Passenger pigeons once abundant in North America

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- On a Friday evening, people gathered to remember Martha.

She was a star in her day. Scarlet eyes and peach-colored breast. Head held high.

Toward the end of her life, people lined up to see her -- a glimpse for the ages.

But a hundred years ago, Martha died alone, like she'd been waiting for the room to clear. A stroke, they say. She was around 29 years old.

Those people, sipping drinks as music played at a Martinis with Martha fundraiser at the Cincinnati Zoo, would all agree she was the last of her kind.

When death came, she was hurriedly frozen into 300 pounds of ice and hustled to the Smithsonian, a tribute to a fallen species.

Martha was the last passenger pigeon, the last of the billions of the most abundant bird in North America. Flocks 300 miles long blocked the sun like a glorious winged eclipse, darkening the land as they passed overhead.

So thick they flew, a man in Kansas City reportedly brought down 15 with a single shot.

Martha's death on Sept. 1, 1914, at the zoo in Cincinnati brought something rare if not new to the world -- the exact day of an extinction. Newspapers carried the story around the world as if she were a Hollywood star or former first lady.

Part of it was amazement: How, in only 50 or so years, did billions come down to one bird?

But people knew how it happened.

"We did it, we killed it off," said Joel Greenberg, author of "A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction."

"We chased it all those years until it was gone."

People killed the passenger pigeon for sport, commerce and fun. With no laws in place to protect migratory birds, hunters blasted away at nesting sites, killing breeding adults and nestlings alike.

They sold them. They ate them at poor folks' tables and in elegant hotel dining rooms. Farmers fed them to hogs. People crammed them into barrels and loaded them onto trains.

Passenger pigeon wings were used to fill potholes.

Until there was only Martha.

Greenberg said the lasting lesson of the passenger pigeon is that abundance does not guarantee survival. The bird's lasting gift is the laws that followed Martha's death, the ones to protect endangered species and migratory birds.

But extinction apparently doesn't ring with the finality it did. Researchers are working to "de-extinct" the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through genetic engineering.

Researchers are using the bird's closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon, in their endeavor.

The work is shaping up to be more about genetic science though than conservation. Bird lovers seem to be more concerned about protecting the endangered species we still have.

"I would rather we save the prairie chicken than bring back the passenger pigeon," said Mark B. Robbins, the ornithology collection manager at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute.

He dismissed any bird that comes from "de-extinction" efforts as a hybrid.

Robbins has the real thing. One recent day on the top floor of Dyche Hall on the college campus, he pulled a shallow box from a stainless-steel cabinet serving as a tomb of the avian extinct.

Carolina parakeets, an ivory-billed woodpecker, small dusky seaside sparrows -- colors as vibrant as if they had died yesterday. And three passenger pigeons, one killed in 1872 in Boston, according to its tag.

This is as close to the passenger pigeon as Robbins cares to be. He smiles with amazement when he talks of the mighty flocks. He speaks of profound regret, anger even, about their slaughter.

So have we learned enough that it won't happen again, to another animal?

"Well," he said, followed by a thoughtful pause. "No."

In 1800, passenger pigeons in the United States counted into the billions, mostly concentrated in huge flocks. Ship captains talked about black clouds of birds they saw over the Eastern Seaboard.

John James Audubon once wrote of a flock he encountered in western Kentucky that took three days to pass overhead. He estimated its size at more than 1 billion birds and said the resulting dung was not unlike falling snow.

Two things are credited with the killing of the birds: the telegraph and the railroad.

The telegraph enabled word of a giant flock's location to spread quickly. Hunters came and killed as rapidly as they could pull triggers, everyone bagging dozens if not hundreds of the birds in a day.

Trains allowed shipment of their bodies to cities all over the country: Meat sold by the ton.

By 1900, they were nearly all gone. The disappearance came so fast, rumors spawned that the bird had mysteriously migrated to South America.

Only Michigan enacted a law to protect the bird.

Too late, and only Martha was left. Her mate, George, had died four years earlier.

Who knows -- the Kansas City Zoo could someday welcome a woolly mammoth. The last one disappeared 4,000 years ago.

But scientists say any extinct animal can be brought back if good DNA can be found.

As for the passenger pigeon, researchers like the symmetry of humans bringing back a species they killed out.

According to Beth Shapiro, a molecular biologist and professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, a team of scientists working on the Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback is close to arranging a representation of the original chromosomes to create a "first draft" of the genome of this species.

It's important to keep in mind, she said, that the bird's population fluctuated greatly as resources changed.

"This means that we probably won't need to bring back billions of birds for their populations to be sustainable, as long as we can keep ourselves from killing them," Shapiro said.

The National Audubon Society takes no position, but Geoff LeBaron, who directs the group's Christmas Bird Count, said he would rather see resources go toward endangered species.

"It would really make more sense to focus on those," LeBaron said.

Robbins at the University of Kansas agrees. The world had the passenger pigeon and threw it away, he said. The duty now is to not let the same happen to another animal.

Back in 1914 when people lined up so see Martha at the end, some reportedly tossed sand her way. To get the old bird to move.

Martha was the last of her kind. Some think she should stay that way.

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Information from: The Kansas City Star, http://www.kcstar.com