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The Passenger Pigeon was a colonial and gregarious bird practicing communal roosting and communal breeding and needed large numbers for optimum breeding conditions. By the turn of the 20th century, the last known group of Passenger Pigeons was kept by Professor Charles Otis Whitman at the University of Chicago.
The Passenger Pigeon, or, as it is usually named in America, the Wild Pigeon, moves with extreme rapidity, propelling itself by quickly repeated flaps of the wings, which it brings more or less near to the body, according to the degree of velocity which is required. Like the Domestic Pigeon, it often flies, during the love season, in a circling ...
Passenger Pigeons were denizens of the once great deciduous forests of the eastern United States. The birds provided an easily harvested resource for native Americans and early settlers. To obtain dinner in the nesting season one needed only to wander into a colony and pluck some of the fat squabs that had fallen or been knocked from their nests.
Apr 15, 2010 · Passenger Pigeons broke down the forest and renewed it, resurrected other plants from beneath snowdrifts of droppings, picked up seeds and spread them in a rain of creative destruction. Human burning, quite possibly in feedback with an expanding Passenger Pigeon population, “made” the landscape east of the Great Plains (which themselves may have been “bison-genic”).
Jan 11, 2024 · The functional extinction of the passenger pigeon likely had ecological ripple effects by disrupting seed dispersal dynamics, nutrient cycling, and food chains. The loss of this keystone species removed a major component of eastern forest ecosystems. ant bird species on the planet to extinction.
Mar 4, 2020 · A male passenger pigeon on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio. The last wild bird was shot in 1901, and Martha, the last captive bird, died on Sept. 1, 1914, at the ...
Nov 16, 2017 · Four billion passenger pigeons once darkened the skies of North America, but by the end of the 19th century, they were all gone. Now, a new study reveals that the birds' large numbers are ironically what did them in. The pigeons evolved quickly, but in such a way to make them more vulnerable to hunting and other threats.
