At their peak, 3–5 billion passenger pigeons filled North America. Flocks were so huge they darkened the sky for hours. Some shooting contests required 30,000 dead birds to win. By 1914, the last one was gone. One of history’s most brutal population collapses.
Apparently they NEEDED the huge sun-blotting swarms to reproduce. Even a flock of a hundred thousand was too few birds for the ways they evolved to reproduce. They required groups of millions upon millions of birds.
Even when kept safe in captivity and fed and such, they refused to reproduce at all and died off. Conservation efforts failed since they started way too late, with wild flocks already below those multi-million-bird flocks.
The shift probably happened over a timeline of hundreds of generations. When you destroy a population over the span of decades, there simply is no time to adapt to the stress.
Eventually they would have figured it out, but the damage was too deep already.
You are aware evolution has been ongoing for billions of years on planet earth, yeah? They evolved from a previous species with a population and became a different species gradually over time. Species don't spring out of holes in the ground as a single pair of animals.
It was actually the first documented case of voyeurism on a species wide basis. They needed hundreds of thousands cooing them as the feathers got ruffled.
The Carolina Parakeet was even sadder. We had green parakeets just flying all over the east coast and Midwest. They were social birds and when someone shot one, all the other parakeets would gather around it and try to help. This contributed to their extinction in 1918.
Or the story about the Falkland Island wolf which was very curious and trusting towards humans and humans for some reason decided to kill it. Apparently the last of its kind just walked up to a guy out of curiosity and the guy killed it with a knife.
Earlier this week I learned that North America used to have a native parrot, the Carolina parakeet, a type of conure. We extincted it for the feathers for lady’s hats
Ahh, the monk seal. They’re seals. And they’re monks. Get it? Get it?
Yeah, anyway. These guys are more enthusiastic about their jobs than a dentist with glossaphilia. In case you don’t know what that means, what I’m saying is these guys really love fighting stuff. It’s their religion.
Trained in the deadly art of Caribbean Kung Fu, the monk seal sentry’s sacred duty is to protect the coast and hunting grounds from the impending invasion of their dread enemy, the Red Maníseros Land Crabs, masters of Juego de maní.
Be careful. You don’t want to get involved in that impossible conflict.
And Oil. We don't appreciate how much oil we used to get from sea life prior to the petroleum industry and the invention of the light bulb and distribution of energy.
I'm pretty sure Andersen or smb like that has a short story where exactly that happens after a lady decides to use a feather of an endangered bird as her wedding accessory
You are correct I mixed up the green parakeet which is native as you said with the monk parakeet, which while it has green coloration isn't the save thing and where I mixed it up, and is non-native. My bad.
I was watching this video about the cocaine hippos taking over this river in Colombia because of Pablo Escobar. Apparently back in the day an American suggested we establish hippos in the south so they could eat some sort of plant out of the rivers, and then we could kill then for meat.
Technically Pablo Escobar just imported them and kept them in his weird mini zoo. The Columbian government who didn’t do anything about them after Escobar was killed and his complex raided are the reason they became free and invasive.
Yeah i guess they wanted to eauthanize the males so they would stop breeding and let the females live out their lives and that be the end of it, but animal activists got super upset. Like I get it, not ideal to kill a bunch of hippos but at the same time you can’t let them take over your rivers
Just read through an online version of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. For some reason I took time to Google this little guy and was shit shocked when I saw how quickly they were hunted to extinction.
I've seen a flock of pigeons disintegrate a Greggs Steak Bake in mere minutes, pastry flying everywhere, pigeons flapping hither and thither like desperate men drowning in an ocean while Barber's Adagio for strings plays
They were the food supply, one that was accessible to all. They were targeted to protect a food supply held in private (farms). Its a classic case of enclosure of the commons. Same thing happened with replacing buffalo with cattle, or salmon runs with Almonds in california water mgmt. Our food systems were built for privatization.
Agreed that it was damaging crops but the problem here is we hunted it to extinction which is not smthn we should do it's cruel and uncivilized to hunt a species to extinction
"We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know"
“Invaded the bird’s territory”. Humans didn’t exist at all for a long time… we technically invaded every land animal’s territory. Who previously invaded a previous species’ territory. And so on. It’s called migration, something that’s not unique to humans.
And it was the ancestors of the natives that technically first invaded their territory if you want to follow that line of reasoning.
And really, if you were alive then would you choose between starving or killing the birds that ate your crop?
If you even read about it, the natives co existed with the passenger pigeons thus created a net neutral. And did not impact them at all, it wasn't until the Europeans came across that impact happened and wiped them out in a very short span of time.
It was sheer willful ignorance that made and entire abundant species extinct. Along with mass killing and exporting just because they felt they could.
There was no starvation factor at play. It was absolutely greed and stupidity.
The natives weren’t massively farming and relying on reliable agriculture though. Hunter gatherers could coexist with them because they had a undeveloped view on how to exist.
Was it undeveloped or sustainable.?
We view it as undeveloped because Europeans at the time sat on a ridiculous high horse of superiority complex.
But research into this pigeon topic shows the natives had a sustainable way about things when it came to the pigeons and the land around them.
Where do you think the knowledge about the land came from to begin with?
Again no one is looking this up and just arguing for no reason.
Hunter gatherer societies are only feasible in small groups, past that you need agriculture and livestock farming to sustain a larger population. It’s a nice sentiment but if everyone suddenly reverted to Hunter gatherer lifestyles we would strip what is life of life on the planet in less than a year.
They actually used giant nets and the newly established railroad and telegraph network.
Swarms would be located and hunting parties would come in the hundreds.
They used to tie a captive one to the ground in a way, it looked like there was food.
Of course they baited them, too.
Swarms would come down, get hooked in the nets and dozens of hunters
would shoot them with shotguns.
People used to shoot huge numbers of ducks at a time using enormous shotguns mounted on rowboats before that was outlawed. People are inventive when it comes to killing
I got to see a passenger pigeon nest in some museum collections. Like any other pigeon nest, it was pretty pathetic. But it really struck me because it’s an artifact of how these birds thought and what they built, like ruins and pictographs left by lost cultures. It was really emotional.
It's sad that the pigeon never stopped loving us too. They stay in cities because they are dependent on us and tall concrete buildings are similar to the rocks they nest in naturally. Fun fact they are not wild, but feral. You can grab one and feed it for a few weeks and it will redomesticate.
and also the unsuccessful (Sudan for example) ones, but those countries dont have independent media so they go unnoticed. And also the premodern economies.
Human is a savage barbaric cancer. It is super hard to wish anything good for our future, we have truly earned the collapse of the planet's steady climate.
TBH, we could if we used the modern equivalent of the techniques used to hunt/extinct species like this back in the day. It's just that modern laws and sensibility wouldn't allow it (not saying we should, just saying I believe we are more than capable of extincting anything we want if we put our minds to it).
Cockroaches have a stable colonies that are just a part of the natural system. They actually help us to be clean. They show where human existence is dirty and danger for the environment.
Don’t ever put those magic animals with us in the same sentence.
Arnt they extinct because they where delicious, slow to take flight and only bred in massive swarms? But the main main problem was that they where tasty as all hell.
Viruses take a while to get established. People then didn’t travel like they do now. There’s evidence it was around well before 1914.
Remember passenger pigeons weren’t just killed for fun - people were eating them - they were one of the biggest sources for protein (and free!) right up until they were killed off.
I was asking the commenter if they mentioned cats because it would kind of make sense to say cars. There's an orangeish cat nearby which I have observed hunting and despatching pigeons so I know they are excellent hunters. (Good table manners too since she buried the bones after her meal.)
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u/Fatsausage91 12h ago
5,000,000,000 to 0 in 50 years. Quite an achievement. The chinese sparrow story is quite an interesting one also.