{"id":8958,"date":"2014-08-19T02:25:17","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T09:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=8958"},"modified":"2014-07-22T08:13:24","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T15:13:24","slug":"death-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/19\/death-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By the summer of\u00a01914, the handwriting was on the cage wall. On August 19, O.S. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/item\/35628#page\/196\/mode\/1up\">Biggs visited Martha<\/a>, the last of the passenger pigeons, at her home in the Cincinnati Zoo:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>She [was]\u00a0dying slowly of old age. Death was but a question of a few days&#8230;. She was at that time unable to sit on her perch and was on the bottom of her cage with her wings drooping, and\u00a0was very weak and feeble.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Biggs, like most of his contemporaries, could still remember the wild bird. The last individual he had seen\u00a0in Illinois was a female in a walnut grove in August 1896.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I mounted [it] and have [it] in my collection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t seem to have occurred to him that there might, just might, be a connection between that shotgun blast in 1896 and the sad state of the species eighteen years later.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 414px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wwx.inhs.illinois.edu\/resources\/inhsreports\/may-jun98\/pigeon\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/wwx.inhs.illinois.edu\/files\/1513\/3961\/7814\/pigeon.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"414\" height=\"286\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Illinois Natural History Survey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By the summer of\u00a01914, the handwriting was on the cage wall. On August 19, O.S. Biggs visited Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons, at her home in the Cincinnati Zoo: She [was]\u00a0dying slowly of old age. Death was but a question of a few days&#8230;. She was at that time unable to sit on &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/19\/death-watch\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Death Watch&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8958"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8984,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions\/8984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}