Glimpses of Paradise The Marvel of Massed Animals

IntroductionIn 1919, toward the end of his life, the great American naturalist John Burroughs looked back in sorrow at the vanished world of his youth. Then spring had brought "vast armies of passenger pigeons ... the naked beechwoods would suddenly become blue with them, and vocal with their soft, childlike calls. It was such a spectacle of beauty, of joyous, copious animal life, of fertility in the air and in the wilderness, as to make the heart glad. I have seen the fields and woods fairly inundated for a day or two with these fluttering, piping, blue-and-white hosts. The very air at times seemed suddenly to turn to pigeons."The passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird in the world. Alexander Wilson, the so-called father of American ornithology, estimated in 1808 that one Kentucky flock numbered more than two billion birds. John James Audubon saw such a flock cross the Ohio River in 1813: "The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse."Death waited for the massed pigeons. "The people were all in arms," wrote Audubon. "The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys incessantly shooting ... Multitudes were thus destroyed."Market hunters killed the birds in millions. In 1805, Audubon saw "schooners loaded in bulk with pigeons ... coming in to the wharf at New York," and on New York markets passenger pigeons were sold for one cent a piece.Farmers shot adult pigeons, knocked down nests and chicks, and fattened their hogs with the dying birds. Sport hunters captured passenger pigeons, sewed their eyes shut, and set them out as decoys on small perches to attract other pigeons into shooting range (hence the term "stool pigeon").By the 1880s the marvelous flights of massed pigeons ended, never to be seen again. Ruthlessly hunted, the birds became rare. The last wild passenger pigeon was shot on March 24, 1900. The very last passenger pigeon on earth, a female named Martha, died at the age of 29 at 4 p.m. on September 1, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo. All that remains of these lovely birds that once filled the sky in rushing masses of life are 1,532 skins and mounts in the museums of the world, where their luster has faded.The mighty bison, the largest land animal in North America, nearly shared the passenger pigeon's fate. In herds that numbered 100,000 or more, these animals roamed the infinite prairies. When they migrated south in fall to better grazing grounds, early European explorers saw streams of the mighty animals fill the land from horizon to horizon, and it filled them with awe. The total number of bison was estimated to be about 60 million. They were probably the most numerous large animals on earth."The Bison has several enemies," wrote Audubon, "The worst is, of course, man." Bison formed the basis of existence for the Plains Indians, but since there were few of them and their weapons were simple, they never threatened the vast herds. That changed when white hunters came to the plains. They were dubbed "buffalo butchers," or "hide and tongue hunters," because they took only the skins that could be sold and the bison's tongues, which were prized as a delicacy. They left the carcasses to rot. In 1882 alone, the Northern Pacific Railway carried 200,000 bison hides out of Montana and the Dakotas. The vast herds dwindled, and the Indians starved. "A cold wind blew across the prairies when the last buffalo fell ... a death-wind for my people," mourned the great Indian chief Sitting Bull.A few animals did survive the slaughter. In 1889, William T. Hornaday of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that 835 bison remained, 200 of them in Yellowstone National Park. Legislation was intBruemmer, Fred is the author of 'Glimpses of Paradise The Marvel of Massed Animals' with ISBN 9781552976661 and ISBN 1552976661.