Passenger Pigeon – Page 2 – Birding New Jersey

April 16, 2014April 18, 2014

The Degenerate Dove

The Count de Buffon died 226 years ago today, making this as good a day as any to see what he had to say about what was over his long lifetime the most abundant bird in North America, the Passenger Pigeon.

In the Histoire naturelle des oiseaux, Buffon dedicates an entire chapter to “Exotic Birds Related to the Pigeon.” The natural historian wastes no time in proclaiming his theory:

There are few species as widespread as the pigeon; as it has strong wings and the capacity for sustained flight, it can easily make long voyages: and most of the races, wild or domestic, are found in all climates; from Egypt to Norway, people raise pigeons in aviaries, and while they do thrive better in hot climates, they do not fail to prosper in colder regions, too, depending on the care given them, all of which proves that this species in general fears neither heat nor cold, and the Rock Pigeon is found in almost all the countries on both continents [Europe and America].

As usual, it is not at first clear just what Buffon means in speaking of “species” and “races,” but he removes all doubt in the accounts that follow. Doves from Mexico, Guyana, and the Far East are here identified as “belonging to the espèce of our European Rock Pigeon.” Unable to resist the poke at his contemporary and competitor, Buffon dismisses Mathurin Brisson’s Violet Pigeon of Martinique as “a very slight variation on our common pigeon.”

And the same, he writes, obtains in the case of

the pigeon of America given by Catesby under the name Passenger Pigeon and by Frisch under the name Columba Americana, which differs from our feral pigeons only in its colors and in the longer feathers of the tail, which makes it seem to resemble our Turtle Dove. But those differences do not seem to us sufficient to make of this bird a distinct species separate from that of our pigeons.

Nowadays, if most people know anything about Buffon, it is his bizarre insistence that “foreign” organisms were the “degenerate” derivatives of European species — which were after, all, the real species. In this year of sad commemoration, it surprises me that no one has pointed out the good Count’s disparagement of the Passenger Pigeon — and the hint, d’outre-tombe, that we could recover that long-lost bird simply by selectively breeding feral pigeons for long tails and subtle colors.

March 15, 2014April 13, 2014

Supply. Demand. Extinction.

It was one of the polite fictions of the waning days of American oology that specimens were never sold but “exchanged,” traded by collectors who were guided not by anything as crass as prices but rather by “exchange values,” regularly updated in the oological journals and other trade publications.

Thus, for example, in 1914, Charles Reed ranked the eggshells of the Ruddy Duck and those of the White-tipped Dove of equivalent value and desirability, assigning an exchange price of 35 cents to each; one laid by an American Crow or an American Goldfinch was worth a cool nickel, and an even hundred of those common specimens could theoretically be traded for the five-dollar egg of an Olive Warbler or a White-winged Crossbill.

The really extravagant price tags — I mean “exchange values,” of course — dangled from boxes containing the eggs of globally rare or extinct species. The eager collector needed to have a ten-dollar bill in his pocket if he thirsted after the egg of a Snail Kite or a Carolina Parakeet or an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and only the truly wealthy could afford to add the California Condor to their cabinets at a hundred dollars a pop.

The egg of the Passenger Pigeon, the last female of which died the same year in which Reed published his list, was far more attainable. At two dollars, such an egg wasn’t exactly cheap, but it was no more expensive than those of such common, if inconveniently accessible, species as the Glaucous-winged Gull and Orange-crowned Warbler. A lot of pigeon eggs must have been collected back in the days of their abundance, when, as Schorger reports, a single tree could support up to three hundred nests.

Just a few years later, it was obvious that the pigeons weren’t coming back. The American Oologists’ Exchange Price List of 1922 set the value of a single Passenger Pigeon egg at $100, twice that of the Heath Hen and five times that of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow. Scarcity drives even the most arcane of markets.

I have no doubt that there are still good numbers of pigeon eggs resting on cotton in long-forgotten drawers, and I suspect that the price wouldn’t be that terribly high if you wanted one. Me, though, I’d be content with this as the easiest way to remember that not much more than a century ago, the life force still ran through a bird we’ll never seen again: