So what happened to all those birds? For one thing, the flip side of traveling en masse is that it makes you an easy target. Like falling under a spell or an enchantment, he reported that “the buzz of all those wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” This truly might seem the stuff of fairy tales except for the fact that this observer was John James Audubon, writing in his Ornithological Biography, published in 1831. One observer reported that the “light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse” when a migrating colony of passenger pigeons flew over – and that this went on for three full days as the skies remained filled with the mammoth and continuous flock streaming by. They traveled in enormous flocks that “darkened the skies” and the beating of all those wings was said to have created gusts of wind felt by the onlookers below And their very abundance only added to this mythology. They were large, grayish pigeons, not flashy, not exotic, yet in descriptions, something about them evoked the language of magic or mythology: the golden-green iridescence that lit up their plumage, the surprise of their bright carmine eyes. One lifeless bird signified the extinction of a species whose population once numbered in the billions, perhaps the most abundant bird in the world. She was found on the floor of her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo and that was that – the end of the last known passenger pigeon on the planet. It was just about a hundred years ago that Martha dropped dead.
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