How to Kill a Passenger Pigeon

I began a long-term writing project this summer on birds.  I mean to be deliberately vague. Though I'm sorely tempted to name the project--this is a book, this is an essay, this is a collection--I've learned that this isn't a decision one can make for some time.  The material--if it is useful--will tell me.  The poet Richard Hugo distinguished between the "triggering subject" and the "generated subject," and he advised poets to welcome the triggering subject but always be on the lookout for the generated one.  This, he thought, was the real subject of the poem.  This is an enormously inefficient process, of course.  I have spent two months reading and writing in my notebook about birds and I still have no grasp on the slippery fish.  What I do have are things that get my attention.  For instance, I've read extensively about the extinction of the passenger pigeon this summer, and I encountered an account of the last great flock of the birds in Arkansas in around 1877.  The size of these flocks is unimaginable--it could take an entire day for it to pass--and witnesses said that the thrum of a million wings made it nearly impossible to speak.  There was a "pigeon" smell, too, as the flock passed over.  The birds would roost in mature forests, a single tree so adorned with birds that “pigeoneers,” hunters of the bird, were drawn as much to the incessant crack of fracturing limbs and branches as the birds’ cooing.  Excrement covered the ground like a snow.  Such was the flock that descended on Hickory Plains, Arkansas.

Pigeon killing was an industry back then and the methods were crude. Pigeoneers would capture the birds long sticks, nets,and guns.  But the saw may have been the most effective weapon; hunters just cut down the trees in which the birds nested, and the sound of falling timber added to the chorus of cracking limbs, cooing, and gun blasts.  Assisted by the telegram, word traveled fast when a big flock alighted, and when word went out about the wild pigeons in Hickory Plain, an army of hunters arrived and the birds--particularly the "squabs," young birds that were especially good eating--died by the thousands.  It is easy, in retrospect, to condemn such a slaughter.  But the flocks were so large that the hunters took only a fraction of the birds.  It was beyond belief, even as the great flocks began to disappear by 1877, that the wild pigeon was in danger.

The hunt in Hickory Plains, Arkansas, went on for days until, by accident apparently, someone started a fire in the dense woods. When nesting, passenger pigeons took turns leaving the roost to look for food, the females leaving in the morning and coming back in the afternoon, and then the males took their turn.  The birds would sometimes fly a hundred miles to find suitable forage.  To the horror of witnesses, the pigeons did not abandon their nests as the woods burned around them, and the returning birds simply flew into the conflagration.  "They poured into  that fire by the hundreds," said one observer, "keeping it up all week while that roost was burning.  The ground was alive with naked pigeons that had the feathers singed off of them...Ever since that fire there have been no more wild pigeons in Arkansas."