passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is a well-known blight against us. At one time the most common bird in North America, by the dawn of the twentieth century they barely existed. While every anthropogenic extinction is violent, passenger pigeons feel the most like a murder because we knew what we were doing. We knew exactly what would happen if we continued and we kept going. It’s a passive sort of violence.

They’re called passenger pigeons because of their migrations. They lived most of their lives in the middle north of what is now the United States. When winter began to set in, the pigeons would all flee south of the Mississippi. Pigeons and doves have lived in North America for around 4 million years. We’re not sure when exactly the passenger pigeon broke off into its own distinct species. We don’t have a date of birth. We can’t estimate the life span of the species despite knowing the end date. History is a lot more end dates that beginnings. Beginnings are the hardest to pin down. Endings are glaring.

Humans and passenger pigeons are not natural enemies. Food chains do not operate in those kinds of binaries. Humans have hunted passenger pigeons in North America for a long time. In the winter, Indigenous peoples living south of the Mississippi had the birds as a mainstay in their diets. Food chains do operate on etiquette. Balance requires maintenance. You must always make sure the pigeons come back next year.

Colonisation is not an activity with a great deal of etiquette.

The first known account of Europeans eating passenger pigeons was in 1565. Even at that early stage, the author wrote to boast about the great number he had killed. Hunting them was easy with progressively complex technologies. It must have seemed so easy. In the sixteenth century, we did not think about extinction as we do now. Charles Darwin would not be born for another 244 years. Extinction was most commonly associated with the biblical apocalypse. There is a significant amount to be said on the topic of colonisation and apocalypse. What scale is the threshold for the end of the world? A 2019 study estimated that prior to 1492, the Indigenous population of the Americans was 60 million. By 1600, it was around 6 million. Australia currently has around 28 million people. I should be writing about that, really, but I’m writing about passenger pigeons instead. At one point, there may have been as many as five billion passenger pigeons in the wild. What makes an apocalypse if not scale?

The last known wild passenger pigeon was shot in 1901 in Illinois. There is no benefit of the doubt: the passenger pigeon was widely known to have been endangered, but that could not deter the hunters, at least not enough to make them more careful. The pigeon did not know it should be careful. This was not, however, the official advent of extinction. That would come thirteen years later.

We don’t know Martha’s date of birth, either. Our best guess in 1885. John Curtin, the 14th prime minister of Australia, was also born in 1885, but I don’t think they would ever have been in the same room. She was named after George Washington’s wife, which is very American of her. When Martha was 17, she arrived at the Cincinnati Zoo to be displayed as one of the last surviving passenger pigeons. For some time, she lived with two other males, but by 1910 both had passed. Martha was the passenger pigeon’s endling: the last of her species.

For four years, Martha was the only passenger pigeon in the world. Eventually, her enclosure had to be roped off to prevent visitors from yelling and throwing sand at her and shouting at her to move and sing. The zoo offered a $1000 (US$34,000 today) reward for anyone who could produce a male for her to mate with. The reward was never claimed. In 1914 she was found dead at the bottom of her cage. Ninety-three years later, Alex the grey parrot would be found the same way.

I can’t say for certain if Martha knew she was the last, but I think that in some way she did. At the very least, she knew that there was no one else like her in her immediate surroundings. To a pigeon, it’s the same thing. To a human, it can also be the same thing. The internet—Reddit, really, given Google’s transformation from a search engine into a gaping maw—is mixed on whether pigeons get lonely. A lot of people say it’s unethical to keep just one pigeon, that it will waste away from solitude. Martha was 29 when she died, well above the expected life span for a pigeon. I’ll be 29 in January. Martha couldn't have known she was the last passenger pigeon on earth. She did know, for four years, that there was no one else like her. She knew the humans who gently cradled her, who made her a new, lower perch after she had a stroke. She knew the humans who yelled and threw sand at her and shouted at her to move and sing. She must have known that it all came from the same, strange other species. She didn't know any other passenger pigeons. I don’t know if she thought about the apocalypse as much as I do.

I feel a great, gut-wrenching responsibility to remember Martha, to keep talking about her. When she died, she was the loneliest bird on the planet. We have to believe that it matters to know about Martha. If she doesn’t matter, then what does?

It’s hard to talk about animals without turning them into metaphors. Endlings like Martha, especially, lend themselves to being figurative. It’s hard to confront animals on their own terms. It’s easier to talk about things with the caveat that it’s about something else. Loneliness becomes speakable when I start to talk about Martha. Without her it calcifies into something that can’t fit up my throat. Best to keep talking about the bird.

Recently, there have been efforts to resurrect extinct species, either through cloning or biohacking extant ones. Dire wolves are the most recent news story, though by no means the only one. Despite the fact that we have a cinematic franchise advising us of the ethical and practical concerns of such activities, it remains a topic of great institutional and public interest. I hate it, if you ask me; which no one really did, but you’re reading my newsletter, so in a way you did ask me. It’s false. A new goldfish, identical, in the same algae and ammonia that killed the last one. When this one dies, too, we can always get a new one. One is just as good as the other. The toddler climbs up and peers into the tank, and because it wants to, it believes that it is the same fish. Bacteria divide and grow in the tank. Down in the sewer, the first fish rots.

Martha hasn’t been allowed to rest. Upon dying, she was skinned and stuffed for display; her organs were preserved and remain in the Smithsonian’s archives. She’s consistently been passed between the Smithsonian and the Cincinnati Zoo, where she lived and died. This fate makes me feel ill. Even in death she is on display for us. She is a zombie in her apocalypse of one. It’s hard to bear. For my own comfort, so that I may sleep, I imagine that one day soon, she will be cremated. It’s the absolute least we can do for her, for all of them. For a final time, she will be cradled in the hand of some bleeding-hearted human and lifted to the air. When the wind blows through it will carry her up and out into the sky, dead and alone and free.