Category: Conservation

Here’s a little quiz question.  Which famous Martha died in September 1914?  One clue: she was called Martha after George Washington’s wife.  Here’s another: fifty years before her death there were 10 billion others like her. Final clue: she was the last of her kind.  Answer: Martha was the last ever Passenger Pigeon, once the most numerous bird on earth, and she died at 12 noon on 1 September 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo, Ohio.  It’s the best-recorded extinction in history, and perhaps the most extraordinary.  Up to the mid-nineteenth century huge flocks of these birds darkened the skies of America.  We hear of one in 1813 so vast that it spread from horizon to horizon and took three days to pass over.  Yet in a few decades the bird was no more.  What could have happened?

The main cause was simple in fact.  The immigrants from Europe had poured into America and spread west, dispossessing the native Indians, clearing the land and destroying the forests as they went.  The pigeons were wholly dependent on these forests for food and nesting sites. They were also easy to hunt and their flesh was both a staple diet for the settlers and a valuable export, so they were slaughtered on an industrial scale.  In the killing season extra trains were put on to convey thousands of barrels of pigeon bodies east to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  

The name ‘passenger pigeon’ isn’t a macabre reference to these train journeys, but probably derives from the French pigeon de passage or some equivalent Indian name.  This was a permanently mobile species, moving on restlessly until they literally ran out of forest.  It should really have been called the ‘wandering pigeon’ or ‘peregrine pigeon’.

This isn’t the only extinction of a charismatic bird, of course.  Think of the great auk, last recorded in Britain in St Kilda in 1840 and killed by fishermen who were terrified by its unearthly shrieking and clubbed it to death, thinking it a witch.  Or the dodo, which has entered our language as the very symbol of extinction, ‘dead as a dodo’.  That was a sort of giant pigeon, too, in fact. The last of them died in 1662 in Mauritius – a fat, clumsy and trusting bird which was butchered by sailors grateful for an easy meal.

It couldn’t happen again, could it?  But when did you last see or hear the British cousin of the passenger pigeon, the turtle dove?  That used to be the soundtrack of summer with its gentle purring song.  They were common here once, but I didn’t hear one anywhere this year, or last …

Jeremy Mynott
3 September 2024

Daniel Defoe is best known nowadays for his desert island novel Robinson Crusoe, but he also wrote an important work on social history, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724). On his travels through Suffolk he records that he witnessed ‘infinite numbers’ of swallows gathering for autumn migration on the coast. We still see swallows and house martins (did Defoe know the difference?) gathering on the telephone wires here in September, often chattering communally as if to psych themselves up before take-off on their huge journeys south. It’s always a moving spectacle but it’s also an elegiac reminder that summer is drawing to a close for us too. Defoe’s birds weren’t on telephone wires back then of course, but were, appropriately, ‘congregating’ on Southwold church. They sometimes also use other buildings, as illustrated in this photo showing a host of house martins clinging to the Shingle Street Martello tower. The big difference, though, is that sadly we no longer see them in this abundance. Forget about Defoe’s ‘infinite numbers’ in 1724 – since this photo was taken in September 2004 the number of breeding house martins in Britain has declined by nearly 40%. Swallow numbers are down too, as are swifts, which have declined by a whopping 60% in the same period. Swifts are often confused with swallows but belong to a different family altogether – one called Apodes, literally ‘without feet’, because they only have stubby toes that couldn’t grasp a telephone wire anyway. All these delightful aerial acrobats are suffering from the same problem: a corresponding sharp decline in the winged insects on which they feed.

We’ve all noticed that ourselves. Think of the ‘splatter test’ – the number of insects smeared on your windscreen and headlights today, compared to the ‘moth snowstorm’ we used to drive through at night a generation ago. And how we miss what Tennyson happily described as the ‘murmuring of innumerable bees’. But there’s also a new factor now – climate change – and that may cause other dramatic changes. As the world’s climate heats up, the swallows’ journeys back to Southern Africa over barriers like the fast-expanding Sahara Desert become ever more arduous. Suppose the costs of long-distance migration no longer prove worth the physical risks and effort they have to endure. Perhaps the swallows might never come at all one year. Or suppose they were to come and stay over, taking advantage of our milder winters now. If we had swallows at Christmas, what would that do to our emotional responses – to swallows, spring and autumn? Are we at risk of losing the seasons as well as the insects and the birds?

Jeremy Mynott
6th August 2023