A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction

Product Description

In the early nineteenth century 25 to 40 percent of North America’s birds were passenger pigeons, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours or even days. The down beats of their wings would chill the air beneath and create a thundering roar that would drown out all other sound. Feeding flocks would appear as “a blue wave four or five feet high rolling toward you.”John James Audubon, impressed by their speed and agility, said a lone passenger pigeon streaking through the forest “passes like a thought.” How prophetic-for although a billion pigeons crossed the skies 80 miles from Toronto in May of 1860, little more than fifty years later passenger pigeons were extinct. The last of the species, Martha, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.As naturalist Joel Greenberg relates in gripping detail, the pigeons’ propensity to nest, roost, and fly together in vast numbers made them vulnerable to unremitting market and recreational hunting. The spread of railroads and telegraph lines created national markets that allowed the birds to be pursued relentlessly. Passenger pigeons inspired awe in the likes of Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and others, but no serious effort was made to protect the species until it was way too late. Greenberg’s beautifully written story of the passenger pigeon provides a cautionary tale of what happens when species and natural resources are not harvested sustainably.

From Booklist

This book contains many historical accounts of passenger pigeon flocks that darkened whole skies for hours at a time. These staggering numbers also started the bird’s troubles. Pigeon hordes devoured crops and sown seeds, and the sheer weight of millions of pigeons swarming to roost altered whole forests. ­Pigeon-harvesting companies with spring-loaded nets were the most efficient killers, though in a single pigeon rookery, hunters armed with long poles would—in a matter of hours—knock tens of thousands of plump, almost-fledged chicks from their nests. Thousands of tons of dead pigeons were wasted: spoiled on train cars and wagons; thought worthless and dumped on the way to market; ground into fertilizer; fed to hogs; left lying in the field. This book regurgitates too much dry research and too many passing encounters with pigeons, but it does show how few ninteenth-century Americans—including scientists—could even imagine conservation. And when Greenberg mentions the nineteenth-century-type slaughter still going on in our relatively lawless oceans, he shows the insidious nature of greed and apathy. –Dane Carr

Review

“The first major work in sixty years about the most famous extinct species since the dodo…equal parts natural history, elegy, and environmental outcry…A painstaking researcher, Greenberg writes with a naturalist’s curiosity about the birds…Answering even basic questions about the passenger pigeon requires a sort of forensic ornithology, which gives Feathered River Across the Sky an unexpected poignancy at the very points where it is most nature-nerdy.” ―New Yorker“Joel Greenberg has done prodigious research into the literature of the passenger pigeon and lays much of it out in this book. For that effort, all who care about the living world owe him a debt of gratitude.” ―Wall Street Journal“A brilliant, important, haunting and poignant book, A Feathered River Across the Sky… will forever change the way in which you think of pigeons (all birds, really) and about the natural world. The book describes, in vivid detail, forceful narrative and handsome illustrations, the history of this species and the factors that contributed to its extinction.” ―Chicago Tribune“Joel Greenberg, a Chicago-area naturalist and avid birder, has written a new account of the passenger pigeon’s demise, A Feathered River Across the Sky . As Greenberg relates it, in calm, measured prose, it’s a story of unremitting, wanton, continental-scale destru