"The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird in the world and suddenly it disappeared totally from the Earth." Could hunting alone have brought down the passenger pigeon? And what would genetics reveal about the population size of the bird that seemed innumerable to early European settlers? The conversation turned to " how evil humans can be to wildlife," Hung recalls. And, it was “not always superabundant,” says Hung, who began studying the birds at the University of Minnesota in the lab of avian evolutionary biologist Robert Zink.īack in 2011 Hung and his co-authors were chatting over the dinner table in Minnesota. "The passenger pigeon was likely to experience dramatic population fluctuations," explains molecular ecologist Hung Chih-Ming, a postdoctoral associate at National Taiwan Normal University and lead author of the analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 16. Now an analysis of genes pulled from toe pads of stuffed museum specimens suggests that a tendency for boom-and-bust cycles might have been written into the passenger pigeon's DNA and contributed to the species’s downfall. The species had gone from extraordinarily populous to extinct in a human life span. Yet, by 1900, none survived in the wild, and on September 1, 1914, the very last one, named Martha, was found dead on the floor of her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. In fact, the passenger pigeon in the early 1800s may have been the most numerous bird in the world, with an estimated population of at least three billion birds-or at least a third as much as the total population of all kinds of birds in North America today. And it is Audubon who in 1833 identified the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, as the most numerous bird on the continent, highlighting the point by describing a mile-wide flock of migrating pigeons that passed over his head and blocked the sun for three straight days. As part of what he called his “frenzy” for avians, the French-American naturalist attempted to survey and document in drawings all the native bird species of North America.
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