From Untold Billions To None: How Passenger Pigeons Went Extinct
Extinct bird A stuffed passenger pigeon at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Keith Schengili-Roberts via Wikimedia Commons It's hard to fathom how many passenger pigeons there once were, but writer Joel Greenberg tries to paint a picture in his book, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction, as reviewed in the current issue of the New Yorker by Jonathan Rosen. Here's one tasty tidbit: In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock--if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at 60 miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun--that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around...