Geese honking overhead, flying in long irregular V’s of migratory flocks, silhouetted against the fall sunsets of Ohio, are part of the season as days get shorter and winds get colder.
Sandhill cranes and starlings also make their way south, a vast movement of creatures pursuing warmth, and living out a cycle going on since ages immemorial.
Our age could be called, some suggest, the “Anthropocene” to follow the Pleistocene and Holocene, given the impacts of humanity, or “anthropos” on the global environment and the face of the earth. The label to follow the still current Holocene is controversial, in part because of the challenges geologically in marking the dividing line. In biological terms, you could say an aspect of the Anthropocene began in 1914, in Ohio.
Morris Schaff grew up in Licking County during the mid-1800’s and wrote a book published in 1905 titled “Etna and Kirkersville” for two southern county communities. One of his childhood memories from the 1840s included this vivid description of passenger pigeons overhead:
“There would be the appearance of a blue wave four-or five-feet high rolling toward you, produced by the pigeons in the rear flying to the front. When startled while feeding, their sudden rise would sound like rumbling thunder… Once they darkened the sky. Millions of them flew over Etna Township as they traveled to and from their feeding ground to roost in Bloody Run Swamp.”
Once, because already the last passenger pigeons in the wild had been shot in 1901, and there were only a few of these larger (and meatier) cousins of mourning doves left in the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha, the last known living passenger pigeon, died in captivity in 1914, and was taken to the Smithsonian on a block of ice to be carefully stuffed and displayed where she still perches in Washington, D.C.
Even by Schaff’s youth in Etna, the massive flocks of passenger pigeons were noticeably smaller. Early Ohio archaeologist Caleb Atwater observed in 1838 that passenger pigeons migrated through this area in smaller numbers than they once did in the spring and fall, but “Formerly the pigeons tarried here all summer, building their nests, and rearing their young, but the country is too well settled for them now; and so, like the trapper for beaver, and the hunter, they are off into the distant forests, where their food is abundant, and where there is none to disturb them in their lawful pursuits.”
Before the Ohio and Erie Canal turned the Great Swamp in southern Licking County and northern Fairfield County into today’s Buckeye Lake, there was a vast stretch of upland swampland extending from Jacksontown in the east to Kirkersville in the west.
Today’s I-70 runs through a stretch of valley west of Hebron, but once it was a northwest extension called Bloody Run Swamp, or more often today known as Pigeon Roost Swamp. A modern agro-tourism farm with pumpkins and visiting school groups marks the northern edge of it along the Old National Road, dipping behind today’s barns into the valley now bisected by the interstate.
Here in the early decades of the 1800s, settlers coming into the Ohio country would capture dozens of passenger pigeons at a time with nets or by knocking them out of trees with sticks ; as shotguns became more available, during the fall migration a common tactic was simply to wait for the tightly packed flock to fly over you, and fire directly overhead. Aiming was not necessary.
Passenger pigeons had the disadvantage of being just slightly bigger and slower than mourning doves — ideal for easy hunting and good eating, as well as for preserving into the winter as smoked meat or even pickled whole in barrels. They were affordable to the poorest table, a kind of Cornish game hen available in season; a report in Columbus during 1855 spoke of a ninety-mile-long flock that passed over for most of a day, and the naturalist John James Audubon wrote in 1835 about a migration in 1813 he witnessed in Kentucky just on the other side of the Ohio River.
“…The birds poured in in countless multitudes… I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse… I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions, when a hawk chanced to press upon the rear of the flock. At once, like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder, they rushed into a compact mass, pressing upon each other towards the center. In these almost solid masses, they 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… Before sunset I reached Louisville… The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers and continued to do so for three days in succession.”
Somewhat like the American bison in the coming century, the growth of the railroad both reduced habitat and increased hunting pressure on passenger pigeons. There actually was a legislative attempt in 1857 by the Ohio legislature to protect the passenger pigeon, indicating just how obvious the reductions in their numbers were by that time, but a “Select Committee” of the state senate responded that the bird did not need legal protection, being “wonderfully prolific,” dismissing the suggestion that the species could be destroyed.
Yet destroyed it was. Martha’s last years were closely watched, after the only other male passenger pigeon (of course named George) died in 1910. Humanity in general, and Ohioans nearby, for the first time consciously witnessed the death of the last of a species, and the concept of “extinction” entered everyday discourse about nature and species. The United States conservation movement began to pick up support, in part because of the public awareness that the destruction of an entire species was possible, with the loss of the passenger pigeon.
Naturalist Aldo Leopold was one of the founders of today’s environmentalism, with works like 1949’s “A Sand County Almanac,” still read in classes on nature writing and ecology. He paid tribute to the passenger pigeon at the dedication of a monument in Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin, which had been one of the species’ social roost sites. In 1947 Leopold could still say: “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”
But there may be one other living monument to the loss of this species in our ecosystem. Some biologists and epidemiologists suggest the prevalence of tick-borne Lyme disease in the last few decades can be credited to the exponential growth in the population of the white-footed mouse, a species which feeds on the same “mast,” or seeds of oak, beech and chestnut that the passenger pigeon did. The loss of those acorn feeding populations of birds on their southern migration opened up the ecosystem to the white-footed mice who had much less competition for food… and who are the ideal hosts of the very ticks which carry Lyme disease. By killing off the passenger pigeon, the environmental imbalance caused a surge in the mice who carry the ticks which host the bacteria that give us the threat we now worry about in the forests around us.
Because actions have consequences, in nature as in life.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller and preacher in central Ohio.