Gigantic Serpents of the Sky

Titanic pink serpents coiled and wheeled in the sky. The earth below was plunged in a chill twilight as they shut out the December sun. These cosmic reptiles were two or three miles long. They moved about a mile a minute. They made a noise like a tornado punctuated with the rat-tat-tat of machine guns.

Thus the naturalist John Audubon described a mass passenger pigeon flight over Kentucky which, he estimated, included more than a billion birds. As they came out of the northeast they looked like a gigantic, low pink cloud driven by a hurricane. Suddenly they split with almost military precision into the coiling, snake-like formation as predacious hawks hovered above them.

When these hawks came, says Audubon, at once with a noise like thunder they rushed into compact masses, pressing upon each other towards the center. In these almost solid masses they darted forward in undulating lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and when high were seen wheeling and twisting in continuous lines which resembled the coils of gigantic serpents.

When the birds reassembled from their emergency snake formations, they constituted, Audubon estimated, a column one mile broad passing overhead at the rate of a mile a minute for three hours. Thus the solid mass of the birds would have covered 80 square miles. Such a monster would have required, the naturalist calculated, about nine million bushels of food a day.

It is more than a century since anybody has witnessed such a phenomenon. Civilization and nature combined to destroy the almost incalculably vast hordes of pink-breasted birds which, acting in a weird unison, seemed to the pioneers like cosmic monsters invading the earth. Hundreds of millions were slaughtered by hunters. Millions perished in one great Atlantic storm when, it was reported, the sea over a radius of three or four miles was covered completely with their bodies.

The passenger pigeon long has been extinct. The last survivor of the tornado-like masses now is mounted and on exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. It died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoological Park at 1 p.m., September 1, 1914. Every year Smithsonian ornithologists get reports that one of these birds has been seen in some remote forest. Almost beyond question, however, these reports are due to the wish fulfillment of amateur bird watchers.

The extant mourning dove sometimes is mistaken for the passenger pigeon. In the west the band-tailed pigeon has been similarly mistaken. Even expert ornithologists might make such errors from casual observations. Although convinced that the bird is extinct scientists continue to investigate any plausible clue to its survival.

According to Smithsonian Institution ornithologists, there is a popular idea that the passenger pigeon mysteriously disappeared and that, while still enormously numerous, it suddenly ceased to exist. Its annihilation has been attributed popularly to various natural phenomena and it has even been rumored that the bird migrated to South America. The natural phenomena supposed to have been causative of its extinction are epidemics, tornadoes, early deep snowstorms, forest fires, strong winds while the birds were crossing large bodies of water which caused exhaustion and death by drowning. Circumstantial reports were published of immense numbers drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, a region well beyond the usual range of the bird. Destruction of the forests undoubtedly was a large detrimental factor in the life history of the pigeons, for the forests supplied their principal food as well as roosting and nesting places.

A bird accustomed for ages to living together in large numbers and close ranks, whether in feeding, migrating, roosting or nesting, might find it impossible to continue these functions with greatly reduced and scattered ranks. It is probably more than a figure of speech to say that under these circumstances such a communist bird would lose heart, nor is it fanciful to suppose that sterility might in consequence affect the remnants. Our continent is so well known that accounts of the presence of living birds must be considered more than doubtful.

The mass flights came about once every ten years in the early winter. The normal habitat of the pigeons was in the great forests of Quebec and Ontario. There they were widely scattered, feeding chiefly on acorns. When snow covered the ground they moved southward, but ordinarily not in great masses. But a periodic failure of the acorn crop, of the extent of which the birds seemed to have some mysterious awareness, caused them to assemble in one body and start a mass migration southward, obscuring the sun for hours as they passed beneath it.

Like tornadoes, they wrecked forests in their flights. Says the naturalist Alexander Wilson: “The roosting places sometimes occupy a large extent of forests. When they have frequented one of these places for some time the appearance it exhibits is surprising. The ground is covered to a depth of several inches with their dung. All the tender grass and under wood is destroyed. The surface is strewn with large limbs of trees, broken down by the weight of birds collecting one above the other. The trees themselves for thousands of acres are killed as if girdled with an axe. The marks of the desolation remain for many years on the spot. Numerous places could be pointed out where, for several years after, scarcely a single vegetable made its appearance.”

After these mass migrations from the north the pigeons scattered through the forests in search of food but assembled again in the spring for egg-laying and hatching. Wilson reported: “Not far from Shelbyville, Kentucky about five years ago, there was one of these breeding places which stretched through the woods in a north and south direction several miles in breadth and was said to be more than 40 miles in length. In this tract almost every tree was furnished with nests wherever the branches would accommodate them.

“As soon as the young were fully grown numerous parties of inhabitants from all parts of the adjacent country came with wagons, axes, beds and cooking utensils, many of them accompanied by the greater part of their families, and encamped for several days at this immense nursery. The noise was so great as to terrify their horses and it was difficult for one person to hear another speak. The ground was strewn with broken limbs of trees, eggs and young squab pigeon which had been precipitated from above and upon which herds of hogs were fattening. The view through the woods presented a perpetual tumult of crowding and falling multitudes of pigeons, their wings roaring like thunder, mingled with the frequent crash of falling timber.”

The last great nesting was recorded at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. The area covered is said to have been forty miles long and 30 miles broad.

Systematic commercial hunting of the birds reached its height shortly after the Civil War. In 1879 dead birds were sold on the Chicago market at 50 cents a dozen. Pigeon hunters made from $10 to $40 a day.