Last passenger pigeon dies

On September 1, 1914, at about one in the afternoon, a female passenger pigeon named Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was the last known of her species, which had once numbered perhaps three to five billion, among the most abundant birds in the world. The last confirmed wild bird had been shot in Ohio in 1900.¹²

Two forces destroyed the species. The first was commercial hunting. Market hunters used guns, nets and fire to take birds at their huge nesting colonies, and the telegraph and railroads let them follow the flocks and ship barrels of pigeons to eastern cities within a day. At one nesting near Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, tens of thousands of birds were killed a day for months. The second force was the clearing of the eastern forests for farms, which removed the beech and oak nuts that fed the birds. Passenger pigeons laid a single egg and bred only in huge colonies, so when numbers fell, breeding collapsed. The decline took only a few decades, from the 1870s to the 1890s. The extinction shocked many Americans and helped fuel the conservation movement and laws such as the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.¹³