Sightings are still sometimes reported, but wildlife officials believe that if there are any big cats here they are released or escaped western cougars, not the native eastern variety. Two remarkable Southern Appalachian birds, the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet were hunted to extinction early in the 1900s. The Carolina parakeet, the only member of the parrot family native to the eastern United States, was a large and flamboyantly colored bird, about thirteen inches long, mostly bright green, but with a yellow head and neck and orange cheeks and forehead. Carolina Parakeets were exterminated because they raided orchards, because ladies prized their feathers for hats, and because their bright colors made them useful for target practice. The passenger pigeon may have been the most abundant bird species on earth.
Ornithologists estimate their precolonial population at two to three billion.
Their extensive winter roosting grounds along river bottoms in the Southern Appalachians are recalled in the names of two rivers, the Pigeon and the Little Pigeon, and in the name of the city of Pigeon Forge. Despite their numbers, the passenger pigeons succumbed quickly. Market hunters across the eastern United States blasted hundreds of millions from their roosts or from the sky. The meat was shipped by rail to New York and Chicago, where it had become fashionable. Well before the passenger pigeons vanished, there were warning signs and scattered calls for conservation, but most people seemed to think that so numerous and familiar a bird could never be eliminated.