When we craved passenger-pigeon pie

Name and nature

The migratory wanderer

The scientific name says it all: Ectopistes migratorius, the migratory wanderer — the bird that never stayed put.

Linnaeus named the species in 1766; in 1827 Swainson raised it a genus of its own, Ectopistes. “Passenger” comes from the French passager, the passer-by — and in 18th-century New France it was called the tourte. Genetic analysis shows the closest living relative is in the genus Patagioenas, not the long-suspected mourning dove.

Its range spanned eastern North America, from the prairies to the Atlantic and from southern Canada toward the Gulf of Mexico. The passenger pigeon rarely returned to the same nesting grounds: it moved its nesting year by year, after the mast. Daily it flew 100–130 km from the roost for food, at times up to 160 km, at about 100 km an hour.

100–130 km

of daily flight from roost to food

100 km/h

the travelling speed of the flocks

The nesting

Nest cities

They nested in “cities”: millions of birds over thousands of hectares, nest by nest, until the branches broke.

The largest nesting on record was in Wisconsin, 1871: 850 square miles, about 136 million adults. At Petoskey in 1878 the nesting ran 40 miles long and three to ten wide, over some 100,000 acres; Roney reckoned, at the lowest estimate, a billion pigeons sacrificed there in a single season.

One tree often held over 50 nests — a hemlock held 317 — and the usual clutch was a single egg. The flocks chose nesting grounds where the mast ran thickest: beechnuts, acorns, chestnuts. The 2018 study shows digestion invariably destroyed the seeds eaten; dispersal ran only through regurgitation or after the bird's death.

For tens of thousands of years the pigeon engineered the eastern broadleaf forests: felling the undergrowth with droppings, snapping branches, turning saplings. After the vanishing, the red oaks may have spread wide — no one ate their spring acorns any more (Ellsworth & McComb 2003).

136 million

adults in Wisconsin, 1871

a single egg

the usual clutch of a pair

For eating

The pie

Before it was merchandise, the pigeon was food: long eaten by Indigenous peoples, then baked into pies by colonists.

In the refuse heaps of a prehistoric village site in Oxford County, Ontario, passenger-pigeon bones dominate the bird remains. Later, the Huron (Wendat) believed that at the Feast of the Dead, about every twelve years, the souls of the departed turned — in some opinions — into turtledoves, pursued with bow and arrow and broiled (Le Jeune 1636, via Mitchell 1935). And Wilson wrote that the birds ran so fat that Indians and whites alike melted the fat down in place of butter and lard.

The two recipes below show the period's culinary form — neither names the species. The proof that passenger pigeons went into the pie comes from elsewhere.

The proof sits in Ontario: Margaret Mitchell, in a monograph devoted to the passenger pigeon (1935), quotes Catharine Parr Traill's pigeon pot-pie recipe — birds under crust, baked in a kettle — and reckons the pie their commonest cooking; Dr Arthur, asked how they were prepared, answered “nearly always as a pot pie”. In 1771 50,000 birds were reportedly sold at a Boston market. Wilson watched wagon-loads pouring into market, from fifty down to twelve cents a dozen: “pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast and supper, until the very name becomes sickening.”

Market hunting

The machine

Railroad and telegraph turned hunting into industry: professional hunters followed the nestings year by year.

From 1840 the professional “pigeoners” worked in bands held together by telegraph. When Plattsburgh joined the railroad in 1851 it shipped 1.8 million birds in a single year, at 31–56 cents a dozen. Cattaraugus County shipped 80 tons in 1848; Michigan at least 300 tons in 1878. Pokagon reckons 5,700 tons in thirty years — at half a pound to the bird, 23 million birds.

In 1874 at least 600 trappers worked; in 1881, 1,200. One hunter reportedly shipped three million birds in a career. Dead birds sold at 35–40 cents a dozen at the nesting and 50–60 in Chicago; live ones at $1–2 a dozen in the cities.

Nothing went to waste: feathers filled bedding — at St-Jérôme every dowry held a pigeon-feather bed and pillows, and one family killed 4,000 birds in a day for feathers. At Coney Island in 1881, 20,000 birds fell in a live-bird shooting match — the origin of today's trap shooting, still named for “clay pigeons”. The live decoy, eyelids sewn shut, fetched $5–$25 apiece; and two farmers drove over 300 hogs more than 100 miles, to fatten on pigeons.

The remedies of the day were matters of belief: blood thought good for eye disorders, powdered stomach lining for dysentery, and dung for sundry ailments.

1.8 million

birds from Plattsburgh in 1851

23 million

birds in 5,700 tons, after Pokagon

The countdown

The last ones

After Petoskey, silence: no great nesting was ever seen again, and the birds that remained are counted by name.

1. 1878

   Petoskey

   The last great nesting: 50,000 birds killed a day for nearly five months. The survivors tried to nest again; they were killed before raising their young.

2. 1899

   Babcock

   Wisconsin, September: a young pigeon shot — Schorger counts it the last reliable record from the state.

3. 1900

   Buttons

   Sargents, Ohio, 24 March: a young female. Schorger accepts her as the last bird taken from the wild beyond doubt — unaware of the 1901 and 1902 males. She is kept at the Ohio History Center.

4. 1901

   Oakford

   Illinois, 12 March: a male — the last wild bird taken for which both a specimen and a doubtless provenance exist. At Millikin University since 1947.

5. 1902

   Laurel

   Indiana, 3 April: a male, verified in the hand by Amos Butler — the last verified wild record. The specimen was later destroyed.

6. 1910–1914

   Martha, alone

   On 10 July 1910 George, the last male, dies. Martha lives alone for four years, in a Cincinnati cage, while visitors throw sand to make her move.

7. 1914

   Martha

   1 September: Martha dies in the Cincinnati aviary. The body, frozen in a 300-pound block of ice, travels by train to the Smithsonian: USNM 223979. After Objects of Wonder (March 2017 – September 2024), the mount shows in From These Lands, on the second floor — open until 2029.

Drag the years from 1800 to 1914 in the counting engine ↑

Why did they perish?

Commercial hunting is one of the causes with the widest agreement; how much deforestation, colonial biology, and natural fluctuations mattered stays disputed.

1. Railroad and telegraph let the market hunters follow the flocks all year and ship them to the cities (Schorger 1955; Price 1999; Greenberg 2014). As Stanley Temple reckoned in 2014, industrial-scale killing that stops breeding makes extinction a mathematical certainty (after WisContext).
2. Deforestation as the chief culprit (Mighetto 1991; Hedeen 2010) — and Greenberg (2014) answers that oaks, birches and aspens remained in plenty: the pine was cut first, and the pigeon ate everything; in any case the bird never reached the 20th century because of killing for profit.
3. Halliday (1980): the final crash ran too fast for hunting alone; colony size decided breeding success. Blockstein and Tordoff (1985, after Roberts et al. 2017) add threshold (Allee) effects: below a number, nesting no longer holds.
4. Genetics quarrels: Hung et al. (2014) read dramatic fluctuations of numbers; Murray et al. (2017) answer that low diversity comes from natural selection in a huge population, not from fluctuations. After Beth Shapiro (2017), the huge numbers themselves may have hastened the ruin (UCSC press release).
5. Roberts et al. (2017): the pigeon never reached functional extinction before true extinction — hunting stopped in time might have saved it. Stanton (2014, after Roberts et al. 2017): a modern risk assessment would have predicted the extinction.

Stones of remembrance

In 1947 the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology raised a monument at Wyalusing to the state's last pigeon, shot at Babcock in September 1899 — unveiled by Aldo Leopold, who called the stone “a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species”. At Cincinnati, Martha's pagoda aviary houses three stuffed pigeons beside Incas, the last Carolina parakeet (dead in 1918, in Martha's cage); on the path, a bronze Martha. On earth remain at least 1,532 skins and 16 skeletons.

On bringing back

The comeback?

Science wants to write passenger-pigeon genes into the genome of a living relative. What came out would not be Martha — but a stand-in.

The “Great Comeback”, begun in 2012 under the scientific lead of Ben Novak, CRISPR-edits the germ cells of the band-tailed pigeon, carried forward through living surrogate hosts. The project's route is germline editing, not cloning. Novak says plainly that an extinct original species can never be remade: the product would be a hybrid, a replacement by proxy — and the first new chicks are hoped for in the 2030s.

A laboratory flock would not be the flock that snapped branches and darkened the sky: the forest's work took millions. Perhaps that is why the Wyalusing monument stands as the most honest epilogue: the first time people openly grieved a lost species (after Stanley Temple, via WisContext) — a stone for a bird that was, for a while, up to 40 percent of America's land birds.

Three untruths