The passenger pigeon was once the commonest bird in the world. Before what conservationist Mark Avery terms “the European invasion”, there were some 10 billion of them in the US. But they were good to eat and ridiculously easy to catch. Flocks of pigeons were so vast they darkened the skies: you didn’t have to be a good shot. But what really sealed their fate was the felling of the eastern American deciduous forests on which they relied for food. Although numbers declined over three centuries, the species died out astonishingly quickly – in the course of a few decades. The last passenger pigeon in the wild was shot in 1900 but the final member of the species survived in Cincinnati Zoo until 1 September 1914, when a pigeon named Martha died. Avery opens with a somewhat dry account of the pigeon’s biology, followed by an entertaining 4,000-mile American road trip around the sites associated with the bird, and concludes with a heartfelt plea to prevent the wildlife of the British countryside suffering the fate of Martha’s species: “It is our definition of progress that we need to examine if we are to save nature.”
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