Passenger Pigeon & Carolina Parakeet - Vanished Birds

Buzz Williams
The Carolina Parakeet was the only parrot of eastern North America; the last Carolina parakeet was taken in 1904.
painting by John James Audobon

Recently I visited the Capitol building in Atlanta and was struck by a display memorializing two extinct birds that were indigenous to the Chattooga River watershed: the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet. Along with paintings of the birds were brief biographies containing an explanation of their demise, which was linked to habitat destruction and market hunting. Of particular note was the mention of the cutting of the “Great White Oak Forest” as a principle reason for the loss of the Passenger Pigeon.

I had always known about these beautiful birds, and this display made me curious about more details. Subsequently, I discovered an incredible source for finding out more about these interesting, extinct birds that once were a part of our landscape. The following is a brief account of their life history, which I learned mostly from a fascinating book entitled Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, by Christopher Cokinos.

Conuropsis carolinensis, the Carolina Parakeet, was indeed a beautiful bird. William Strachey was an early naturalist in the Southeastern wilds of North America and described the parakeet as “a fowle most swift of wing, their wings and breast are a greenish colour with forked tayles, their heads some crimson, some yellow, some orange towny, very beautiful…”. A German immigrant to Missouri, in his writings of 1877, likened the winter sighting of a flock of several hundred Carolina Parakeets in a Sycamore tree to the nostalgic image of a Christmas tree, with their yellow heads shining like candles. But it was this same color and brilliance that made the flocks of parakeets almost invisible in lush green foliage of its preferred habitat of deciduous timbered streams, swamps and cane breaks of the eastern United States.

The Carolina Parakeet was relatively common from New York to the deep South, and even ranged as far west as Colorado. It did not migrate, and exhibited an incredible range of food sources. The Carolina Parakeet, with its thick powerful beak, was primarily a seed-eater including those of pine, maple, elm and cypress. It also consumed mulberries, paw-paw, wild grapes and leaf buds, but the cocklebur was by far its favorite. They were also very dependent on salt, and were often seen in natural salt deposits such as at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. Early explorers also noticed their tolerance of extreme weather conditions. The bird’s wide variety of food sources and its hardiness account for its non-migrating lifestyle.

The Carolina Parakeet is thought to have nested in hollow trees. Often they nested in large groups inside the trees, where some were even forced to cling to the outside of the opening, hanging to the tree with their feet and beaks as they slept.

There are many mysteries about the reproductive cycle of the Carolina Parakeet, presumably due to both its complexity and the fact that much of it was concealed in a tree hollow. We do know that they nested in colonies and that their eggs were plain white. But whether they nested in summer of spring, the exact number of eggs laid, their courtship patterns and longevity—all are still unknown.

Some experts believe that though the Carolina Parakeet exhibited flexible feeding habits, it was very inflexible in its breeding pattern. There is speculation that it depended on native cane breaks to trigger courtship and breeding. Since the seed production of cane was a non-annual event, their dependence on it for breeding stimulation limited reproduction. This “inflexibility” in breeding patterns is referred to by scientists as species “specific perturbation.”

When settlers cleared river bottoms of native bamboo, reproduction of the Carolina Parakeet was greatly reduced. This proximal cause of the eventual extinction of the Carolina Parakeet was set in motion by the overarching, “ultimate causes” such as logging for fuel wood, and habitat destruction caused by land-clearing for agriculture. John James Audubon wrote in 1844, “…there are one half the number that existed 15 years ago.”

There were other factors which aided the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet, one of the most interesting being the “white man’s flies,’’ or honeybees. Brought by Europeans to America for honey production and pollination, honeybees quickly escaped into the wild. Indians noticed the presence of honeybees preceding the arrival of the white man. Since honeybees also utilized hollow trees, they often displaced nesting Carolina Parakeets, thus contributing to their decline.

Also a factor in their demise was hunting for the millinery trade. Carolina Parakeets were shot in large numbers in the mid 19th century to supply feathers to decorate women’s hats and dresses. It has been estimated that this trade produced five million birds for market in 1886.

Live capture, another practice which greatly reduced Carolina Parakeet populations, was a large contributing factor in their decline. The Carolina Parakeet was not only beautiful but made a wonderful caged bird. Though it did not sing or mimic, it did learn its name and made a very pleasant and entertaining pet. As their numbers declined, they were even more in demand for “curiosity” specimens and were sold to the general public as well as the scientific community.

By the turn on the century, the Carolina Parakeet was probably gone from the wild. Though for a short time a few existed in captivity, the large flocks of these beautiful birds would never be seen again in America.

The Passenger Pigeon was hunted to extinction for both sport and food.
painting by John James Audobon

The Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, like its scientific epithet was a migratory species. It did so in such huge numbers that as early as the 1500’s, explorers were amazed by the size of the flocks. They were described as blocking or eclipsing the sun, and as funnel clouds or squall lines. Passenger Pigeons flocked in thick clouds, and sometimes flew in layers or in a single dense sheet; they were likened to moving rivers.

Audubon described a huge flock that took two days to pass. “The dung fell in spots not unlike melting flakes of snow,” he said. It is estimated by some authorities that the Passenger Pigeon made up 20 to 40% of the total populations of the United States, with an estimated population of 3 to 5 billion—easily the largest species population on Earth at the time of their existence.

The Passenger Pigeons were as beautiful individually as they were awesome en masse. Their heads, back and wings were blue-gray, with their necks shimmering an iridescent purple, gold, yellow and green. They had powerful chests showing white down to their bellies, with black bills, long tails and quick stabbing wings that could propel them up to 60 miles per hour. Their legs, feet, and eyes were a piercing red.

The preferred food of the Passenger Pigeon was oak acorns, chestnuts and especially beechnuts. Since most of these preferred foods are cyclic, it is believed that their aerial searches enabled them to find which forests were more heavily laden with acorns or nuts, thus accounting for their swarming, wandering “migratory flight patterns.”

Passenger Pigeons migrated north for the April through June breeding season. This early arrival also insured the birds’ first dibs on feed after the snow melt. Their breeding was highly synchronized with exact time lines for courtship, nest building, egg laying, incubation, hatching, feeding and abandonment of chicks.

They formed huge nesting colonies, averaging 311 square miles. One colony observed in 1871 in Wisconsin was scattered over 850 square miles, and probably consisted of nearly all the Passenger Pigeons in the United States. It was estimated that there were almost 135 million birds in this one colony.

Their breeding season began with the courtship rituals of billing and necking, and rushing together as if almost “hugging” each other. This display lasted for three days. Nest building followed, again for three days, with a loosely built nest made of twigs. Typically, the male brought in a twig and perched on the female’s back, where he transferred the twig to her bill. Then, all on the same day, she laid a single white egg which took thirteen days to incubate. Males relieved females on the nest from about 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. The males nested separately from the nesting colony. Young pigeons, or “squabs,” were born naked and blind. They ate a substance produced by the females called “pigeon milk,” which was white in color and fed to them through the beak. The squabs soon developed yellow down and opened their eyes. In late summer the parent birds would feed the squabs for a final time, and then abandon the squalling squabs to fly south.

For the next three days the young birds would fall to the ground, learning to fly. Soon they joined the flocks of pigeons flying south. These colonies, both nesting and roosting, attracted large numbers of predators such as wolves, bobcats, foxes and other carnivores, which came to prey on the young squabs and adults. Scientists believe that the genetic survival strategy of the Passenger Pigeon against both predation and competition was their shear numbers.

Nonetheless, humanity made the exception to this rule. During the 18th and 19th century, humans killed incredible numbers of Passenger Pigeons for sport and for food. In 1825, one individual was reported to have shot 500 birds in 528 minutes. A cruel practice was sometimes employed where birds were purposefully injured, causing them to fly more “springily” before contestants in trap-shooting contests. One trap-shooter estimated killing 30,000 birds in his lifetime.

Astronomical numbers of birds were sold in the markets of large northern cities. New technology such as the telegraph and railroads aided the growing market-hunting trade. Passenger Pigeons dressed and packed on ice in barrels, at the rate of 25 to 35 dozen per barrel, could be shipped from New York to Chicago in 48 hours. The birds were sold for 50 cents per dozen, or 12 cents for a pound of feathers, with approximately 50 pigeons producing a pound of feathers. They were sold door to door in carts or in the market, either broiled, roasted, pickled, smoked or salted. Sometimes the birds were stuffed with charcoal as a preservative. Squabs were marketed as a delicacy.

Market-hunting was a huge business. The hunters used an amazing array of techniques to bring down the birds when massed in flocks. They netted, shot and swatted the birds with long hickory poles; they even used whips. Passenger Pigeon flocks were so thick that hunters often killed 20 to 30 birds per shot. They burned sulfur pots to fumigate roosting pigeons, and poked down nests with poles to get the squabs. In one instance, 1,500 acres of trees were cut down to get to the helpless young birds. Sometimes there were as many as 100 nests per tree. Unbelievably, hunters sometimes even used fireworks to bring down pigeons. The killing frenzy was once described as “a wild pandemonium for a saturnalia of slaughter.”

In 1878, one of the last great flocks of Passenger Pigeons nested in Michigan. By then some activists were lobbying for laws to limit hunting and to stop nest raiding. The market hunters countered by arguing that the protesters did not care about the poor. Some scholars believe that as many as 10 million birds were harvested in that single nesting kill. In 1886, only two flocks of Passenger Pigeons were left in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. By 1897, when Michigan finally passed a law banning the killing of Passenger Pigeons, it was already too late. Passenger Pigeons had depended on large numbers to locate food and to thrive, but by now their numbers had fallen precipitously. Habitat had been destroyed and nesting patterns disturbed. At the turn of the century, a young boy shot a lone bird in a tree in Pike County, Ohio; it was the last Passenger Pigeon known to have been shot in the wild.

It is interesting to note that the decline of the Carolina Parakeet as well as the Passenger Pigeon coincided with the cutting of the “Great Forest” of the eastern United States. Agricultural and forest products industries argued then, as now, that land clearing and development practices were for the good of people. Yet in the case of the Passenger Pigeon, the marketers destroyed the very thing that was their livelihood.

As I walked around the corner that day in the Capitol building, leaving the display which had stimulated my curiosity to learn more about the two now-extinct birds, I saw another display by the Georgia Forestry Commission. This display promoted land management based on “industrial strength forestry.” Much of the display was about pine plantation forestry. I couldn’t help but wonder how many more species were in precipitous decline, sacrificed for the short-term gains of humanity.