By this time of the year, many of the large flocks of songbirds have come together and have chosen their territories for mating. The annual robin gathering is among the most obvious of these events, but as the sun approaches Aries, the sign that eventually brings in middle spring, a sizable number of songbird species have settled in to nesting and breeding.
This was also the time, one hundred and fifty years ago (and for thousands of years before then) that passenger pigeons began their spring movements, invading different locations of North America's hardwood forests, settling in flocks of hundreds of thousands to feed and breed, ravaging the habitats into which they entered and devastating the new crops that were emerging in nearby farms.
More numerous than any kind of bird ever seen by the American settlers, the birds were killed by the thousands, bodies often stuffed into barrels and shipped east for food and compost and feathers. So innocent were the birds, so oblivious to their hunters, that kills of up to 50,000 birds in a day were not uncommon.
When the great flocks suddenly disappeared at the end of the 19th century, most people didn't even notice. Some people tried to regulate their slaughter, but it was much too late. Taken for granted because of their numbers, the forest habitat destroyed by farms and cities, and the mindless harvest of their bodies put an end to them, and, Martha, the last of the species, died in captivity in the Cincinnati zoo on September 1, 1914.
History continues to repeat itself now with different species. The number of insects has declined througout the world. And while robins and sparrows and blackbirds seem to continue to thrive, their numbers, too, are in decline. All of the forces that eliminated the passenger pigeons are still in place: habitat loss, indifference, ever more effective pesticides and herbicides and ignorance are likely to create other sudden tipping points that will eliminate our most common species.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with more notes on nature and the seasons. In the meantime, appreciate the abundant species that remains, think about how they might possibly be saved.
