- Martha in her final resting place: the Smithsonian Institution
2014 is the year of the passenger pigeon. Not that any passenger pigeons are around to appreciate this fact: the last one, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo exactly a century ago, on September 1, 1914. What makes the extinction of the passenger pigeon particularly tragic is that less than 50 years before Martha’s death, there were millions, even billions, of passenger pigeons in North America. They were so numerous that a flock flying overhead could darken the skies and the beating of their wings could cause changes in the atmosphere, like weather. Today the passenger pigeon is an object lesson in the damage human greed has done.
Passenger pigeons could be pests, destroying crops, but farmers retaliated by shooting them for food (approximately two million birds were killed in 1881 alone), trapping them (using decoys called stool pigeons), or setting fires to kill them by asphyxiation. They did have their benefits, though: their droppings made for good fertilizer. One scientist interviewed in the film (the heads of the people in front of me blocked his name) theorizes that the pigeons ate the ticks that cause Lyme disease. They were also aesthetically pleasing, with beautiful iridescent feathers.
From Billions to None is a handsome film (with some beautiful aerial shots, collected via drone). Its message may not be new—and it will probably be repeated many times this year—but it’s well worth listening to: all our collective actions as a species can have dire consequences.
