When a female Passenger Pigeon – named Martha by those who tended to her daily needs at the Cincinnati Zoo – died in her cage on 1 September 1914, a species of bird that only a hundred years prior had numbered in the billions forever vanished from the face of the planet. Other bird species, […]
In honor of the opening of the Smithsonian Libraries’ new “Once There Were Billions” exhibit, Joel Greenberg, author of the recently published A Feathered River Across the Sky; The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction will be delivering a lecture titled “Echoes of Their Wings: The Passenger Pigeon and its Legacy” followed by a book signing on Tuesday, […]
Bloomsbury Publishing has announced that it will be publishing Mark Avery‘s new book A Message from Martha; The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and Its Relevance Today in late July of 2014 and subsequently in late August in the U.S.
The Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, was so plentiful across early Nineteenth Century North America that passing flocks were said to block out the sun. By 1900 the last one found in the wild was captured and in 1914 the lone surviving member of the species died in a Cincinnati zoo.