A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction
This book contains many historical accounts of passenger pigeon flocks that darkened whole skies for hours at a time. These staggering numbers also started the bird’s troubles. Pigeon hordes devoured crops and sown seeds, and the sheer weight of millions of pigeons swarming to roost altered whole forests. ­Pigeon-harvesting companies with spring-loaded nets were the most efficient killers, though in a single pigeon rookery, hunters armed with long poles would—in a matter of hours—knock tens of thousands of plump, almost-fledged chicks from their nests. Thousands of tons of dead pigeons were wasted: spoiled on train cars and wagons; thought worthless and dumped on the way to market; ground into fertilizer; fed to hogs; left lying in the field. This book regurgitates too much dry research and too many passing encounters with pigeons, but it does show how few ninteenth-century Americans—including scientists—could even imagine conservation. And when Greenberg mentions the nineteenth-century-type slaughter still going on in our relatively lawless oceans, he shows the insidious nature of greed and apathy. --Dane Carr