A Feathered River Across the Sky

by Joel Greenberg

  Passenger pigeons have also been linked to another human disease. Eastern encephalitis resides in birds and is spread to people via several species of mosquitoes, most particularly Culiseta melanura. This insect breeds in a specific microhabitat that is common in large swamps: small puddles that form under the trunks and roots of fallen trees. The twentieth century saw several major outbreaks in such states as Massachusetts (where over thirty people died) and New Jersey (twenty-two fatalities). Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that the highly mobile passenger pigeons would have been less likely to become infected than such species as American robins, red-winged blackbirds, and common grackles, which have increased in the eastern swamps. Because they are more sedentary, these birds would have increased exposure to the infected mosquitoes.72

  Birds are, of course, members of ecosystems, but to lice, birds themselves are ecosystems. Many lice are adapted to survive on a single species. If that bird dies out, so does the parasite. For a while it seemed that the passenger pigeon was host to two endemic lice that followed its host into extinction. In 1937, over two decades after Martha keeled over in her cage, R. O. Malcomson was examining feather lice in an old collection when he came upon three specimens collected from passenger pigeons. He concluded that they were unlike any other bird lice and named them Columbicola extinctus, or “extinct pigeon” louse. They were long and thin and likely inhabited the vanes of the wing feathers. Decades later J. Tendiero found what he described as a new species of feather louse that was also dependent on the passenger pigeon. He named it Campanulotes defectus.73

  Lice will never engender much affection among the public, but these two species rode the passenger pigeon into some notoriety. Nigel Stork and H. C. Lyal used them as their principal examples of what they called “co-extinctions” in a 1993 Nature article. They make the important point that every time a sexy species becomes extinct, the tiny, cryptic creatures that depended on it disappear as well. And sometimes the host doesn’t have to disappear. When the last wild California condors and black-footed ferrets were taken into captivity, they were disinfected so as not to contaminate other individuals already in cages. Only later did scientists learn that among the parasites they destroyed were one from each of the more charismatic animals that occur on no others.

  As is often the case with science (and one of the things that separates it from certain other epistemological systems), the truth can be inconvenient. In this instance, subsequent research determined that Columbicola extinctus was more catholic in its habitat than Malcomson thought: it also thrives on the very much alive band-tailed pigeon. The specimens he looked at had broken setae (hairlike bristles on some invertebrates); without that damage they were identical to the extant lice. As for Campanulotes defectus, it apparently never came close to passenger pigeons in life, for it was an Australian species that had somehow come to be mislabeled. So the story of the two parasites proves to be less than what it seemed, and in a way that is too bad. But the ledger of such things now shows two fewer extinctions, and the plight of puny parasites has a slightly higher profile.

  Chapter 2

  My Blood Shall Be Your Blood: Indians and Passenger Pigeons

  The Spirits of men came upon the earth seeking incarnation, among the birds and animals, with an appeal, “Ho, Elder Brother, the children have no bodies.” But they were unheeded, until the pigeon came and answered: “Your children shall have bodies; my bones shall be their bones, my flesh their flesh, my blood their blood, and they shall see with my eyes.”

  —SENECA LEGEND AS TOLD BY JOHN C. FRENCH

  When, where, and how the first humans entered the western hemisphere are now matters of heated dispute. Most archaeologists would agree it was no later than about fifteen thousand years ago. These humans survived on the bounty of the land that awaited them, and they exploited the biological resources that best served their needs. The people who lived within range of the passenger pigeon, particularly in places where the birds nested regularly, incorporated the species into their diets and often into their social and religious lives as well. The story of the passenger pigeon’s relationship with the early people of North America is found in the archaeological record written in bone.

  Above all other animals, the white-tailed deer was a staple of the people who lived in the forests of the eastern United States and Canada. A single deer represented a large quantity of protein for the successful hunter and came with such bonuses as a valuable hide, bones, and often antlers. Among birds, the wild turkey was king. But when other food sources were to be easily had, humans sought variety. Much of this variety was available only seasonally. Prehistoric Indians inhabiting western Michigan, for example, focused almost exclusively on lake sturgeon during the spawning period. Many of these traditions survived into historical times, ceasing only when white activities either prevented further access to the resource or so lowered prey populations there was nothing left to take.1

  Among birds relied on for food by Native American groups within passenger pigeon range, only the wild turkey was of greater importance than the pigeon. Although passenger pigeon remains are frequent at some sites, they are lacking or in low numbers at others. In understanding this, it is important to note that the archaeological record reflects use by the people living in a given place, and not necessarily the abundance of the animal. With passenger pigeons, abundance was at best seasonal, and in some years the birds may have been present in small numbers or even absent.2

  Beyond that, there is the matter of taphonomy, or what happens to a carcass. In northern Minnesota, for instance, beavers appear so often in prehistoric sites one might conclude that they were more important to those people than bison were to the Plains Indians. But the reality is that beaver bones are dense and preserve readily in the soils of that region. Bird bones, in contrast, are hollow and often don’t preserve well. The remains of geese, turkeys, and ducks do show up in large numbers in some places, but they have larger bones than passenger pigeons and thus were more likely to be preserved.3 Where Indians could exploit nesting passenger pigeons, they overwhelmingly favored the squabs, whose bones had not yet even hardened. Many squabs were cooked in soups and stews, which would have further reduced the resiliency of their bones. Finally, many of the young birds were eaten at the temporary camps set up at the nesting sites and never made it back to the permanent dwelling places.

  However, at some archaeological excavations the pigeons do make up a significant portion of the faunal remains. Modoc Rock Shelter, a riverine site four thousand to six thousand years old in southwestern Illinois, proved to be a trove of animal remains. Over nine hundred bird bones representing at least fifty-six species were recovered, most of which were waterfowl. Of the remainder, sixty-seven bones were of turkey and forty-six of passenger pigeons. It is not an area where passenger pigeons likely nested, but noted zooarchaeologist Paul Parmalee surmised that hunters caught the pigeons as they migrated along the bluffs. The species may also have used the woods surrounding Modoc Rock Shelter as winter roosts.4

  Meadowcroft Rockshelter, located in Washington County in western Pennsylvania, is one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in the eastern half of the United States. Careful analysis of the evidence discovered there indicates that people used the site for at least sixteen thousand years and possibly as long as nineteen thousand years, making it perhaps the oldest known site of human habitation in all of North America. The shelter is under a cliff overhang sixty feet above Cross Creek and littered at the base with geologic rubble that has been accumulating for millennia. Hunters working the rich lands of the upper Ohio River valley used the place as a campsite where they could be protected from inclement weather. Remains have been recovered demonstrating the presence of human groups from Paleo-Indians through Mound Builders and those of the Woodland and Mississippian cultures that flourished until about the time of the European arrival.

  Nonhuman predators, particularly birds of prey, also utilized the ledge
s and rocks to den, nest, and roost; their legacy is represented by the incredible deposits of small birds and mammals, which were not heavily exploited by their human competitors. This aggregation of biological relics assembled by such a wide variety of species over so many thousands of years led paleontologist John Guilday to reflect on the uniqueness of Meadowcroft: “It is a site archaeologists dream of. Here is a chance to look at a vanished fauna across the board; a chance to match culture and environment through the vagaries of time with the greatest of clarity.”5

  Archaeologists have identified 151 groups of animals among the remains, making Meadowcroft’s archaeofauna one of the most diverse known from any North American site. Most of this total are from the pellets regurgitated by hawks and owls, with the latter contributing the large majority. Southern flying squirrels, passenger pigeons, and toads (species?) comprise two thirds of the vertebrate remains that have been identified. Of the 13,350 bird bones found, 75 percent are from the pigeons, representing at least 810 individuals. A high proportion of these are squabs, which rarely show up in human-generated remains. But the flightless chicks would have been perfect targets for the predatory birds that left behind most of these bones. If not for these hawks and owls, we would have no inkling that passenger pigeons nested in southwestern Pennsylvania, since they evidently stopped doing so before recorded history.6

  Passenger pigeon bones are also scattered through various prehistoric sites farther east. Significant concentrations, for example, have been uncovered at Uren and Lawson, both in Ontario. A particularly rich discovery of passenger pigeon bones was made at Lamoka Lake in Schuyler County, New York, a site dating back forty-five hundred years, which was principally occupied as a hunting camp. Of the 359 bird bones found, 274 are from passenger pigeons. These represented forty-three individual pigeons. Two Pennsylvania sites, dating from 100 B.C. to A.D. 1190, yielded more wild turkey bones than any other bird remains, but in one, ruffed grouse were second and passenger pigeons third, while in the other the pigeon was second. Sheep Rock Shelter in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, is unusual, if not unique, for having been used by people for over nine thousand years and being situated near a pigeon nesting area. Pigeon bones have been found at all of the many layers of human occupation. At the oldest levels, remains of this species outnumbered those of all other birds. Archaeologists also discovered small quartz pebbles, which proved to be crop stones ingested by passenger pigeons and turkeys to aid digestion.7

  Archaeologist H. Edwin Jackson identified 107 sites in the Southeast that had yielded at least one passenger pigeon bone. They span periods from the late Pleistocene to the early nineteenth century. The earliest sites of human habitation were from the Late Paleo-Indian (16,500–13,500 B.C.) stratum of Dust Cave in Alabama. But impressive quantities of passenger pigeons did not appear until the Late Woodland Period (A.D. 700–1000), for which a greater number of sites are known. The Oliver site in northwestern Tennessee produced 1,181 passenger pigeon bones, which constituted 87 percent of all the bird remains found there. Jackson says this is the first “clear evidence for the exploitation of roosting locations.” That may be the case, but since mass nestings did occur during historic times in Kentucky, and at least once each in Oklahoma and Mississippi, the possibility exists that these were nesting sites.8

  A paper in 1985 by Thomas Neumann fueled some debate by claiming that the paucity of passenger pigeon remains at prehistoric sites within its range demonstrates that the species existed in small numbers during prehistoric times due to predation and competition for food by Native Americans. Only after Indian populations plummeted due to the diseases brought by Europeans were passenger pigeons able to attain historical abundance. This increase in pigeons was further helped by the reduction of deer, turkey, and other nonhuman competitors due to the appetites of the new arrivals. The author, however, omitted many of the sites where pigeon remains have been found in large quantities. He also neglected to mention the many early European descriptions depicting vast flocks of passenger pigeons. And finally, he greatly overestimated the degree and impacts that human competition and predation would have had on the pigeon population. For these and other reasons, archaeologists have largely repudiated this assertion, but regrettably it gained traction by inclusion in Charles Mann’s popular 1491.9

  Professor Jackson’s work does suggest that pigeon numbers in the Southeast began to rise between A.D. 900 and 1000, about five hundred years before the appearance of Europeans. But the reasons for this increase are impossible to divine with certainty. Since nesting and roosting areas provided the best, if not only, opportunity to obtain large numbers of pigeons, perhaps people devoted more time to identify where these places were, figuring the extra effort would pay off in the easily obtained provender. Archaeologist Paul Parmalee offered the possibility that the paucity of passenger pigeon remains at Illinois sites might be “attributed to greater local abundance or availability of more preferred species.”10 A change in the availability of those other organisms might have spurred greater interest in passenger pigeons. Jackson believes it can be explained by a shift to agriculture by Native peoples that both reduced their consumption of mast and provided corn as a new food source for the pigeons. But the amount of corn that would have been available to the pigeons was dwarfed by the edibles provided by vast forests. In addition, the dominant nut eaten by woodland people was hickory, which was too big for pigeons. Acorns were not an important food source for humans in the eastern forests because they required a lot of preparation to remove the bitter tannin. And among the acorns, those from the white-oak types were sweeter and thus consumed more often by people, whereas passenger pigeons preferred the black-oak types that stayed on the trees for two years. Also, as we have seen, the pigeon diet was not restricted to mast.

  Dr. Terry Martin of the Illinois State Museum has been a zooarchaeologist for over thirty years. His office is in a large warehouselike structure that houses both the museum’s collection and most of its scientists. He has in a drawer a small box of passenger pigeon bones recovered from Fort Ouiatenon, an eighteenth-century fort in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. The French founded and ran the place, but a large Wea village stood nearby, ensuring frequent trade and visitation. (Wea were of the Miami people.) Among the contents of the box is a pigeon sternum, paper-thin but strong enough to anchor the powerful muscles that propelled the bird in its meanders through the sky. The flesh likely helped fuel people who coexisted with the pigeon for centuries if not millennia.

  OF SUSTENANCE AND SPIRIT

  God sent a great storm and gathered all of these birds up and blew them all into the sea and drowned them all, and the reason for his doing this was that God had prepared this great number of food for the Indians, and when he saw that the white man was starting to kill them, he did this thing. This is why the pigeons all disappeared at one time and were not killed out as the deer were.

  —CHEROKEE TALE EXPLAINING THE EXTINCTION OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON, INDIAN PIONEER HISTORY, VOL. 32

  To the Jesuits go the credit of being the first European note takers to penetrate the interior of what would become Ontario and Quebec, and the eastern and Midwestern parts of the United States. As their mission was to save souls, the priests spent time with the people they encountered and provided glimpses of their practices and beliefs. These accounts were recorded as letters or relations. In one dated 1636 and entitled “The Ideas of the Hurons Regarding the Nature and Condition of the Soul, Both in This Life and After Death,” the author, Le Jeune, wrote, “At the feast of the Dead, which takes place about every twelve years, the souls quit the cemeteries, and in the opinion of some are changed into Turtledoves, which they pursue later in the woods, with bow and arrow, to broil and eat.” He goes on to speak of the Huron notion that each being has two souls: “One separates itself from the body at death, yet remains in the cemetery until the feast of the Dead—after which it either changes into a turtledove, or, according to the most common belief, it goes away at once to the vi
llage of the souls.”11

  Two Indian tales, one from the Cherokee and the other from the Neutrals (a now-extinct Iroquois group who were concentrated in eastern Canada and upstate New York), are strikingly similar to each other and, indeed, to some parts of the Old Testament. It has been suggested that early contact with Europeans might have planted the idea of Noah’s guiding dove. In the Cherokee language, the passenger pigeon was a woyi. A dearth of mast threatened birds and mammals with starvation throughout the mountains. But through its efforts, a woyi found one territory rich in nuts and thus rescued its neighbors. In the other story, the Neutral also faced starvation one winter. The culprit this time was the enraged manitou who locked all the waters securely in thick ice, thereby depriving people of the life-giving fish they depended on. But then a miraculous thing occurred. Clouds of pigeons arrived clutching branches of huckleberries in their beaks. As the birds passed over the village, they dropped the berries, leaving a trail from whence they had come and to where they were headed. Following the discarded fruit, the Indians trudged for days until they finally found the source of the berries and were saved.12

  The Iroquois and the Cherokee also performed pigeon dances and songs. The Iroquois pigeon dance could be enacted at any time of the year, but was the opening piece in the annual Maple Festival. The dance-song featured two leaders moving abreast and shaking horn rattles, while pairs of dancers, alternating between men and women, stomp-stepped in a big circle. As part of their Green Corn Festival, the Cherokee performed a dance that emulated the predator-prey relationship between the pigeon and the pigeon hawk (presumably merlin). Just as the falcon would dart into flocks to whisk away its victim, a dancer pretending to be the raptor would rush the line of his comrades and pick one off. Another dance was a pantomime depicting the hunting of pigeons at a roost.13