Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon

This sermon is in four parts. The Eyewitness Accounts section was shared by 4 people in the congregation.

Eyewitness Accounts 

In May 1850, a 20-year-old Potawatomi tribal leader named Simon Pokagon was camping at the headwaters of Michigan's Manistee River during trapping season when a far-off gurgling sound startled him. It seemed as if "an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me," he later wrote. "As I listened more intently, I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm, and beautiful." The mysterious sound came "nearer and nearer," until Pokagon deduced its source: "While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season."

These were passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius, at the time the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would "pour its living mass" hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. "I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America," he wrote, "yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven."

Pokagon recorded these memories in 1895, more than four decades after his Manistee River observation. By then he was in the final years of his life. Passenger pigeons, too, were in their final years.[1]

The passenger pigeon…was once the most common bird in the United States, numbering in the billions. Passenger pigeons lived in enormous colonies, with sometimes up to 100 nests in a single tree. Migrating flocks stretched a mile wide, turning the skies black. Bird painter John James Audubon, who watched them pass on his way to Louisville in 1813, described “the continued buzz of wings,” and said “the air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse…” When he reached his destination, 55 miles away, the birds were still passing overhead, and “continued to do so for three days in succession.” The passenger pigeon, a wild bird, is not to be confused with the carrier pigeon, a domesticated bird trained to carry messages.

With such abundance, it seemed unimaginable that the passenger pigeon could ever become extinct. But due to overhunting, habitat loss, and possibly infectious diseases that spread through the colonies, they became increasingly rare by the late nineteenth century. The last confirmed sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was in 1900. After that, only a few survived in captivity. “Martha,” who lived her whole 29-year life in the Cincinnati Zoo, was the last.[2]

“The number of pigeons [at Clarendon] was immense . . . For an hundred acres together, the ground was covered with their dung, to the dept of two inches. Their noise in the evening was extremely troublesome, and so great that the traveler could not get any sleep, where their nests were thick. About two hours after sunrise, they rose in such numbers as to darken the air.” William Samuel, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 1794.[3]

From at least 1848 to 1853, a nesting site occupied twenty acres of virgin maple and yellow birch in the towns of Stowe and Hyde Park in the northern part of the [Vermont]…. Trees often held in excess of twenty-five nests. Forbush goes on with the story provided him by eye-witness Clayton Stone: “Most of the time during the nesting season large flocks of these birds could be seen coming and going in all direction to and from the nests. The people from this and neighboring towns went to the place with their teams to take up the squabs that had fallen to the ground; they took them away by cartloads. The squabs were distributed free, to be used as food by all their friends and neighbors. . . In 1848 Mr. Stone . . . sprung a net over 528 birds at one cast. Pigeons were abundant in that locality until the fall of 1865, when a man could shoot in half a day all that he could use.”[4]

The Story of Martha, the last of her kind.

From the Encyclopedia Smithsonian:

Early explorers and settlers frequently mentioned passenger pigeons in their writings. Samuel de Champlain in 1605 reported "countless numbers," Gabriel Sagard-Theodat wrote of "infinite multitudes," and Cotton Mather described a flight as being about a mile in width and taking several hours to pass overhead. Yet by the early 1900s no wild passenger pigeons could be found. One of the last authenticated records of the capture of a wild bird was at Sargents, Pike County. Ohio, on 24 March 1900. Only a few birds still survived in captivity at this time. Concerted searches were made and rewards offered for the capture of wild passenger pigeons. From 1909 to 1912, the American Ornithologists' Union offered $1,500 to anyone finding a nest or nesting colony of passenger pigeons, but these efforts were futile. Never again would man witness the magnificent spring and fall migratory flights of this swift and graceful bird. Attempts to save the species by breeding the surviving captive birds were not successful. The passenger pigeon was a colonial and gregarious bird and needed large numbers for optimum breeding conditions. It was not possible to reestablish the species with a few captive birds. The small captive flocks weakened and died. The last known individual of the passenger pigeon species was "Martha" (named after Martha Washington). She died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, and was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where her body was once mounted in a display case with this notation:

MARTHA

Last of her species, died at 1 p.m.,

1 September 1914, age 29, in the

Cincinnati Zoological Garden.

EXTINCT[5]

What the Smithsonian does not mention is that Martha was born in captivity in Hyde Park, a neighborhood of Chicago, in 1885, and was raised by a professor at the University of Chicago. She lived with a small group of other passenger pigeons, and this professor donated Martha and two male companions to the Cincinnati Zoo.

Martha never lived in the wild, she never got the chance to fly free through the air as so many of her ancestors did. Because by the time Martha was hatched from her egg, people knew that her species was in serious trouble.

As you could hear from the eyewitness accounts that Linda and I shared with you, passenger pigeons had once been so many that their flocks could be over a mile wide, and take hours and hours to pass over a person.

But they had been so over-hunted as a cheap source of food, and people moving west, creating farms, like right here in the Greater Cleveland Area, gradually took away the natural habitat of Martha’s ancestors.

And so their numbers dwindled, until at the end there was only two males and one female passenger pigeon left on the planet.

Martha was sick and never laid even a single egg that became a bird.

There are theories about this, one of them being that passenger pigeons needed to live in HUGE groups together in order to produce eggs that hatched into new birds.

And of course, Martha didn’t have that.

But what Martha has is a legacy. With the passing of the passenger pigeon into extinction, people finally began to take notice that some species were no longer around, because they had been over-hunted, or their habitat destroyed by people who were trying to make their own way in the world, by doing things like farming and feeding their families, but without paying attention to how they were affecting the other species around them.

This is partly why our own seventh principle is important. Through our seventh principle, we know that we are connected to all life on our planet.

Being Alone      

The part of Martha’s story I didn’t tell you while our kids where here is that Martha spent the last 6 years of her life alone, the last of her kind.

She was transferred to the Cincinnati Zoo from Chicago with two male birds, who died before she did.  She also spent the last of her life in the zoo, having children occasionally throw sand at her in her cage, trying to get her to move around, or sing. 

This last bit of information was, to me, surprisingly upsetting.

Science Fiction and Dystopian British novels are full of stories of people who are the last of their kind. Sometimes they are the last human on the planet, or in a ship. Sometimes, they are seemingly the only ones who hide from the Monitors of Big Brother as often as they can, because they don’t fit neatly into that Orwelllian order. Sometimes, as in Huxley’s famous novel, they are the Alpha male who is thought to be defective because he’s not tall enough, the Beta woman who is thought odd by her friends, because she longs for monogamy in a society where everyone’s body belongs to everyone else, or the last “Savage” who hangs himself because he cannot function in this Brave New World.

There are many times when I, and perhaps you, too, felt like the last, or only of your kind. It is a profoundly lonely feeling.

Perhaps part of the reason I find the story of Martha’s final years so affecting, is that I am anthropomorphizing her. That having felt alone in the world, I can easily sympathize with her, being even more alone in the world than I have ever been, or will hopefully ever be, and having sand thrown at me.

Meditation

Please join me in a spirit of prayer and reflection:

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. These are the words of Paul Tillich, 20^th century theologian.

Loneliness can be so very difficult to bear. It can feel like an impenetrable bubble around us. A film which prevents those around us from seeing who we truly are, and if they cannot see who we truly are, there can be no true love.

There is not one among us who has not felt the sting of the distance between ourselves and those around us.

De-extinction?

When the movie Jurassic Park was released in 1993, just 21 years ago, the idea of bring a species back to life was only science fiction. We could enjoy the thought of dinosaurs hunting us, because it was so far from a possibility that the idea was actually non-threatening.

Well, we’re still not likely to see dinosaurs roaming the earth again, but there has been much talk about “de-extinctioning” species.

Among those that travel in the kind of circles where de-extinction is an important pursuit, three animals are high on their list of potentials.  The Wooly Mammoth, the New Zealand Moa and the Passenger Pigeon.

The Long Now Project, which is dedicated to thinking in terms of 10s of thousand of years, in fact, they date all their work by using five year digits, so that today would be October 5, 02014, is a big backer of re-introducing species.

While it might seem that de-extincting a species might be a way for us, as a species, to turn back the clock and right the wrongs we have visited on this planet, ethicists and scientists do not agree about whether or not this is a good idea.

The Wooly Mammoth, last decade's de-extinct cause celeb, if we were to bring that back because humans hunted them into extinction 10,000 years ago, where would they live?

The mammoth poses many questions like this. Has our environment changed so much in 10,000 years that the mammoth would be brought back only to die out again, because that species, while not “alien” in the sense of extra terrestrial, would certainly be “alien” to our time period.

And what would we do with herds of mammoths roaming the Great Plains?

Would we revive them, only to keep them in zoos?

Now, the passenger pigeon, though was alive a mere 100 years ago. Surely, it’s a better candidate for a return. In Science magazine from April 2013, Henry Greely and Jacob Sherkow write about potential complications of reviving species.

Scientists are currently working on three different approaches to restore lost plants and animals. In cloning, scientists use genetic material from the extinct species to create an exact modern copy. Selective breeding tries to give a closely-related modern species the characteristics of its extinct relative. With genetic engineering, the DNA of a modern species is edited until it closely matches the extinct species.

 All of these techniques would bring back only the physical animal or plant.

"If we bring the passenger pigeon back, there's no reason to believe it will act the same way as it did in 1850," said co-author Jacob Sherkow, a fellow at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences. "Many traits are culturally learned. Migration patterns change when not taught from generation to generation."[6]

What these scientists suggest is that to physically bring back a species in no way represents a full return of that species.

There is no “do-over” button.

In an article for the Harvard Science Review, Cailtin Andrews writes

Scientists estimate that 99% of the roughly 4 billion species to ever live on Earth have gone extinct (1). But, although we often hear extinction being associated with human action, most of these events have been a natural part of Earth’s evolutionary history. Since the dawn of life, extinction has represented the constant ebb and flow as species have fought and dominated or struggled and fizzled out. At five points in time, this process has been drastically accelerated by geological disasters or other events, leading to periods of “mass extinction” in which over 75% of Earth’s biodiversity has been lost. As deforestation, poaching, and climate change impact nearly every ecosystem, there is strong evidence to suggest that we are now in another of those periods—a sixth mass extinction (1). Instead of a more natural pace of one to five species per year, we are losing dozens of species every day. Until recently, these losses were assumed to be permanent (2). But, what if we could somehow reverse the clocks and bring these animals back to life? Would we want to do it? Should we do it? And what would our decision mean for our planet?[7]

Obviously, this is a tremendously complex series of ethical questions, and not to be engaged in lightly. For every expert who thinks that we should bring back these, and more species, there’s someone else talking about the problems that the planet would face should this occur. Would restored species restore natural ecosystems, or due with engagement with an environment they literally have had no chance to adapt to, would they be candidates for immediate re-extinction?  Would they carry diseases that humans have no defense against?

Would they just become side-show attractions, a way for zoos to have “exclusives” and draw crowds?

And since I’m asking so many questions this morning, is it responsible to expend millions or billions of dollars on a series of questions like this, when there are people who are mal-nourished and fighting poverty just a mile or two away from where we sit today?

I enjoy the mind exercise of “what if?” as much as the next person, maybe even a little bit more. Martha’s death 100 years ago brought this question of de-extinction to us this morning. And ever since Linda Coulter brought up the idea during a Worship Team meeting, I have enjoyed rolling around these ideas and questions in my mind.

Given a choice between allocating resources to explore reviving a way of life in the past, or investing those resources in today and then in tomorrow’s potential, which do you chose?

May the wisdom of Athena and Solomon be granted us as we work to make our world a more fair, just and compassionate home.

Amen.

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[1] http://www.audubonmagazine.org/articles/birds/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct

[2] http://www.mnh.si.edu/onehundredyears/featured_objects/martha2.html

[3] http://www.passengerpigeon.org/states/Vermont.html

[4] ibid

[5] http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_Si/nmnh/passpig.htm

[6] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/greely-species-deextinction-040413.html

[7] http://harvardsciencereview.com/2014/01/22/extinct-today-alive-tomorrow-the-science-and-ethics-of-de-extinction/