Name: Passenger pigeon

Description: -

Reason for being extinct: The passenger pigeon was driven to extinction by uncontrolled commercial hunting for their meat, which was desired by Euro American settlers. The pigeons' migration and nesting behavior made them easy to hunt in large numbers. They were netted, shot and smoked out of trees with sulfur torches. Special firearms, including a forerunner of the machine gun, were used to harvest these birds in quantity. The growth of commercial enterprises was facilitated by the railroads, which made it possible (and profitable) to transport the meat quickly to urban centers. By 1850, several thousand people were employed in the passenger pigeon industry. In New York, one operation processed 18,000 pigeons each day in 1855. In one year in Michigan alone, a billion birds were harvested. Not surprisingly, the population collapsed. Although several thousand birds survived in 1880, it was no longer profitable to hunt them since they were widely dispersed across the continent. Ironically, this scattered distribution, which saved a large core population for the post-commercial era, may also have contributed to the passenger pigeon's ultimate demise by interfering with breeding abilities. The reasons that the passenger pigeon was unable to recover from the period of overexploitation are not fully known. Some species have been able to recover from a low number of individuals, but the passenger pigeon continued to decline and was extinct in the wild by 1900. Captive breeding efforts were not successful and the last individual died in 1914.

Fossils??: None.