This is a piece I published in American Heartland Magazine. If you are interested in more of my work, please go check out our latest issue at americanheartlandmagazine.com

Once, not that long ago, nearly one-half of all the wild birds in North America were passenger pigeons. At the moment the first pilgrim’s boots touched the New World, there were somewhere in the range of three to five billion of the gray-plumed birds. But almost three hundred years later, the last of its kind (a female named Martha) left this mortal coil in the Cincinnati zoo. One can only hope that she was met by countless rows of mast-seeding oaks and endless berry-laden prairies on the other side—as well as the rest of her kin. Today, there are none left who remember when the pigeon dominated the air; only the oldest of hardwoods will carry on their living memory now. 

Unlike the city-dwelling sky-rats, or dawn-heralding mourning doves, these celestial nomads were wind incarnate. With a breathless top speed of sixty miles an hour, these ecological forces of nature marauded throughout the Heartland in massive phalanxes. Everything yielded to their numbers—trees, understory growth, crops, even daylight. The undulating flocks in which they traveled were often so great that they stretched from horizon to distant horizon, blacking out the sun. Such impressive populations, of course, require ample fuel and space. And in a primeval America, the pigeons were afforded both. In the summer months, they nested in the Great Lakes region, New York, and Ontario. Then, when the mercury dropped, the billions of them turned south to roost in the more temperate climate of the Gulf States, Tennessee, and Arkansas. And in the spring, presumably with a growling stomach and restless spirit, they became skyborne vagabonds. 

From certain perspectives, a dark cloud of passenger pigeons eclipsing the sky above must have seemed like a plague rolling in on the breeze. Say a squirrel awakens from his home—a tidy hollow in some ancient oak—to be greeted by a beautiful morning. He goes about his daily business, snacking on acorns as he sees fit. He fills his stomach with them; he is content. Then, in the late afternoon, the sky darkens. Rain? he wonders, sniffing the air. But no, instead a living wind descends upon his woods. Five hundred pigeons roost in his tree, abolishing limb from bole. The forest floor becomes caked in a greasy layer of droppings. And by the time the birds leave, off to some other unsuspecting woodland, all the squirrel can do is look back at a time, a short while ago, when his acorns were of great abundance. 

For as long as humans and hordes of passenger pigeons have existed together, the birds have been a popular source of protein. When the frontier was no further west than the Appalachians, Indians would thrust sticks and nets into the air to fell them as they made low passes. Then, some time later, as settlers trudged across the landscape, entire pioneer communities were fed by their meat. And where squirrels can take no action against the onslaught of a biological storm, a farmer surely can. Thus, as crops began to replace forests, they too began thinning the flocks to protect their fields and fill their stomachs to boot. Soon after came the market hunter when railways were laid over wagon trails. They hunted the birds with extreme prejudice; throughout his career, just one of these men purportedly sent over three million pigeons back to eastern cities—destined for the cannery. Eventually, by the mid-1890s, the shotguns of professional pigeon hunters fell silent across the plains. The skies shone empty. The pigeons were all gone. 

It was in 1947 when the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology erected a monument overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers in Wyalusing State Park. Back in the days when pigeons held dominion of the air, it was a place with which they were quite familiar. And so, it seems fitting that at least one passenger pigeon should be returned to its home, even if it be engraved in a metal plaque rather than in flesh and feathers. For the occasion, a eulogy for the species was in order—I can think of no person more suitable to give it than Aldo Leopold. Leopold was a man of many elements: philosophy, science, forestry, conservation. Chiefly, though, he was a naturalist and a tremendous writer; it was he who had the honor of paying tribute to the deceased. In a poetic and mournful speech titled “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” he mused on the nature and legacy of what was once North America’s most abundant bird. Ultimately, Leopold concluded that it is more than mere nostalgia to grieve for the species. As he so expertly expressed, the Clovis people of ancient America did not mourn the mammoth. The hide hunters felt no remorse for the buffalo. And the pigeon, if it had been us who had vanished from this world, surely would have felt nothing at all. “For one species to mourn the death of another,” he writes, “is a new thing under the sun.”