Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • May 1, 2013 southern Ontario is said to have been a mile wide and 300 miles long and took 14 hours to pass overhead. Total passenger pigeon numbers were estimated at three to five billion birds. By the first year of the 20th century, the wild passenger pigeon was extinct. The sheer numbers of the passenger pigeons tempted settlers to wasteful slaughter. People turned the annual migration of the flocks into a one-sided war. James Fenimore Cooper, in “The Pioneers,” published in 1823, describes rustic people firing a cannon into the cloud of pigeons and farmers discharging muskets into the flocks as if they were under attack by foreign enemies. Most of the farmers cannot shoot straight and this invites the contempt of Natty Bumppo, making his first literary appearance and later to be known as Hawkeye in “The Last of the Mohicans,” probably America’s first world-class novel. Hawkeye, true to his name, brings down a single passenger pigeon with a single shot of his rifle -- and then stops shooting and makes a startling and prescient speech to Judge Marmaduke, the leader of the community and of the pigeon shoot: “Put an end, Judge, to your clearings. Ain’t the woods His work as well as the pigeons? Use, but don’t waste. Wasn’t the woods made for the beasts and birds to harbor in? And when man wanted their flesh, their skins, or their feathers, there’s the place to seek them. But I’ll go to my hut with my own game, for I wouldn’t touch one of the harmless things that cover the ground here, looking up with their eyes on me, as if they only wanted tongues to say their thoughts.” Passenger pigeons were generally eaten locally and the farmers restricted their kills to what they could cook and eat in their own backyards. But with the railroads, and the growth of eastern cities, passenger pigeons could be shipped to restaurants before the meat went bad. The loss of habitat had started the decline even in Cooper’s time. The introduction of railroads finished the process as the hunting became professional. Market hunters soaked grain in alcohol to get the feeding pigeons drunk, and then netted them. They also used “stool pigeons” to flutter around while tethered and lure the wild pigeons into range. In 1878, Ohio reported 1 billion passenger pigeons killed and shipped. Before most people realized anything was wrong, the passenger pigeon population was so reduced that loss of habitat and natural predation finished off most of the isolated survivors. In 1900, a farm boy in Ohio spotted an unusual bird sitting on the ground. He ran home and borrowed the family shotgun. When he returned, the bird was sitting on the branch of a tree. He shot it. The last wild passenger pigeon anybody ever saw had died. Carolina parakeets that were not shot to protect crops were shot for their feathers. Carolina parakeets could also be domesticated and bred in captivity, and some got a reprieve from the general massacre by being housed in cages and fed by people who actually loved them and were sad when they died. The parakeets made it easy for human predators because the birds often flocked around the first parakeet to be shot, making themselves easy targets. “The only flaw the Carolina parakeets had was that they were beautiful and loyal,” McGrain said. “The feather trade was really a part of their extinction.” “We are the last asteroid to hit the Earth,” his brother-inlaw Andy Stern said bluntly. The heath hens had an even deadlier flaw. They were edible and not that hard to catch. Like the praire chicken, the heath hen would often die in defense of its nest. Colonial labor contracts sometimes specified that laborers who were fed as part of the contract not be given heath hen more than two or three times a week. The attrition and the loss of habitat were more than the species could bear. The New York State Legislature tried to ban the hunting of heath hens as early as 1791, making the heath hen one of the first wild species to be protected by laws. But the laws could not be enforced, and the species was so reduced that reproduction could not cover the losses due to human and animal predation. The Labrador duck, once native to New Jersey, was described as extinct in 1878. The nesting sites, sometimes near industrial areas beside northern rivers, were too vulnerable once humans and feral dogs joined wild predators. The great auk, extinct earlier in Europe, was reported extinct in eastern Canada in 1888. American Indian tribes had hunted the great auk for food for thousands of years, but had barely reduced the population. The auk, a flightless bird, was impossible to catch in the water, where it swam better than a fish, but the auks could only mate on land. The three-foot-tall auk was wiped out by white settlers because the down feathers were desirable for quilts and other insulation. The Canadian Newfoundlanders, incidentally, were extremely supportive of McGrain and Stern when the two Americans showed up at a town meeting, and the Newfoundlanders turned out in crowds to commemorate the double-life size bronze statue of the auk. Conversely, park officials on Martha’s Vineyard turned down the original request for a display site for a statue of the heath hen, but later reconsidered. They did right. Remembering these lost birds, and how they were lost, could be a giant step in making sure mankind does not lose the entire planet. People should not forget that drastic changes in the environment can spell the doom of any species -- including humans. McGrain sums up the message of his campaign: “Forgetting is another form of extinction.” Lady Jane, Incas, Martha, and Booming Ben may be gone, but they are not forgotten. They now have their own monuments set up near the places where their entire species were last seen on Earth thanks to Todd McGrain and his brother-in-law Andy Stern, who created and dedicated bronze statues to their memories. Martha was the world’s last known passenger pigeon. She died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914, just as Europe was plunged into World War I. Shortly before World War I ended, on Feb. 21 of 1918, the last Carolina parakeet died in the same cage as Martha. The Carolina parakeet was named Incas. His mate, Lady Jane, died the year before, the year America entered the war. Booming Ben, the last living heath hen, lived until 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression. At the end of his life, Booming Ben -- a relative of the prairie chicken -- sat atop a tree in Massachusetts and boomed with his throat pouches to attract a female heath hen, but there were no female heath hens. Booming Ben fell silent in 1932, the last of his kind. Todd McGrain, a sculptor who works in bronze, was inspired by the writings of Christopher Cokinos to commemorate these lost bird species and two others, the great auk and the Labrador duck, by creating larger-than-lifesize images of the victim species and having them dedicated at the sites where the species once flourished, and most especially near where the last living specimens were sighted. The actual sculpting, in a style that blends realism with expressionism, was the least of his problems. Some of the locations, including state and national parks, were perhaps embarrassed that more had not been done to preserve creatures that were once plentiful. Eventually, every bronze statue in the Lost Bird Project found a home. The statues are not only memorials to lost species, but hopefully tombstones to an era when natural resources were considered inexhaustible and any moderation of the struggle for profit was considered feeble and downright unAmerican. The harbinger of it all was the American buffalo, or bison, which was reduced in such drastic numbers that the public’s attention was triggered. As many as 60 million bison are said to have roamed the Great Plains and the surrounding woodlands. When the killing stopped, the survivors were so few in number that small herds kept for sentimental reasons by Indians or by white men with Indian wives had to be tapped so that attempts to bring the species back would not be tainted by inbreeding. Bison are now systematically culled -- read here executed -- and people can buy the meat and the hides. My own preference would be to establish bison parks anywhere the rainfall permits and the land is not needed for food production, and deed the surplus bison to the Indian tribes for tourist display or animal husbandry. I always take visitors from outside the area to see the bison and the elk at Van Saun Park in Paramus. The birds that most resembled the bison, not in appearance but in fate, were the passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were so numerous that their passage sometimes threw a cloud over the landscape in the eastern United States and southern Canada. They were the most abundant birds in the world in the early 19th century. One flock in Gone, but not forgotten April 23 was World Book Night, a time when volunteers give out free books at various locations all over the world. This event is run by a non-profit organization that is dedicated to spreading the love of reading, person to person. World Book Night is held on April 23 because that is the birthday of both Shakespeare and Cervantes. This event was launched in England and quickly spread to the USA and other countries. Volunteers must apply and, if chosen, are given 20 books to give out at the location of their choice. There are featured Captain Paul Monton, Lieutenant Brandon Corcoran, Marilyn Farrar-Wagner, and firefighters titles each year, and the Jason Jacoby, Jason Kane, and Dan Steen. “book givers” are able to ing, where firemen actually must burn books rather than choose a book they have read and enjoyed. This year, Marilyn Farrar-Wagner, manager of the put out fires because their society says books ‘give people Ridgewood Veterinary Hospital, applied and was chosen ideas.’ “I thought it would be a great idea to give the books as a book giver. “I wanted to do it in memory of my husband, Robert to Ridgewood’s Fire Department, not only because of the Farrar-Wagner, who recently passed away and worked in irony of the content, but also because my father was a firepublishing as a graphic designer for 36 years,” she said. man for 37 years, and I know how hard their job is. I truly “We both always loved reading, and I chose the book hope the department finds the book entertaining, which is ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ The book is a commentary on free think- the goal of World Book Night.” World Book Night comes to RFD