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

by Joel Greenberg

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Birds, Nature, Science, Natural History, Animals

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2014

About the author

Joel Greenberg is a research associate of the Chicago Academy of Sciences Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Field Museum. Author of three books, including A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg has taught natural history courses for the Morton Arboretum, Brookfield Zoo, and Chicago Botanic Garden. He helped spearhead Project Passenger Pigeon to focus attention on human-caused extinctions. Greenberg lives in Westmont, Illinois. Visit his blog at Birdzilla.com.

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the dawn of the 19th century, the continent of North America was so fecund and verdant with wildlife and fauna it beggars description and stymies the imagination. Out of all this bounty, perhaps the most impressive display was the nesting migrations of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). At the time of the Civil War, there may have been as many as 3 billion of these birds in the United States and Canada; said to be the most plentiful bird species on Earth. It could take three days for massive flocks of the birds to pass from horizon to horizon during migrations. The massive avian cloud flyovers turned day into night and the sounds of the singular giant symbiotic life machine made a deafening roar, often compared to the din of a tornado. The sight must have been jaw-dropping and humbling. For many at the time, it could be downright scary, like a Biblical plague. When birds settled into an area to breed and nest, their sheer weight and volume could leave behind staggering damage to trees and the landscape. On the map, they could take up areas as large as small states. One nesting of millions of birds in Pennsylvania in 1870 filled up the forest in a strip 40 miles long and up to two miles wide. Such miles-long nestings numbering millions continued up into the 1880s, but by 1890, the passenger pigeon had all but vanished. By the end of the century, a nesting of a dozen or less would be a rare sight. And even then, the first response of most people to the sight would be to shoot first, rather than wonder. By the time people began to show concern for any of this, it was too late.

Despite attempts to allay human blame for this by some apologists, author Joel Greenberg unequivocally declares that people were to blame, and he goes through the arguments and facts as to why and how. We did this. And that's why no one will see bird flocks of this impressive enormity in the sky ever again.

The story of the passenger pigeon as told in Greenberg's book offers an alternate history of the United States you never learned in school. It's just as much a story of industrialization, technology and human mobility as much as it is a tale of the pigeon. Harvesting of the pigeon was once exclusively a Native American activity. The first Americans didn't take more than they needed for sustenance. As white settlers moved in and pushed into the Midwest and West, hunting pigeons was largely a family or local enterprise affair. Some of the slaughters could be heedlessly wasteful, but not extinction level. But once the large commercial interests moved in, as rail tracks and telegraph lines began to cover all parts of the country, and rapacious moneymakers could be alerted to the sites of nestings, it was over. A bird sitting in a marsh on the Midwestern Plains could be killed, stuffed in a barrel and sent by railcar in a couple of days to New York City for the delectation of a diner at Delmonico's. The birds were doomed.

Greenberg's book is the first popular-audience-level book written on the passenger pigeon in decades I've gleaned. I can't possibly imagine that any of the others are as scrupulously researched and complete. It's a tour-de-force of historical research, and at its powerful best is a shattering account of the merciless, relentless and cruel destruction of an entire species. The book begins, and ends, rather dryly; and the writing often lacks oomph. The matter-of-fact presentation and litany of facts can become wearying and hardgoing for some readers. Sometimes one feels as though the wind was taken out of the sails. Greenberg's cool-headed academic bent keeps things from getting too emotional or poetical, even though at times I wanted to hear a philosophical Aldo Leopold-like voice in this story, something to give the extinction some meaning beyond the merely categorical. But, Greenberg is wise, even noting that one has to be careful to not overlay one's own contemporary sensibilities onto the thinking and needs of people in their own times. Righteous indignation can hinder understanding. I can come to my own conclusions, which mirror his facts, that this is a cautionary tale of the rapaciousness of unchecked capitalism; that is self evident.

For many settlers at the time, the passenger pigeon was a source of cheap and easily available food for their families, or a seasonal side-business that made subsistence survival possible. It is wrong to judge these people too harshly. By the time the slaughters reached commercial, charnal-house proportions, though, it becomes hard to justify the downright gleeful and giddying "pigeon mania" that gripped people and led them into killing en masse for pleasure and obscene profit. But again, people back then knew nothing of biodiversity loss or unchecked loss of habitat.

A mass nesting could take on a party atmosphere. Pigeon boom towns arose over night in anticipation of the killing orgies. One of the most notorious happened in Wisconsin in 1871, when a passenger pigeon roosting covering 850 square miles brought 100,000 human spectators and hunters from all over the continent to the spectacle. As one witness described the preparation:

“Had a stranger looked on to the street in town on Friday night he would have thought it about war time, or soon after an Indian scare or massacre. Young men and old, women and children, fathers, sons and husbands, and other men had a gun or wanted to borrow one. Clerks and proprietors were pouring out shot like hail in the March equinox.”

Greenberg writes that "one merchant in Sparta sold sixteen tons of shot over the season, and the same amount of powder. This amounted to about 512,000 rounds."

A witness described the scene once the enfilade commenced:
“Hundreds, yes thousands, dropped into the open fields below … The slaughter was terrible beyond any description. Our guns became so hot by rapid discharges, we were afraid to load them. Then while waiting for them to cool, lying on the damp leaves, we used, those of us who had [them], pistols, while others threw clubs, seldom if ever, failing to bring down some of the passing flocks … Below the scene was truly pitiable..”

At the end of this orgiastic slaughter well over a million birds lay dead. And this was just one of many such hunting forays during those decades. For a bird that only laid one egg at a time, to be constantly killed or interrupted in breeding, to the point of becoming too skittish to stay in one place long lest humans intervene, it's not hard to see how a whole species could disappear in the span of one human generation. And yet, it's still depressing as hell and tragic as can be.

I'm giving this five stars for succeeding at what it set out to do, which is be the best book out there on a chapter of our history that should be better known and understood, and as a primer in literature on the environment. If you can make it past the first couple of dullish chapters, you might find this becoming a page turner.

EG/KR@KY 2021

[Peggy Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book reminded me of a story Mark Twain used to tell, which Hal Holbrook used in his stage interpretation. Twain was in church one Sunday(or at least so he claims) listening to a missionary preacher just returned from the South Seas. As he describes the hardships of the people there and the fine work of the missionaries, Twain decides he will put five dollars in the basket when it is passed. The missionary then describes the schools and homes they have built for the natives, and Twain ups his planned donation to ten dollars. The missionary goes on for several more minutes, and Twain begins to weary. Beginning to be a bit bored by all of it, he reduces his donation to five dollars. Missionary goes on for 10 more minutes, and Twains donation goes back down to a dollar. 10 more minutes and it's $.50. Well, the missionary continues for another half an hour and as Twain reports, when the basket is passed he takes out a dollar! That's how I began to feel reading this book. Greenberg leaves out absolutely no detail about the natural history, culinary delights, habits, appearance, and disappearance of the passenger pigeon. We read this for bookclub and most of the members said they cast it aside in exasperation! I did not do that because the plight of the passenger pigeon is so sad and of such interest to me that I followed it to the end. The bitter end! In spite of the excruciating detail, I was drawn in the sadness of the story.

[John Caviglia · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the passenger pigeon was anything, it was numerous … so much so that they were counted by the very roughest approximation. The largest flock was probably recorded in Fort Mississauga, Ontario in 1860, by Major Ross King, an English hunter and naturalist, who estimated that the flock passing over him for about fourteen hours was about 300 miles long, and about a mile wide. And for days afterward the stragglers passed over, in huge but diminished numbers. Assigning two birds per square yard and a speed of sixty miles an hour to this sighting a certain Schorger estimated the flock to contain 3,71,120, 000 pigeons!

The pigeons congregated in flocks large enough to destroy the trees they perched in. A nesting site was estimated to be 860 square miles. The pigeons were a force of nature, compared to whirlwinds and cyclones, the plagues of Egypt. In the words of Aldo Leopold: "The pigeon was no mere bird, he was a biological storm…. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling burst of life."

The pigeons were thought to be endless in number, and men killed them as if they were, in every conceivable way—with guns, blunt arrows, nets and stones. They knocked them down from trees with poles. They knocked them out of the sky with rakes and anything they could pick up, when they flew low. With “stool pigeons” they lured them into traps….

The Indians only killed the squabs, leaving the mature birds to nest again. But the white man killed them all, and in great quantity. The meat was so bountiful that two pence bought a dozen, sometimes so bountiful that pigeons were used to fertilize the fields, or simply thrown away to rot. Millions upon millions died, the slaughter accelerating as the railroad and the telegraph came into use. Flocks were reported by telegraph, and the “hunters” boarded trains taking them to the slaughter. The killing became a business, the pigeons taken to market by rail…. 1878 was the last great nesting. And in 1914 the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.

Thanks to First Reads for this book, for Greenberg tells the sad tale well, and probably definitively, amassing a wealth of fact and fascinating detail (I leave it to you to find out what a “stool pigeon” actually was), and including appendices that he calls A Passenger Pigeon Miscellany to supplement his text. A Feathered River definitely captured and kept my attention, and though its thoroughness deserves five stars, the very exhaustiveness at times slows the narrative. Definitely recommended for students of natural history, the natural world in this case interfacing with man’s apocalyptic urge to kill, for in the last analysis, the human race drives the plot of this tragedy.

[Andree Sanborn · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Avery's A Message from Martha: The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and Its Relevance Today , I felt some guilt, but not that much, about the human obliteration of the passenger pigeon. After all, he reasoned, they couldn't possibly survive in those numbers today with the fragmented habitat and loss of mast.

But now, after reading Greenberg's thoroughly researched and detailed work, my guilt (by association with humans) overwhelmed me. We all know how cruel humans can be; but the extent of Americans' intent to destroy these birds overwhelmed me.

This is an excellent book. Greenberg's writing is engaging and his thoroughness appeals to someone like me, who will compulsively follow a topic into all areas. I watched videos, viewed art online, listened to 19th century music that mentioned the pigeons, studied maps ancient and modern, and essentially immersed myself in the pigeon lore on the Internet.

This book was an experience, not just a "read." Unfortunately, I think most people need to experience this so that we don't repeat history (which we seem to be doing in spite of ourselves and people like Greenberg who continue to tell us these stories and are ignored.) Mr. Avery soft-pedaled this extinction, which comforted. Mr. Greenberg hit me over the head with an anvil. We need Greenberg's reality.

[Roger Morgan-Grenville · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing and tragic story, from which modern 'us' has so much to learn, not least is the vulnerability of even the most numerous species in the new Anthropocene Age. Very detailed in a world where sometimes, less is more.

[mippers · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh how i wish i lived in the time when 1700s boston was caked in the shit of a billion pigeons,,,,,

[J.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book saddened and depressed me. Still, I feel it should be required reading in all our schools. There are valuable lessons here for all of us.

This book is about the demise of the passenger pigeons, once the most abundant bird on the North American continent, possibly on the planet. Once its migration flights were so immense they would block out the sun for hours, sometimes for days. Audubon recorded one that eclipsed the sun for three days. Its numbers were estimated in the billions when Europeans first reached these shores.

Warnings were broached as early as the 18th century. Yet man managed to drive these incredible creatures to extinction in a mere 40 years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the 19th century.

The hardwood forests of my home state of Pennsylvania were one of their prime nesting sites. Though they are long gone from our forests, Greenburg explains how their absence is still affecting the ecosystem.

In 10 chapters and several appendixes he recounts the life cycle of the birds, their relationship to those who came in contact with them, the meager too-late efforts to save them and their final extinction.

There was, of course, more than one cause. But the largest role was played by man in market hunting and just bloody thoughtlessness.

Man is a greedy, callous creature.

Why that should surprise me, I don’t know. Since we attach so little value to the lives of our fellow humans, it shouldn’t be surprising we’d have so little remorse over the destruction of something so simple as a bird.

Some of a religious bent might argue God gave man dominion over the beasts. I doubt the Creator intended that to mean treating any creature with cold-blooded indifference.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

No for the casual reader, this volume packs a lot of cultural and social history in with its natural history. In the text this can create long passages where the connection of the person under discussion to Passenger Pigeons isn't clear until pages later when it turns out that they wrote a journal entry, or a symphony. Similarly, the book is entirely catholic in its selection of topics, seeking to be comprehensive over narrative. So in between the long biographical sections there are tiny interstitial mentions of this person or that who saw a pigeon flock once, or heard of one second hand clumped into a paragraph or two with several others with a similar story.

This encyclopedic scope is certainly the most fatiguing aspect of the book, but it is also the book's greatest strength. Greenberg is striving for a single volume overview of what the pigeon meant to America, and what its extinction tells us about ourselves and our approach to nature. What can read like digressions and repeated hypothetical statements are really Greenberg pointing out that because none of these choices were made the collapse of this keystone species into extinction proceeded almost without pause or notice. That we need to do better.

As a stylist Greenberg is clunky and a little chaotic, but the book has its charms. It is certainly an authoritative text on the extinction of species that demonstrates how we humans can forget an event of this magnitude so easily that occurred only a century ago.

[Danielle T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joel Greenberg does a considerable amount of research to publish this timely reminder in the year of the 100th anniversary of Martha's death at the Cincinnati Zoo. It's the first passenger pigeon book aimed at a general audience since 1955. Chapters are organized in chronological order (though some are focused on products and the 'pigeontown' boomtowns that popped up during nestings). I still can't fathom flocks of *billions* crossing the sky- must have been like a feathery, poopy eclipse.

This book seems to be part of Project Passenger Pigeon, which seeks awareness and commemoration of this once great bird, and prevention of future mass exterminations by humans. While they do reference the Long Now Foundation once, I do wish there was more reference to Ben Novak's genomics project with passenger pigeons (maybe Greenberg was too close to publication date, or perhaps it didn't fit in the historical narrative).

[Grrlscientist · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hundred years ago today, the last passenger pigeon, a captive-bred adult named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Since we knew that she was the last of her kind, her body was frozen into a 300-pound block of ice before she was shipped by train to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned, dissected and preserved as a mount.

Although none of the people who knew these birds are alive today, we can still learn more about this iconic bird through their writings and photographs, thanks to Joel Greenberg’s book, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction [Bloomsbury USA, 2014]. Written by a research associate at the Field Museum and the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and co-founder of Project Passenger Pigeon, this comprehensive book meticulously documents much that is known about this iconic bird.

The extinct passenger pigeon or wild pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, was a sleek handsome bird with a pointed tail and elongated wings, resembling the much smaller mourning dove. Adult males had slaty blue-grey upper-parts with a copper-coloured breast and shimmering iridescent plumage that changed colours from royal blue to emerald green under changing light conditions. Adult females wore more subdued plumage, whilst the juveniles, which resembled females, were paler with white spots on their wings.

Passenger pigeons were gregarious, roosting and nesting in such prodigious numbers that their combined weight sometimes uprooted entire trees or broke off branches. Most of the birds nested in tremendous colonies covering hundreds of thousands of acres and containing many millions, possibly billions, of birds. Whether these large flocks were an essential component for breeding to occur is uncertain since they also nested in small groups or even as solitary pairs in the wild, and they bred readily in aviaries.

Wild pigeons ate a varied diet. They favoured the seasonal crop of nuts (“mast”) produced by deciduous trees, especially oaks, but they also consumed corn, buckwheat and other cereal crops planted by farmers, and they ate worms and insects, especially when raising young.

Passenger pigeons were the most numerous birds in North America, and may have been the most numerous bird on the planet. Experts estimate that their population numbered somewhere between three and five billion during the early- to mid-1800s.

These elegant birds were built for speed and endurance. In historical times, they wandered low over the continent’s landscape in immense flocks, darkening the sky for days. According to written descriptions inspired by these birds, it’s easy to believe that if passenger pigeons were alive today, they would have routinely stopped all air traffic for days across large parts of North America.

History suggests that few things stimulate human ingenuity more than the challenge of killing. This is most evident when the intended targets are other human beings, for no other organism poses anywhere near the same severity of threat. But as a species, we are no slackers even when the adversary is an eighteen-inch-long bird. Safe only when they rose above high enough to exceed the range of weaponry, the passenger pigeons otherwise lived a gauntlet whereby they became the targets of an arsenal that employed an amazing array of instruments. [p. 91]

Subsistence hunting of passenger pigeons was not sufficient. Instead, men, women and children often traveled long distances, gathering where ever the passenger pigeons congregated, and the birds were massacred by the hundreds and by the thousands — in numbers far greater than anyone could possibly consume — for simple amusement. Males, females and their eggs and chicks (squabs) were all targeted indiscriminately. After the pigeons were dead, they were eaten or their feathers were used to stuff pillows or feather beds, they were dressed for sale and shipped by train or carts to nearby cities, they were fed to swine or simply left to rot — not unlike the fate of millions of American bison, for example.

Wild pigeons were slaughtered using any conceivable sort of weapon, ranging from bare hands or clubs to canons, from torching the birds whilst they slept in their nests or roosts at night to simply biting their heads off. Entire competitions were designed to celebrate the greatest number of pigeons killed by a single shotgun blast or that were killed by one person within a specific span of time. Large social events and tournaments were held where thousands of wild pigeons were jammed into crates and transported by train to large cities like New York. There, they become trap shooting targets for rich and powerful gentlemen, whilst cheering mobs gambled on who might be the eventual winner. Although viewed as a sport, these events amounted to nothing more than firing squads where the wild pigeons, debilitated by lack of food and water for days, were shot moments after release.

But at least some pigeons escaped or managed to recover from their wounds. According to one anonymous pigeon hunter in the state of Wisconsin, a close examination of his pigeon carcasses revealed “a host of wounds from ‘previous assaults’: ‘broken and disjointed legs; bills that had been shot half away and grown curiously out again; missing toes or even a whole leg; and even healed up breast wounds.’” (p. 97)

The passenger pigeons’ resilience and tremendous numbers allowed this bloodshed to continue unabated for fifty years. But in the end, the carnage came to an abrupt halt because the vast flocks of wild pigeons disappeared. Yet even at the end of the 1800s — and despite their rarity — the last few wild pigeons were still being singled out whilst feeding in the company of flocks of other avian species or they were shot out of the sky and, once again, their bodies were typically discarded, or were occasionally made into mounts or eaten.

The final chapters of Mr Greenberg’s book record the last few breeding attempts made by passenger pigeons across the eastern United States and Southeastern Canada. Reading this roll call to extinction is almost like hearing the tolling of a distant bell marking a funeral, except this bell tolls for the loss of an entire nation, it documents the indefensible, deliberate decimation of an entire species that will never again grace this planet.

Even as people knew these birds were disappearing, the persecutions intensified, and several million pigeons were recorded as being slaughtered and shipped to cities from their final mass nesting attempts during their last decade on Earth. This of course leaves one to wonder how many additional deaths went unrecorded because no one bothered to collect the dead birds? And the numbers of live birds shipped to trap shoots in those final years remained undocumented, as well.

But even in the last few years of their existence, these birds often died in vain: upon reaching the cities, it was not uncommon for barrels of pigeons to be discarded as unfit for human consumption.

This carnage left just a few dozen passenger pigeons alive in private aviaries and zoos. The last one of them all, named Martha, was a captive-bred bird with a fuzzy history who resided at the Cincinnati Zoo. First, she was part of a small group, but they died one by one until Martha was the last living representative of her species. But even during the last four years of her life, the ageing Martha was sometimes harassed by the public, who gathered outside her aviary on Sundays to throw sand at her so she would move around the enclosure.

This compendium, which clearly is a labour of love, took four years to investigate and write. It is meticulously researched and thoroughly cited, containing a readable 34-page appendix of miscellany, 16 pages of chapter notes, a 14-page bibliography and a 15-page index. The index’s usefulness is limited to listing only the names of people and places, instead of additional terms that would probably interest most readers, terms such as pets, zoos, captive breeding or aviculture, especially since all these topics were mentioned in the book, even if only briefly.

The book includes numerous black-and-white photographs, drawings and a few maps embedded within the text and a special insert with full-colour illustrations — paintings, photographs, sketches and other historical materials that add context to this shameful story.

The writing is generally pedestrian although it sometimes can be sardonic or personable. Nevertheless, the considerable effort required to hunt down and read the historical materials, some of which are newly brought to light so this book could be written in the first place, makes this the most important document about the passenger pigeon to be published since A. W. Shorger’s monograph, The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction (1955). I suspect that the author’s dedication came at a price: I can barely imagine the huge emotional toll that researching and writing this book must have taken on Mr Greenberg.

A Feathered River Across the Sky is critically valuable as a reference work and as a historical document. This chronicle is a powerful record of the extinction of a species at the hands of man and for this reason alone, it is our responsibility to read this book. Further, it serves as a quietly damning reflection of our outrageous hubris and arrogance, and the myriad destructive choices that we make as individuals, as a culture and as a species.


NOTE: Originally published at The Guardian on 1 September 2014.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Feathered River Across the Sky establishes, within the first three pages, the physical beauty—aesthetic and athletic—of the passenger pigeon, and then, having given the reader a proper appreciation for the bird, begins the story of its extinction. The book is a vivid rendering of a tragedy that paints just as precise a portrait of humans as of pigeons. There's not much complexity to the narrative as far as humans go, despite the complexity of factors behind it; mankind had a use for something, exhausted its supply, and moved on to other things. Greenberg depicts enthralled crowds who can't help but attempt to kill pigeons when they see them, then documents the literal and figurative lengths people went to when they got tired of waiting for pigeons to come to them, then notes the systems devised to sell pigeons by those who killed pigeons in numbers well beyond those that they could use, then shows the professional hunters' systematic perpetuation of their denial of the diminishing numbers of birds, and finally shows how people's insatiable desire for the pigeons was transformed into their attempts to garner the final specimen, potentially hastening the by-then inevitable extinction.

All this sums to an elemental, almost parable-like, story of greed and violence that are never reduced, only redirected. Due to this simplicity, and the plain trajectory from a population of billions to one of zero, Greenberg doesn't need to exert himself fitting his research to a particular through-line. Instead of producing a work dependent on a (potentially speculative) specific story he wishes to tell, he produces the kind of nonfiction that I often prefer (if only because it comes through as a torrent of facts without much subjective filler or framing), which is to say, a chronologically-ordered of endlessly fascinating facts, anecdotes, and observations. Underneath the general arc from a thriving population to extinction, Greenberg groups his findings into categories that match to the chapters, and then subcategories that make up various sections of those chapters.

There's an appendix which I found quite enjoyable in which Greenberg compiles tidbits of information that didn't fit elsewhere, again grouped together appropriately. He notes depictions of the passenger pigeon in feature films, popular music and folk songs, the locations of existent taxidermized passenger pigeon, the rare examples of photographs of dead or live pigeons (a telltale sign of the way the birds were taken utterly for granted), and uses of metaphors involving the passenger pigeon in literary works, among many other bits of trivia. It made me realize that the whole book almost feels like an appendix in a way (I mean this as a good thing!), the only difference being the more trivial, but no less fascinating, nature of the entries in the actual appendix; if the basic plight of the passenger pigeon is well-known, it wasn't known to me in anywhere near the level of absorbing detail provided in this book, a degree of depth of exploration allowed by the narrowness of the focus on one species.

There is page after page of captivating scientific details such as how passenger pigeons' mouths adapted to swallow acorns whole, ecological interactions of the pigeons with various flora and fauna, the beliefs of various cultural traditions regarding the pigeons, culinary insights including various known preparations for eating, intricate methods of transportation over extensive networks including different modes to get pigeons from far-flung nesting sites to major urban markets, and accounts of various tall tales involving pigeons. There are many awe-inspiring accounts of the nearly unimaginable sheer physical force of the flocks of pigeons darkening the sky, bending trees to the ground, and drowning out voices for hours with the roar of their passing. There are hard-to-read accounts of cruelty, from the mass killing of baby pigeons by hand to the idea to set off fireworks into a flock, out of curiosity. Greenberg tells us enough about the specifics of the data he's referencing that can be deduced from sites (such as the number of individual pigeons represented by a number of bones at site) to suggest the scientific processes used to determine said numbers, and also notes failures, mistakes, and faulty assumptions of past researchers to help clarify the refinement of certain ideas.

The overall bleakness not of tone so much as of the reality to which the details accumulate is lightened by Greenberg's occasionally-inserted wryness; he at one point invokes Vonnegut's "So it goes" rather pleasingly. He includes some humorous contemporaneous quotes as well, including a delightful piece of satire featured in the New York Times, refuting a defense of pigeon-shooting as a benefit to national security preparedness in a manner that reminds of "A Modest Proposal." It also is somewhat of a comfort to continually realize throughout that historians and ethnologists were somewhat more successful in their efforts to keep the history of the passenger pigeon alive than were the proto-conservationists who too late began their efforts to save the species.

[Chloe Ng · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm only a little bit obsessed with passenger pigeons :P

[Paulette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an astounding and detailed accounting of the fate of the passenger pigeon, birds that once flew across the sky in such quantity that the sun would be blocked for an hour as they traveled across the sky. It is a grim true story of how human beings for purposes of greed, gluttony, and the "joy" of killing things wiped out an entire species of bird without leaving anything for future scientists and environmentalists to work with, with the exception of Martha, the last documented passenger pigeon sitting stuffed at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. The author, Joel Greenberg, does not hide his disgust with human behavior. "History suggests that few things stimulate human ingenuity more than the challenge of killing. This is most evident when the intended targets are other human beings, for no other organism poses anywhere near the severity of threat. But as a species, we are slackers even when the adversary is an eighteen-inch-long bird," he writes at the beginning of Chapter 5. Be forewarned: the details in chapters 5 and 6 are gruesome and lead to the obvious conclusion that in the 19th century human beings behaved like savages (I will leave it up to future readers to decide whether or not we have improved in the 20th and 21st centuries.)

One of the highlights of the book is the appendix, which contains passenger pigeon miscellany; novels and poems with themes built around the passenger pigeon; art, sculpture; even economists have used the history of the passenger pigeons to illustrate that the market system does not preven extinction. He even includes a section called "Conservation Measures: Way too little Way too Late."

Some may read this book and conclude that this couldn't happen today, we know better, surely we will act to prevent such a tragic eradication of a species. And it is true, there are many many people in the world fighting for the survival of most species. But extinction looms even now for many. Case in point, which Greenberg mentions at the end of his book, the ongoing white nose fungus disease which is ravaging the bat population. Three of the bat species affected by this disease were already endangered when this white nose syndrome (WNS) reared its ugly head. Greenberg cites a Boston University professor, Thomas Kunz, who compared the reduction of the bat population to that of the passenger pigeon. Since 2006 when this disease first was uncovered and through 2014, when A FEATHERED RIVER ACROSS THE SKY was copyrighted, 6 million of 9 species of bats died from WNS. One can only wonder how many more bats have died since then.

Lessons can be learned from this book and I hope everyone gets the opportunity to read this. If we don't learn from manmade tragedies like the annihilation of the passenger pigeon, then it is only a matter of time before humankind becomes extinct. Perhaps the rest of the planet will be grateful for that.



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[Bill Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a boy, I kept a coop of 25 pigeons. I would sit with them hours on end commuting with them at the peak of my Saint Francis phase.

I read and knew all about the hordes of Passenger Pigeons that blackened our skies until the late 19th century. My heart ached for the lonely death of Martha the last of the species that died in 1914. Her mate, George (get it--they named the pair George and Martha?) years earlier.

Like so many books, "River" is flawed but compelling. It is overflowing with descriptions of the flocks of millions and millions of birds. Unfortunately, there is not a good understanding of what caused the collapse of the species.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read - lots of science and history and especially cultural history, without being too academic or too dumbed-down. Such a sad subject, of course, and the melancholy comes through in the writing. Definitely understand more about what happened and the likely reasons why. Recommended to those who enjoy natural history and especially histories that show the idiocy of humans.

[Tyler Hartford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very well researched - but (as I told my wife) I got to the middle and realized I had just spent quite a chunk of time reading about the ways, reasons, locations of killing pigeons. Nothing much else. There were some tidbits of natural science in there, but basically it was a river of billions of facts regarding ways a pigeon could die.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like a great roiling and ponderous flock of facts, this book took four days to pass overhead and blotted out the sun.

[Steven Meyers · Rating 3 out of 5]

“BYE BYE BIRDIES”

“At the time that Europeans first arrived in North America, passenger pigeons likely numbered anywhere from three to five billion.” I read that sentence three times because I thought I had read it wrong. Three to five BILLION passenger pigeons driven to near extinction in about 40 years (1860-1900.) Flocks during migration would fill the sky for hours or days, even blocking out the sun. Mercy, the pigeon poop raining down on the land and people must’ve been a God’s wrath, biblical sort of scene. Mr. Greenberg does cover the effects of so much waste littering areas where the passenger pigeon migrated. The book was published in 2014.

The author is thorough in his explanation of the passenger pigeons’ history and presents what limited information we do have about the bygone bird. The passenger pigeon went extinct before humans developed the technological and scientific means to study and save them. It should come as no surprise that Mr. Greenberg keeps the subject matter grounded in evolution. He collects the old data about their mating habits, nesting, and migration territory, as well as the elements that kept the pigeons’ population in check such as predators, landscapes, adverse weather, and food constraints. Some of the info is contradictory and he makes efforts to clarify the likely results. Sometimes, however, he admits answers will remain inconclusive. ‘A Feathered River Across the Sky’ includes plenty of interesting stories about Native Americans and European immigrants witnessing the passenger pigeons. The birds were a popular food source, especially the squabs (a young unfledged pigeon.) Naturally, they became part of Native American religious symbolism and mythmaking, and superstitious white settlers viewed the large flocks of pigeons as bad omens that they correlated with disease outbreaks or personal hardships. Mr. Greenberg does a fine job explaining how the passenger pigeons were an integral part of the continent’s ecosystem and its demise affected humans, animals, insects, parasites, and other wildlife. Technology such as railway expansion and the telegraph helped speed up the bird’s demise.

There are two environmental belief systems still at play in the United States. One mindset embraces the notion that nature is solely here for humans to exploit anyway they see fit. The second attitude is that nature’s resources should be conserved for the future. Back before the mid-1900s, the predominant thinking was the former statement. Conservation was viewed by most citizens as loony as the belief that M&M candies grow on bushes. The examples of massive butchery are relentless and overwhelming. I had a feeling of belated schadenfreude while reading about A-hole citizens pulling a Dick Cheney and shooting their compatriots during unnecessary pigeon killing sprees. ‘A Feathered River Across the Sky’ includes plenty of side stories that are tenuously related to the passenger pigeon. The author’s focus is so thorough that he even recounts the very last passenger pigeons held in captivity and the few measly efforts to save the species. It was much, much too late. The book concludes with an argument about the value of biodiversity. It also includes 16 pages of color photos and illustrations as well as black-and-white graphs and photos sprinkled throughout it. The appendix skims topics such as inadequate conservation attempts to save the passenger pigeon, cloning its return, taxidermy collections, the economics behind the pigeons demise, and various arts that centered on the bird.

While I found Mr. Greenberg’s dedication to the subject matter admirable, it was just too much needless death for me. It became deeply depressing and monotonous. There is a broader message in ‘A Feathered River Across the Sky’ about the interconnectedness of living things on the planet. What is very clear is that humans wiped out the pigeon for profit and senseless bloodlust. Humans had valid reasons for using the bird as a food source and minimizing their destructive effects on farm crops, but we went waaaaaay overboard. Humans’ rapacious reckless nature is on full display and was simply too much for me. If you have a macabre fixation, boy oh boy, ‘A Feathered River Across the Sky’ fits the bill.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is everything you ever wanted to know about passenger pigeons and everything you didn't know you wanted to know about passenger pigeons and more. It is clearly the most important collection of information about passenger pigeons ever written. Not only does it discuss the known scientific facts, but it ties them to the very history of our nation and to our future and who we are and how we deal with our natural resources as Americans. There is something here for everyone be they birders, biologists, historians, artists or politicians. It is full of many photos of the people mentioned in the book, artwork in which passenger pigeons are the subject, and photos of actual passenger pigeons, mostly those used as stool pigeons. Definitely read Appendix A which is a lesson in how important these birds once were to the American life and how they still live on in pop culture today, everything from operas to poetry to urban legends. The section on novels in Appendix A is surely an incomplete listing as I could immediately think of James Fennimore Cooper's "The Pioneers" from 1823 and the more modern "The Plague of Doves" by Louise Erdrich. I learned a lot and will forever wonder how a flight of passenger pigeons compares in noise to 50,000 snow geese taking off or in passage to a murmuration of starlings.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more devastating texts I have read, it is difficult to fully grasp just how profound an extinction occurred when the great passenger pigeon flocks disappeared in the latter 19th century. These birds were endemic to the eastern half of the United States and Canada and were so great in number that they could darken the daytime sky for a full week.

Though I appreciate the lessons we must take from the pigeon’s disappearance related to human molestation of the earth, what is most striking to me is the way in which these birds were a fundamental part of life and makes me consider some of the historical events I have learned of through my life in a different way. Were passenger pigeons a part of any Revolutionary or Civil War conflicts? Did the provide food for soldiers? A period of awe at their sheer breadth and number?

[Richard Quigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting, although sad and depressing. It is like a horror story. Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions and, through human cruelty, they became extinct. The people of the early 1900s not only destroyed these beautiful birds, but also robbed future generations of the privilege of ever seeing one.
The only positive note was that the wanton slaughter was so appalling that it helped launch an environmental movement.
The author tells the story in a vivid manner. We hope that people have learned to be more kind and appreciate what we have. Sadly, when we se ongoing wars and environmental destruction, we realize that we have a long way to go to achieve “humanity”. As the song says “don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”.
Please read this book.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a 207-page book, and it took me two weeks to read it. Generally, that's not a good sign. It shows that I wasn't as motivated to pick it up and read it, and was more inclined to do something else instead.

The fate of the passenger pigeons is a subject that I'm interested in, but perhaps I didn't need as much detail as this book provides. At times, it's an endless progression detailing one mass slaughter after another and they all start to blend together. There are some anecdotes among the many slaughter recaps that are interesting, as are the final chapters, examining some of the nuances that may have contributed to the extinction (beyond the obvious one, the repeated mass slaughters).

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book to supplement my understanding of Passenger Pigeon biology ahead of lecturing about them in Population Ecology, and I found it to be quite useful. I do however wish that I hadn't gotten the audio version as there were several useful pull quotes or facts that I would have liked to have a time to either think more about, or to integrate into my lectures. While the book was informative, I did find it somewhat repetitive in parts. And while I wouldn't want the information to not be included, I think a more rigorous editing would have helped with the overall flow. That being said, though I'm extremely glad I got this book as it is a compelling look at an ecological disaster of our own doing.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't finish this work, which is reflected in the "star" rating.

Why didn't I finish it?

While the author clearly did a great deal of in-depth research he couldn't find a way to present it in a narrative fashion. To me, the text seemed to be a series of paragraph length bullet points of the information he uncovered during his research. There didn't seem to be a narrative flow and that made it difficult for me to continue reading.

On the other hand, I doubt there is another work with this level of research into the passenger pigeon in North America. If a reader is willing to slog through the prose they will be rewarded. I am not that reader.

[Barbara Carder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scratch what you think you might know about the extinction of the North American Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius. It is a true mysterious phenomenon which Greenberg has captured in this amazing book. So many 'facts' revealed, I completely changed my perspective on the natural history he revealed. We really don't know that much as 'modern 21st century' denizens. We need to REVIEW our own history. A must-read.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I forgot I had taken this book out of the library a previous time — and re-discovered it is way too depressing and upsetting to read. The grotesque hunting of this abundant and beautiful bird into extinction is horrific — much of the slaughter took place in Michigan, too. Some of the illustrations are wonderful; the paintings that passenger pigeons inspired artists to create... But the pictures of hunters with their “stool pigeons” and the piles and piles of dead birds (and other animals) are revolting. I don’t object to sustainable, need-based hunting but this wholesale profit-driven slaughter to the point of extinction just is too painful to read about. UGH. Also the subtitle outrages and disgusts me: “The passenger pigeon’s *flight to extinction*“ ...???? The birds were relentlessly lured bludgeoned, shot, and netted into extinction — I really hate that obscuring use of the passive voice. Humans destroyed these birds, there was no “flight into extinction.”

[Jay Gravelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard to fault the author for doing an amazing amount of research on a rather obscure subject matter, but it’s not an easy book to read. There’s a lesson here for society as a whole but I highly doubt anyone’s paying attention. We’ll do the same thing to the rest of our natural resources, including our oceans.

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written with good insights. It is sad how greedy people can be to rob future generations the thrill of seeing a passenger pigeon flock. I hope books like this keep future species from going extinct as a testament to past losses.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read. It was thoroughly researched and it shows. Lots of information that paints a vivid picture of what life would have been like in the days of the passenger pigeon.

A haunting story, but one that hopefully we can learn from in hopes of changing and reshaping the future.

[Meghan Bohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to know how you can go from 1 *billion* birds to zero in about 40 years, this book will spell it out in great detail. It's a very comprehensive account of the species, but it is very detailed and very dense.