At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the naturalist Alexander Wilson was on a trip to Kentucky when he encountered a great migration of passenger pigeons, which he unknowingly believed to be "a tornado that was about to destroy the ground and everything in the house." ”
How did such a large species, a population of up to 5 billion individuals, be eaten extinct by the Americans for more than a hundred years?
A new species that has been discovered for less than a hundred years
Since the seventeenth century, Europe has colonized the North American continent, and many new species have been discovered in the process of colonization, and the passenger pigeon is one of them.
In 1813, the famous American scholar John Audubon observed a migration of passenger pigeons, a huge flock of birds shrouded the sky, the sun disappeared, and the earth was dark. The 16 km pigeon flock flew over it for three whole days. The famous ornithologist of the time exclaimed: "Passenger pigeons will never be wiped out by humans." ”
It is speculated that the number of passenger pigeons in the North American continent before European colonization was about 5 billion, from 5 billion to 0, it only took more than a hundred years, how did all this happen?
Is the demise of the North American passenger pigeon really because it is delicious?
Since colonists entered the North American continent in the seventeenth century, passenger pigeons have been found to be used as ingredients.
But it was not a delicacy as an ingredient, and in the early 19th century passenger pigeons were used as pig feed and slave servant food, transported by caravan to cities in the eastern United States; In 1805, a pair of passenger pigeons in New York State sold for 2 cents. According to the Mint Act of 1792, which is equivalent to spending 12 yuan to buy 600 grams of pigeon meat, before the promotion of industrial breeding, passenger pigeon meat was the only meat accessible to the poor, although it was not delicious, but it was full.
The sheer number of passenger pigeons makes it extremely easy for people to hunt this bird, when the passenger pigeon migrates, several passenger pigeons will fall down by pulling the trigger in the sky, and even burning the grass will have a large number of passenger pigeons being smoked and dropped from the air, but the American way of hunting is not for eating at all, this is a premeditated slaughter, and farms in the northeast of the United States have even held decades of hunting passenger pigeon competitions.
Between 1820 and 1870 , the size of the passenger pigeon population gradually decreased , but its total number remained large. But after 1870, its numbers decreased in an avalanche, and after 1901 no one saw passenger pigeons in the wild.
At the end of the Civil War in the early 19th century, coinciding with industrialization, the advent of railroads and telegraphs brought about qualitative changes in the transportation industry, passenger pigeon meat was transported from the northeast of the North American continent to the United States in all directions, just a small town in New York State sold 1.8 million passenger pigeons in 1851, so the industrial killing lasted for 20 years, and the number of passenger pigeons in North America began to plummet at this time.
People raise their guns to the sky, set up nets to catch them, live passenger pigeons are sewn with eyelids and tied to their legs, and when other pigeons pass by, the hunter pulls a rope to make it flap its wings on the ground, as if the illusion of finding food will attract the pigeons to fall. Adult birds that have just escaped capture are ready to re-nest, or they will be caught by hunters.
These are recorded as just one of the millions of events that took place in that era, when all parts of the passenger pigeon's body were considered medicinal, and blood could cure eye diseases; The stomach wall is ground into powder and can be used to treat malaria; Even feces can treat headaches, stomach pains, drowsiness ... In order to compete for extra money, the whole people turned into hunters and threw themselves into the extermination of passenger pigeons.
On March 22, 1900, on the outskirts of Pike County, Ohio, a 14-year-old young hunter aimed his air gun at a wild passenger pigeon, the last wild passenger pigeon ever seen.
The Song of the River of Feathers
In the 1880s, Charles A. Thompson of the University of Chicago Professor Whitman rescued several passenger pigeons from the wild and bred them artificially, but unfortunately after several generations, the number of passenger pigeons continued to decrease.
In 1898, Professor Whitman gave the few remaining passenger pigeons to the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, hoping to survive the species through professional breeding.
But the last pair of passenger pigeons died after giving birth to a chick and a few unhatched eggs, and people named the chick "Martha".
At noon on 1 september 1914, the breeders came to Martha's loft for a routine inspection and found Martha crouched motionless on top of the loft, staring at the sky in the distance. An hour later, when the keeper returned, "Martha" had collapsed in the cage and stopped breathing.
Another perspective is the extinction of the North American passenger pigeon
It is true that the commercial hunting and consumption of human beings is the most important reason for the extinction of the North American passenger pigeon, but without the influence of this factor, the passenger pigeon will slowly disappear. First of all, the first challenge for passenger pigeons is the loss of habitat, which was 95% forested in Wisconsin in 1600, but less than 30% two hundred years later. Overall, 80% of the passenger pigeon's habitat is deforested.
In other species, this destruction may be able to survive in small tribes, and other species in these destroyed forests have lived in this way, but passenger pigeons cannot. The way North American passenger pigeons survive is that huge groups search for food extensively, and they have never experienced such a big change in their history, and they cannot change their way of living overnight. Coincidentally, when facing the greatest dilemma of survival, he encountered a human shotgun, which accelerated the extinction of the passenger pigeon.
According to research in the journal Science, the genetic diversity of North American passenger pigeons is surprisingly low, and during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, a large number of passenger pigeons carrying genetic diversity were naturally eliminated, and their surviving numbers were not very large. Over the course of 20,000 years, it has evolved and gradually increased to adapt to the environment of the North American continent.
But the hidden flocks of birds over the North American continent are essentially a vulnerable group that is heavily homogenized. When faced with massive reductions in environmental habitat and large-scale hunting, they cannot come up with the right mutations to adapt to the crisis. Their most proud genes ended up being accomplices in their own extinction.
Erected monuments to commemorate the departure of species.
The monument carries our sadness, and we grieve because we can no longer see the dodo running around the island of Mauritius; It's because we can no longer see white sturgeon swimming in the Yangtze River; Because no one has ever seen the phalanx of passenger pigeons charging, which had cleared a path for the March sky and driven the defeated winter out of the forest.
For various reasons, the extinction of species may be inevitable, but it is inevitable to protect the species from this moment on.