![]() ![]() “I could not imagine billions of birds,” Novak recalls. There are multiple feasible methods for de-extinction. 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon was found dead on the floor of her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. Hunters enabled by the twin technologies of the telegraph and the train wiped out the passenger pigeon by traveling from site to site to supply markets hungry for meat in the burgeoning cities of eastern North America. “Early settlers commonly described flocks so immense that they blotted out the sun.”īy the end of the 19th century, the passenger pigeon, once perhaps the most abundant bird in the world, was extinct. “At the beginning of the 19th century, there were perhaps three billion pigeons migrating north to nesting grounds in New England and the Great Lake States,” the book noted. Just 40 or so pages into that book is a picture of a museum display of stuffed birds, the male resplendent with a burnt umber chest and bluish-gray feathers on his head and back, the female more demure in mottled brown-and-gray. It was there that he discovered the National Audubon Society’s Speaking for Nature: A Century of Conservation. One day Novak, a precocious but solemn 13-year-old, found himself in the back of a Waldenbooks at the mall. feathered eclipse: There were once so many wild passenger pigeons that people were encouraged to hunt them-some said the flocks were so big they could block out the sun. ![]() Yet it was near Williston, the heart of western North Dakota’s new boom-and-bust oil patch, that Ben Novak first fell in love with Ectopistes migratorius-the passenger pigeon, a bird that rarely graced this region, if ever. The state is primarily covered in what was once short-grass prairie but is now mostly farms embedded in a human-made grassland, exceptions being the Badlands and a swath of boreal forest in the far north near Canada. Such posts substitute for trees in much of North Dakota. The state bird is the western meadowlark, a mellifluous yellow songbird often seen singing on fence posts. North Dakota is not known for its pigeons. ![]()
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