A Feathered River Across the Sky

by Joel Greenberg

  On September 14, a male passenger pigeon was taken by Addison Wilbur at Canandaigua, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. Elon Eaton was present at the shooting and describes the individual in his Birds of New York as one fledged the preceding spring, as it was not yet in full adult plumage. Canada’s last confirmed pigeon was a male whose life ended in Winnepegosis, Manitoba. According to George Atkinson, who stuffed it, the date of its demise was April 10. The bird was “in the pink of condition in every way” and was the “only specimen [he] was ever privileged to handle in the flesh in Manitoba.”32

  The final specimen from 1898 has not hitherto been part of the passenger pigeon literature. The source of the record is Amos Butler, the grandfather of Indiana ornithology, whose monograph The Birds of Indiana (1898) served as the definitive reference for decades. He submitted most of his articles on Indiana birds to the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, including notes published in 1899, 1902, and 1912. Sandwiched between them, “Some Notes on Indiana Birds” appeared in the Auk in 1906. It seems likely that Schorger and other non-Indiana ornithologists assumed that the Auk paper and the 1897 book revealed all that Butler had to say about passenger pigeons in his state. But by overlooking the three papers in the Proceedings they missed two significant records.

  Butler includes reports from a variety of people but makes clear those specimens that he himself saw and identified. In the 1899 paper he provides the details of one recently collected bird: “One mounted by Beasley and Parr of Lebanon, was killed by Frank Young, Wilson P.O., Shelby County, Indiana near that place around September 24, 1898. It was in company with two doves in a patch of wild hemp when found. The specimen is in the possession of W. I. Patterson, Shelbyville, Indiana.” He mentions the record again in the 1902 paper, reiterating the September 24 date and specifically stating, “I have seen this specimen.”33

  Three reports emerge from 1899. The most poorly documented of them is the mere mention in Birds of Western Pennsylvania that Dr. McGrannon shot one at Roulette, Potter County, sometime during that year. Next, in order of increasing documentation, concerns the Little Rock, Arkansas, merchant who received a male pigeon in with a load of quail that arrived from Cabot, Arkansas. He knew the significance of the bird, for he displayed the specimen for a few days with a sign saying it was the last of the species. The time was late December. The report boasting the best credentials of the three is of a young pigeon that was shot in Babcock, Wisconsin, between September 9 and 15. Schorger considered it the last reliable record from the state and published a note in the Auk elaborating upon the initial report. Emerson Hough was part of the group that secured the specimen and averred that he still had the skin in his possession at least as late as 1910. Where it eventually wound up is unknown.34

  STILLED WINGS: THE NEW MILLENNIUM AND THE END OF

  THE PASSENGER PIGEON AS A CREATURE OF THE SKY

  “Who killed Cock Robin?”

  “I,” said the sparrow,

  “With my bow and arrow,

  I killed Cock Robin.”

  “Who saw him die?”

  “I,” said the fly,

  “With my little eye,

  I saw him die.”

  —ANONYMOUS, NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH RHYME

  A first-of-the-year female, Buttons, or the Sargents’ Pigeon as preferred by some purists, is one of the best-known wild birds that North America has produced. Her popular sobriquet refers to the objects that were used by the taxidermist to fill the holes on the sides of her head when the preferred glass eyes were not available. She figured as the main character in Allan Eckert’s 1965 novel, The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, where she was called an adult “he” who had a white splotch on one wing. Christopher Cokinos has written at length about his search for the young man who allegedly shot her, and the dedicated scholar Geoffrey Sea, whose house is next door to where the bird was killed, has spent years ferreting out the details about those involved. What brought these people and others to focus on this particular specimen was Schorger’s proclamation “I am willing to accept as the very last record the specimen taken at Sargents, Pike County, Ohio, on March 24, 1900.”35

  The saga of Buttons began with a 1902 article by W. F. Henninger on the birds of “Middle Southern Ohio.” His passenger pigeon account takes four sentences, the last two of which are relevant here: “On March 24, 1900, a solitary individual was shot by a small boy near Sargents, close to the boundary line of Pike and Scioto Counties, and mounted by the late wife of ex-sheriff C. Barnes of Pike County. This is the only authentic record for twenty years.” A Lutheran minister by profession, Henninger resided in nearby Waverly and was widely respected as an ornithologist and a taxidermist. He failed to comment on the gender or age of the bird, which has led Sea to conclude he never examined it. If that is true, it makes what follows even more critical.36

  If, indeed, the identification rested with Barnes, the record would have warranted no more than a quick mention in any history of the species. But fortunately, Clay Barnes offered to donate the bird to the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in October 1914, the month after the last captive bird died. The original accession card is now missing and the documents that remain are ambiguous on the details of the acquisition. But that card was quoted in a 1955 story that appeared in the Ohio Conservation Bulletin. It was dated February 25, 1915: “Received from Clay Barnes Waverly. Killed by Mr. Barnes himself.” The article relied heavily on the views of Dr. Edward Thomas, who served as both curator of natural sciences at the Ohio State University Museum from 1931 to 1962 and the curator of natural history at the Ohio Historical Society. No one knew the collection better than Thomas. Based on the accession card and other factors less clear, he evidently believed that Barnes had indeed shot the bird and invented the small boy to avoid any disapprobation (shades of Dr. Moody/Mr. Clements). The Waverly Courier Watchman, spurred by the recently passed Ohio law protecting game, had been railing against those who use “rifles in shooting every bird they see,” and thus it was politically inexpedient for the good sheriff to admit that he fell into that category.37

  On the other hand, Thomas assumes that Henninger spoke with the Barneses about the incident. He would have had but a narrow window in which to conduct that conversation, as the bird was shot in late March and Mrs. Barnes died around July 8, just three days before her newly born infant also passed away. (Sea believes mother and child died of arsenic poisoning, as the substance was commonly used in the preparation of specimens.) But if that interview had occurred and the Barneses had made up the boy story, they would have been lying to Henninger’s face or Henninger agreed to go along with the ruse. Sea, though, does not think this talk did ever take place, because of both Mrs. Barnes’s death and local politics: divisions within Pike County at the time would likely have separated the Barneses from the Henningers.

  Decades later, Christopher Cokinos tracked down the supposed shooter, Press Clay Southworth. Southworth had died in 1979, having lived just six years shy of a century. Cokinos describes him in the most glowing terms, calling him “a strong and polite man, witty and usually patient,” who grieved “deeply” for two wives who predeceased him. When Southworth read an article in Modern Maturity magazine in 1968 recounting the Buttons tale, he responded with a letter to the editor giving an extremely detailed recollection of events that took place almost seventy years earlier. The youngster had been tending the cattle in the barnyard when he saw “a strange bird feeding on loose grains of corn.” The bird flushed and landed in a tree. The visitor puzzled Southworth, for it was too big for a mourning dove and flew differently from a rock pigeon. He ran into the house to get permission from his mother to dispatch the bird with the family’s 12-gauge shotgun: “I found the bird perched high in the tree and brought it down without much damage to its appearance. When I took it to the house, Mother exclaimed—‘It’s a passenger pigeon.’” His father concurred in the identification and urged him to take th
e bird to Mrs. Barnes, who prepared the mount, improvising when she discovered she had no glass eyes left.38

  As far as I know, no one since Schorger has examined the question of which record represents the last wild bird. It is, of course, impossible to know when the last wild passenger pigeon died. Buttons, after all, was a young of the year, so it is perfectly possible that one or both of her parents were still around, and if they could have fledged young, so likely could others. Most of these reports, including Buttons, had been first challenged by James Fleming, who seemingly tried to cast doubt on the timing of all specimens collected after September 1898, the date of the most recently killed pigeon in his possession.39

  In my research, I have come upon two records unknown to Schorger that extend the confirmed presence of the species in the wild to 1902. One of these is a specimen at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, which is the last undoubted passenger pigeon known to have been collected in the wild for which there is an extant specimen. From Paul Hahn’s Where Is That Vanished Bird?—an amazing work that gives the location of every known passenger pigeon specimen in the world (along with a few other extinct or nearly extinct birds)—I knew that a passenger pigeon was in the collection at Millikin. A mutual friend contacted David Horn, the ornithologist at Millikin, about my interest, and Horn sent me several photos of the bird in its display case. One shot clearly revealed the label: “This bird was killed in March 25, 1901 near Oakford, Illinois and mounted by O.S. Biggs, San Jose, Illinois.” On the back of the case were the same words with some additional information. Biggs had mounted the bird for M. O. Atterberry, but then purchased it from Atterberry a short time later. The last sentence states, “This was the last Passenger Pigeon killed in Illinois that there is any record of.” And it ends with “O.S. Biggs.” I was flabbergasted to see a specimen that was purportedly taken so late.

  Further research revealed additional details. The front page of the August 1901 issue of the Oologist (vol. 18, no. 8) includes this short note: “Under date of March 25, Mr. O.S. Biggs of San Jose, Ill., writes: ‘A friend sent me a fine specimen of a male Passenger Pigeon which was killed March 12 near Oakford, Illinois. It is the first one I know of being killed here in 8 or 9 years. I have it mounted and in my collection.” For reasons that are not clear, another central Illinois naturalist and friend of Biggs’s, R. M. Barnes, sent a similar letter to the Oologist that was published in April 1923: “We are informed by O.S. Biggs of San Jose, Illinois, that one of these birds [Passenger Pigeon] was killed March 25, 1901 at Oakford, Illinois, and was mounted by him and is still in existence. Owing to the lateness of the date, we thought this capture worthy of record.” Barnes obviously did not know that Biggs had sent the same information to the same journal twenty-two years earlier. The only real contradiction is that the original note as published gave the killing date as March 12 and the letter date as March 25, while Barnes and the label on the back of the case say the bird was shot March 25. I would be inclined to accept March 12, 1901, as the date the bird was shot and March 25 as the date Biggs sent his letter to the Oologist, particularly since it is not clear who wrote the label. But at most the discrepancy is thirteen days and is based on a plausible reason, confusion between the date of Biggs’s letter to the journal and the date of the actual shooting.

  Nothing is known about the circumstances of the bird’s killing or whether Atterberry was even the actual shooter. But both Atterberry and, especially, O. S. Biggs attained enough prominence to have left a historical record. Atterberry and a partner bought what had been a drugstore in Oak-ford, Menard County, in 1892. Later, Atterberry acquired sole ownership in what would become a highly successful business that offered a wide variety of services and products including banking, hardware, drugs, groceries, and sundries. Residents referred to it as Sears Roebuck of Oakford. An operation such as that would have attracted local hunters and others who had unusual items to show or sell, so if Atterberry was not the shooter himself, he would have been in a good position to have acquired a freshly killed passenger pigeon.40

  Biggs (1861–1947) was a college graduate who came from one of the founding families of Mason County. He had eclectic interests and was at various times occupied as a pig farmer, banker, tax assessor, apiarist (vice president of Illinois River Valley Beekeepers Association), and taxidermist. This last pursuit is the most relevant to this story. He donated specimens to the Illinois State Museum and “reportedly” had some of his work displayed in such universities as Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. A note published in the Auk on one of Illinois’s few prairie falcon records credits Biggs as the source of the specimen.41

  Biggs had two daughters, Hazel and Olive. When he died, his extensive natural-history collection was divided between them. Hazel, who also became an accomplished taxidermist, used her home as a small museum that featured the mounts created by her and her father. These holdings were eventually donated to the Illinois State Museum. Olive, a liberal arts major who graduated from Millikin in 1926, wound up giving her birds to Millikin. In the college Bulletin of July 1947, there is a discussion of the contributions collected to help finance a proposed Science Hall: “More than 200 birds and animals were given by Mrs. Cyril Gumbinger (Olive Biggs) ’26. It is a collection her father made through a lifetime, including white owls, eagles, and a passenger pigeon now extinct. It is valued, we are told, at ‘several thousand dollars.’”

  The second record I wish to introduce refers to an Indiana specimen for which all salient facts are known and the identification is beyond dispute; unfortunately, however, the bird itself was destroyed many decades ago. Details appear in those obscure notes of 1902 and 1912 that Amos Butler published in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science.

  The bird was shot on April 3, 1902, and Butler learned about it shortly thereafter “through the kindness of Fletcher Noe,” who operated a pawn/taxidermy shop in Indianapolis. Butler quotes a letter from Charles K. Much-more, a pharmacist in Laurel:

  The bird, which is a beautiful male, was taken by a young man named Crowell, near his home, about two and one-half miles southwest of this place. He reported that there were two. He heard the bird cooing and shot it and brought it to me, having concluded that it was something new. You can imagine how we almost took it away from him when he unrolled it out of a bloody old newspaper and began to inquire if we knew what it was … I used to see them occasionally in Iowa about 1882–3, and although I was then very small, the specimen was not new to me, and I, of course, at once recognized the same.42

  If matters ended with that letter, the record would rest on Muchmore’s identification. Butler quotes him in a number of his papers so he likely was reliable, but his stature would not be enough to carry the weight necessary to establish the veracity of the report. Unfortunately, he never donated the specimen to a collection where it can currently be examined, but he did the next best thing. Butler continues the story in his 1912 paper: “The last verified record for this State is from Franklin County. Two birds were seen, and one was shot, near Laurel, April 3, 1902. The specimen taken was submitted to the writer for verification and was returned to Mr. C.K. Muchmore, the owner, at Laurel.” It is inconceivable that Butler would have misidentified a dead adult-male passenger pigeon that he had the opportunity to study in hand at leisure.43

  I wanted to find out more, but inquiries in Laurel yielded nothing. Might there be a hint of the bird’s fate buried in Butler’s writings? Don Gorney, a longtime birder who enjoys a wild-pigeon chase, became my accomplice on a trip to the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, where most of Butler’s papers are housed. We spent a day perusing the contents of many boxes and realized that almost all of it related to Butler’s social-welfare and prison work. There was, for example, the case of the two young women who tried to bribe their way out of incarceration at a state facility by offering a gardener the only thing they could provide that he felt was of value. They kept their part of the bargain but he reneged on his. An old story, I supp
ose. But we found virtually nothing about birds.

  Undaunted, Don started poking around and learned that the papers we sought were in the possession of the Indiana Audubon Society and kept at their headquarters. The society then passed the material along to their archivist and board member, Alan Bruner. Don contacted him, and Alan graciously invited Don and me to his house, where we could go through two huge boxes of unorganized Butler stuff. Alan lives near Turkey Run State Park, which is three hours from me and two hours from Don. The day I selected turned out to coincide with the season’s first serious discharge of snow. To arrive in advance of the precipitation, I left the day before and stayed at the closest motel. In the morning, the roads slick with slush, I slowly made my way around the S-curve, over one bridge, past the cemetery, and then across the final bridge before reaching Alan’s house. He and his wife, Jackie, answered my knock and the day began. Don arrived shortly thereafter.

  Amos Butler. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

  Alan had moved the two big boxes next to a table off the kitchen. The boxes brimmed with papers of various kinds in no order. Both Alan and Don explained how many hands the contents had gone through before reaching their current state. I was not hopeful.

  Amazingly, however, Alan found them: two letters from Muchmore to Butler, one dated August 30, 1932, and the other just a few weeks later on September 19. We learned that Muchmore obtained the pigeon from Crowell in exchange for “a week’s supply of tobacco trade” (September 19) and that Muchmore stuffed the bird himself. Crowell had since moved to Nebraska.

  Then there was the August 30 letter, which brought closure to the affair, albeit in a disappointing way:

  I am very sorry to report that the pigeon was destroyed some 17 years ago, in this wise: I was taken with tubercular trouble and dropped everything and headed for the mountains. I was in Grant County at the time. Later, I wrote to a friend to go to the store and get my specimens and take them home with him until I might be able to call for them. This he did, but unfortunately his wife promptly threw them into a woodshed attic and the winter rains beating through the roof wrecked them all, so that months afterward when I inquired about them they were gone. I shall always regret my failure to put this specimen in the state museum as you suggested and as I had fully intended to do.