The Passing Of The Passenger Pigeon
These wild birds once inhabited North America by the billions. Yet in three centuries they were exterminated by “civilized” man
June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4
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The distracted flocks that remained had broken up into small bands or scattered pairs well before the century’s end. A few apparently survived for a number of years. The ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush noted several more or less authenticated records of wild passenger pigeons in the early years of the twentieth century: 140-odd in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1902; one at Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1904; one on the Black River of Arkansas in 1906; one at St. Vincent, Quebec, on September 23, 1907.
All of these, of course, were killed.
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