#ectopistes

pls tell me you understand the joke

DinApril Day 13: A Quaternary dinosaur.

As long as America was rural and untraversed by railroads, the killing did not seem to do much more than dent the vast pigeon population. After the Civil War, however, things began to change rapidly. You could find out by telegraph where pigeons were nesting, get there quickly by train, and sell what you killed to a city hundreds of miles away. Soon market hunters began operating on an enormous scale, cramming tens of thousands of birds into boxcars—especially after Gustavus Swift introduced the refrigerator car, in 1878. This meant that rural migrants to growing cities could still get wild game, and the well-heeled could eat Ballotine of Squab à la Madison, served by a new class of restaurant, like Delmonico’s, in New York, where fine dining was becoming a feature of urban life. All this coincided with an explosion in logging, which began destroying the habitat of pigeons just as hunters were destroying the pigeons themselves.

Answering even basic questions about the passenger pigeon requires a sort of forensic ornithology, which gives “Feathered River Across the Sky” an unexpected poignancy at the very points where it is most nature-nerdy. A characteristic sentence begins, “Yet another of the great questions that can never be answered regarding the life history of this species is how many times a year they bred.” But the central question that Greenberg sets out to answer is how a bird could go from a population of billions to zero in less than fifty years. The short answer is that it tasted good. Also, it was easy to kill and so abundant that it often seemed, in the days before refrigeration, like the quail that fell on the Israelites in Exodus. In 1781, after a crop failure, a flock of pigeons saved a large swath of New Hampshire from starvation. Despite the occasional apocalyptic shiver, most Americans looked up and decided that it was cloudy with a chance of meatballs.