The Passenger Pigeon’s Eclipse, by Anita Albus
The first of three extracts from Anita Albus’s On Rare Birds, a lavishly illustrated tale of ten rare or extinct birds.
Watch for an exclusive competition here on Bookhugger after all the extracts have been featured.
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Weaving together natural history and investigative reporting with mythological and cultural material, On Rare Birds tells the compelling stories of ten rare or extinct bird species – from the tragic demise of the once-abundant Passenger Pigeon to the shooting death of the last Carolina Parakeet in the wild, and from the startling natural defences of the wilful Nightjar to the diverse cultural significance of the Kingfisher. Some stories bear sad witness to precious species we have lost, but they are all fascinating and often heartwarming or humorous depictions of the unique lives and loves of birds.
On Rare Birds is a visually stunning volume illustrated by author Anita Albus’s own superb artwork and by images ranging over five centuries. It will delight anyone who loves birds, laments the depletion of their populations by human hands, and cares about the survival of those species that still stand a chance. With knowledge, devotion, and a true artist’s eye, Albus explains in graceful, precise prose why the decline of these bird species is a great loss both to the natural world and, unavoidably, to culture. With each species lost, a world is lost to human understanding-to our arts, our mythology, and our environment.
Extract 1, from “The Passenger Pigeon’s Eclipse”
It was a sunny Kentucky day in autumn 1813 when John James Audubon set out for Louisville from his house in Henderson, on the Ohio River. As he was riding briskly over the Barrens toward noon, a few miles beyond Hardensburg, a black cloud of Passenger Pigeons appeared on the horizon. The flocks were flying from northeast to southwest at over sixty miles an hour. The air was soon filled with pigeons, the sky darkening in a flash as if in an eclipse. Bird droppings rained down on Aububon like melting flakes of snow. The unending buzzing of wings began to lull his senses to sleep. To fight this off, he dismounted. He put a hand over his sketchbook while trying to estimate the number of flocks, making a dot with his pencil for each one. One hundred and sixty-three flocks in twenty-one minutes. But that was only a tiny sliver of the huge flock rushing high overhead and stretching from the Ohio River to the huge forests in the far distance. And the end was nowhere in sight.
While Audubon waited for his lunch in an inn at the confluence of the Salt and Ohio rivers, he could see immense multitudes of Passenger Pigeons moving high in the air over the barren countryside. Not one pigeon would land unless some of their millions of fiery red eyes could spy some woods with beech mast or acorns, or fields of wheat or rice for their millions of pitch-black bills. If a falcon tried to seize a bird in the flock, the pigeons quickly closed ranks into a compact mass, generating a roll of thunder with their beating wings. Like a living torrent they plunged down in almost solid masses and “darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” Moved by the beauty of the spectacle, this painter of birds observed how one flock after the other would fly into the space where a pigeon had just escaped a falcon’s talons, and how, even if no raptor were present, they would form a living river in the air and replicate the angles, curves, and undulations of the attacked flock before them. A single memory bonded millions of pigeons together.
The sun had not set by the time Audubon reached Louisville, fifty-five miles from Hardensburg. There was still no end of the birds in sight. The flock continued passing by for three days. The mass of birds summoned masses of men into the field. “The people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which there flew lower as they passed the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed. For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of Pigeons, and talked of nothing but Pigeons. The atmosphere, during this time, was strongly impregnated with the peculiar odour which emanates from the species.”
Audubon estimated afterward that, considering the extent of the flock and the length of time it took to go by, it consisted of 1,115,135,000 Passenger Pigeons. Alexander Wilson, Audubon’s rival, came up with an estimate of over two billion. The horrendous mass of pigeons was matched by a horrendous need for food. If the Argus-eyed swarm spotted a food supply, the birds would crowd together to form a feathered serpent, circling and sinking, to seize possession of the land. The plumage of this twisting, serpentine formation, like that of a single pigeon, flashed iridescent purple, green, and gold and shimmered from a reddish colour to a slate blue, depending on the vantage point of the viewer, as it maneuvered through the air. Magnificent and fearsome, like the birds of the Apocalypse that were summoned by the angel with “Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God,” the swarms of Passenger Pigeons ravaged woods and fields.
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By the end of the 1880s, Ectopistes migratorius had become rare compared with the millions upon millions that had once plunged whole expanses of land into darkness during migration. … If the Passenger Pigeon had once seemed to the white settlers like three of the nine plagues of Egypt — locusts, hail, and darkness—rolled into one, now the prophecy of the Natives was to be fulfilled. Nature completed the business of destruction wrought by human masses. The superorganism of the giant flock was cut to shreds. The birds, reduced to a few sparse flocks and driven by herd instinct, were now no match for their natural predators. Thunderstorms and hail in the breeding season, forest fires, and viral epidemics took care of the remainder.
The last Ectopistes migratorius to survive in the wild was a female. The fourteen-year-old son of an Ohio farmer shot her on March 24, 1900. The stuffed bird can be seen today in a museum in Columbus.
July 15th, 2011 at 9:27 pm
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