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 era 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 stunning than something of the type I ever knew. Had I been a musician, comparable to Mendelssohn, I felt that I might 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 had been emissaries of the chic, migrating by the thousands and thousands, 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 guide A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (public library), comes from the Potawatomi Chief Pokagon, who wrote with such touching tenderness in Might 1850, as throughout America the birds had 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 the deep forests in the direction of me. As I listened extra intently I concluded that as a substitute 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, blended with the rumbling of an approaching storm. Whereas I gazed in surprise and astonishment, I beheld transferring in the direction of me in an unbroken entrance thousands and thousands of pigeons, the primary I had seen that season. They handed like a cloud by the branches of the large timber, by 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 punctiliously hid them underneath my blanket. I now started to comprehend they had been mating, preparatory to nesting. It was an occasion which I had lengthy hoped to witness; so I sat down and punctiliously watched their actions, amid the best tumult. I attempted to grasp their unusual language, and why all of them chatted in live performance… The timber had been nonetheless stuffed with them sitting in pairs in handy crotches of the limbs, at times 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 distinct biology, with the lack of any species a specific approach of seeing and a specific 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 get better 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 all of a sudden their numbers
Grew to become monumental, they might flatten ten miles of forest
After they flew all the way 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 disguise 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 number 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 improve.
A person from Britain touchdown in Gaul when Rome
had fallen
He journeyed fourteen days inland by that stunning
Wealthy land, the orchards and rivers and the looted villas: he stories he noticed
No residing man. However now we fill the gaps.
Despite wars, famines and pestilences we’re fairly all of a sudden
Three billion folks: our bones, ours too, would make
Huge prairies white, a gorgeous 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 kids, 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 reside.
Respect humanity, Loss of life, these
shameless black eyes of yours,
It’s not essential to take unexpectedly — apart from that,
you can’t do it, we’re too highly effective,
We’re males, not pigeons; chances are you’ll take the previous, 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: we’ve bridled the cloud-leaper lightning,
a lion whipped by a person, to hold our messages
And work our will, we’ve snatched the thunderbolt
Out of God’s palms. Ha? That was little and final 12 months —
for now we’ve taken
The primal powers, creation and annihilation; we make
new parts, comparable to God by no means noticed,
We will explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left
however pure vitality, we will use it
In peace and conflict — “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’re not in your order. You watched the dinosaurs
Develop into horror: that they had been little elves within the ditches
and presently grew to become monumental with leaping flanks
And tearing tooth, plated with armor, nothing might
stand towards them, nothing however you,
Loss of life, they usually died. You watched the sabre-tooth tigers
Develop these large fangs, pointless as our sciences,
and presently they died. You’ve got their bones
Within the oil-pits and layer rock, you’ll not have ours.
With ache and surprise and labor we’ve 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,
we’ve 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,
Quicker than sound, increased than the nourishing air;
we’ve monumental privilege, we don’t worry you,
We now have invented the jet-plane and the death-bomb
and the cross of Christ — “Oh,” he mentioned, “absolutely
You’ll reside without end” — grinning like a cranium, protecting his mouth
along with his hand — “What might exterminate you?”
A decade later, the poetic conservationist Aldo Leopold memorialized the vanished chicken 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 demise of one other is a brand new factor underneath the solar,” he writes:
There’ll all the time be pigeons in books and in museums, however these are effigies and pictures, useless to all hardships and to all delights. E-book-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 reside without end by not residing in any respect.
[…]
Man* is simply a fellow-voyager with different creatures within the Odyssey of evolution… We should always, within the century since Darwin, have achieved a way of group with residing issues, and of surprise over the magnitude and length of the biotic enterprise.
Reflecting on this “monument to a chicken we’ve misplaced, and to a doubt we’ve gained,” he provides:
Our grandfathers, who did the precise killing, had been our brokers. They had been our brokers within the sense that they shared the conviction, which we’ve solely now begun to doubt, that it’s extra necessary to multiply folks and comforts than to cherish the fantastic thing about the land wherein they reside. What we’re doing right here immediately is publicly to admit a doubt whether or not that is true.
[…]
Our grandfathers, who noticed the glory of the fluttering hosts, had 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 we’ve gained by the change.
Couple with a poem inspired by the last Moho braccatus, which went extinct in our lifetime, then revisit Robinson Jeffers’s staggering poem about the interwoven mystery of mind and universe. For a vivid counterpoint of what human nature can be able to, savor the story of the woman who saved the hawks.
