a doubt now we have gained,” he provides:
Our grandfathers, who did the precise killing, have been our brokers. They have been our brokers within the sense that they shared the conviction, which now we have solely now begun to doubt, that it’s extra essential to multiply folks and comforts than to cherish the fantastic thing about the land during which they stay. What we’re doing right here right this moment is publicly to admit a doubt whether or not that is true.
[…]
Our grandfathers, who noticed the glory of the fluttering hosts, have been much less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we’re. The strivings by which they bettered our lot are additionally these which disadvantaged us of pigeons. Maybe we now grieve as a result of we’re not positive, in our hearts, that now we have gained by the trade.
Couple with a poem impressed by the final Moho braccatus, which went extinct in our lifetime, then revisit Robinson Jeffers’s staggering poem in regards to the interwoven thriller of thoughts and universe. For a vivid counterpoint of what human nature can be able to, savor the story of the girl who saved the hawks.
