Our Vanishing Wild Life Part 2

It is a serious thing to exterminate a species of any of the vertebrate animals. There are probably millions of people who do not realize that civilized (!) man is the most persistently and wickedly wasteful of all the predatory animals. The lions, the tigers, the bears, the eagles and hawks, serpents, and the fish-eating fishes, all live by destroying life; but they kill only what they think they can consume. If something is by chance left over, it goes to satisfy the hunger of the humbler creatures of prey. _In a state of nature, where wild creatures prey upon wild creatures, such a thing as wanton, wholesale and utterly wasteful slaughter is almost unknown!_

When the wild mink, weasel and skunk suddenly finds himself in the midst of scores of man's confined and helpless domestic fowls, or his caged gulls in a zoological park, an unusual criminal pa.s.sion to murder for the joy of killing sometimes seizes the wild animal, and great slaughter is the result.

From the earliest historic times, it has been the way of savage man, red, black, brown and yellow, to kill as the wild animals do,--only what he can use, or _thinks_ he can use. The Cree Indian impounded small herds of bison, and sometimes killed from 100 to 200 at one time; but it was to make sure of having enough meat and hides, and because he expected to use the product. I think that even the worst enemies of the plains Indians hardly will accuse them of killing large numbers of bison, elk or deer merely for the pleasure of seeing them fall, or taking only their teeth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIX RECENTLY EXTERMINATED NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS Great Auk Labrador Duck Eskimo Curlew Pallas Cormorant Pa.s.senger Pigeon Carolina Parrakeet]

It has remained for the wolf, the sheep-killing dog and civilized man to make records of wanton slaughter which puts them in a cla.s.s together, and quite apart from other predatory animals. When a man can kill bison for their tongues alone, bull elk for their "tusks" alone, and shoot a whole colony of hippopotami,--actually damming a river with their bloated and putrid carca.s.ses, all untouched by the knife,--the men who do such things must be cla.s.sed with the cruel wolf and the criminal dog.

It is now desirable that we should pause in our career of destruction long enough to look back upon what we have recently accomplished in the total extinction of species, and also note what we have blocked out for the immediate future. Here let us erect a monument to the dead species of our own times.

It is to be doubted whether, up to this hour, any man has made a list of the species of North American birds that have become extinct during the past sixty years. The specialists have no time to spare from their compound differential microscopes, and the bird-killers are too busy with shooting, netting and clubbing to waste any time on such trifles as exterminated species. What does a market-shooter care about birds that can not be killed a second time? As for the farmers, they are so busy raising hogs and prices that their best friends, the birds, get scant attention from them,--until a hen-hawk takes a chicken!

Down South, the negroes and poor whites may slaughter robins for food by the ten thousand; but does the northern farmer bother his head about a trifle of that kind? No, indeed. Will he contribute any real money to help put a stop to it? Ask him yourself.

Let us pause long enough to reckon up some of our expenditures in species, and in millions of individuals. Let us set down here, in cold blood, a list of the species of our own North American birds that have been totally exterminated in our own times. After that we will have something to say about other species that soon will be exterminated; and the second task is much greater than the first.

ROLL CALL OF THE DEAD SPECIES OF AMERICAN BIRDS

THE GREAT AUK,--_Plautus-impennis_, (Linn.), was a sea-going diving bird about the size of a domestic goose, related to the guillemots, murres and puffins. For a bird endowed only with flipper-like wings, and therefore absolutely unable to fly, this species had an astonis.h.i.+ng geographic range. It embraced the sh.o.r.es of northern Europe to North Cape, southern Greenland, southern Labrador, and the Atlantic coast of North America as far south as Ma.s.sachusetts. Some say, "as far south as Ma.s.sachusetts, the Carolinas and Florida," but that is a large order, and I leave the A.O.U. to prove that if it can. In the life history of this bird, a great tragedy was enacted in 1800 by sailors, on Funk Island, north of Newfoundland, where men were landed by a s.h.i.+p, and spent several months slaughtering great auks and trying out their fat for oil. In this process, the bodies of thousands of auks were burned as fuel, in working up the remains of tens of thousands of others.

On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the great auk was exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844. Many natives ate this bird with relish, and being easily captured, either on land or sea, the commercialism of its day soon obliterated the species. The last living specimen was seen in 1852, and the last dead one was picked up in Trinity Bay, Ireland, in 1853. There are about 80 mounted and unmounted skins in existence, four skeletons, and quite a number of eggs. An egg is worth about $1200 and a good mounted skin at least double that sum.

THE LABRADOR DUCK,--_Camptorhynchus labradoricus_, (Gmel.).--This handsome sea-duck, of a species related to the eider ducks of arctic waters, became totally extinct about 1875, before the scientific world even knew that its existence was threatened. With this species, the exact and final cause of its extinction is to this day unknown. It is not at all probable, however, that its unfortunate blotting out from our bird fauna was due to natural causes, and when the truth becomes known, it is very probable that the hand of man will be revealed.

The Labrador duck bred in Labrador, and once frequented our Atlantic coast as far south as Chesapeake Bay; but it is said that it never was very numerous, at least during the twenty-five years preceding its disappearance. About thirty-five skins and mounted museum specimens are all that remain to prove its former existence, and I think there is not even one skeleton.

THE PALLAS CORMORANT,--_Carbo perspicillatus_, (Pallas).--In 1741, when the Russian explorer, Commander Bering, discovered the Bering or Commander Islands, in the far-north Pacific, and landed upon them, he also discovered this striking bird species. Its plumage both above and below was a dark metallic green, with blue iridescence on the neck and purple on the shoulders. A pale ring of naked skin around each eye suggested the Latin specific name of this bird. The Pallas cormorant became totally extinct, through causes not positively known, about 1852.

THE Pa.s.sENGER PIGEON,--_Ectopistes migratoria_, (Linn.).--We place this bird in the totally-extinct cla.s.s, not only because it is extinct in a wild state, but only one solitary individual, a twenty-year-old female in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens, now remains alive. One living specimen and a few skins, skeletons and stuffed specimens are all that remain to show for the uncountable millions of pigeons that swarmed over the United States, only yesterday as it were!

There is no doubt about where those millions have gone. They went down and out by systematic, wholesale slaughter for the market and the pot, before the shotguns, _clubs_ and _nets_ of the earliest American pot-hunters. Wherever they nested they were slaughtered.

It is a long and shameful story, but the grisly skeleton of its Michigan chapter can be set forth in a few words. In 1869, from the town of Hartford, Mich., _three car loads_ of dead pigeons were s.h.i.+pped to market each day for _forty days_, making a total of 11,880,000 birds. It is recorded that another Michigan town marketed 15,840,000 in two years.

(See Mr. W.B. Mershon's book, "The Pa.s.senger Pigeon.")

Alexander Wilson, the pioneer American ornithologist, was the man who seriously endeavored to estimate by computations the total number of pa.s.senger pigeons in one flock that was seen by him. Here is what he has said in his "American Ornithology":

"To form a rough estimate of the daily consumption of one of these immense flocks, let us first attempt to calculate the numbers of that above mentioned, as seen in pa.s.sing between Frankfort and the Indiana territory. If we suppose this column to have been one mile in breadth (and I believe it to have been much more) and that it moved at the rate of one mile in a minute, four hours, the time it continued pa.s.sing, would make its whole length two hundred and forty miles. Again, supposing that each square yard of this moving body comprehended three pigeons; the square yards in the whole s.p.a.ce multiplied by three would give 2,230,272,000 pigeons! An almost inconceivable mult.i.tude, and yet probably far below the actual amount."

"Happening to go ash.o.r.e one charming afternoon, to purchase some milk at a house that stood near the river, and while talking with the people within doors, I was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rus.h.i.+ng roar, succeeded by instant darkness, which, on the first moment, I took for a tornado about to overwhelm the house and every thing around in destruction. The people observing my surprise, coolly said, 'It is only the pigeons!' On running out I beheld a flock, thirty or forty yards in width, sweeping along very low, between the house and the mountain or height that formed the second bank of the river. These continued pa.s.sing for more than a quarter of an hour, and at length varied their bearing so as to pa.s.s over the mountains, behind which they disappeared before the rear came up.

"In the Atlantic States, though they never appear in such unparalleled mult.i.tudes, they are sometimes very numerous; and great havoc is then made amongst them with the gun, the clap-net, and various other implements of destruction. As soon as it is ascertained in a town that the pigeons are flying numerously in the neighborhood, the gunners rise _en ma.s.se_; the clap-nets are spread out on suitable situations, commonly on an open height in an old buckwheat field, four or five live pigeons, _with their eyelids sewed up_,[A] are fastened on a movable stick, a small hut of branches is fitted up for the fowler at the distance of forty or fifty yards. By the pulling of a string, the stick on which the pigeons rest is alternately elevated and depressed, which produces a fluttering of their wings, similar to that of birds alighting. This being perceived by the pa.s.sing flocks, they descend with great rapidity, and finding corn, buckwheat, etc, strewed about, begin to feed, and are instantly, by the pulling of a cord, covered by the net. In this manner ten, twenty, and even thirty dozen have been caught at one sweep. Meantime the air is darkened with large bodies of them moving in various directions; the woods also swarm with them in search of acorns, and the thundering of musquetry is perpetual on all sides from morning to night. Wagon loads of them are poured into market, where they sell from fifty to twenty-five and even twelve cents per dozen; and pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast and supper, until the very name becomes sickening."

[Footnote A: To-day, we think that the fowlers of the roccolos of northern Italy are very cruel in their methods of catching song-birds wholesale for the market (chapter xi); but our own countrymen of Wilson's day were just as cruel in the method described above.]

The range of the pa.s.senger pigeon covered nearly the whole United States from the Atlantic coast westward to the Rocky Mountains. A few bold pigeons crossed the Rocky Mountains into Oregon, northern California and Was.h.i.+ngton, but only as "stragglers," few and far between. The wide range of this bird was worthy of a species that existed in millions, and it was persecuted literally all along the line.

The greatest slaughter was in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1848 Ma.s.sachusetts gravely pa.s.sed a law protecting the _netters_ of wild pigeons from foreign interference! There was a fine of $10 for damaging nets, or frightening pigeons away from them. This was on the theory that the pigeons were so abundant they could not by any possibility ever become scarce, and that pigeon-slaughter was a legitimate industry.

In 1867, the State of New York found that the wild pigeon needed protection, and enacted a law to that effect. The year 1868 was the last year in which great numbers of pa.s.senger pigeons nested in that State.

Eaton, in "The Birds of New York," said that "millions of birds occupied the timber along Bell's Run, near Ceres, Alleghany County, on the Pennsylvania line."

In 1870, Ma.s.sachusetts gave pigeons protection except during an "open season," and in 1878 Pennsylvania elected to protect pigeons on their nesting grounds.

The pa.s.senger pigeon millions were destroyed so quickly, and so thoroughly _en ma.s.se_, that the American people utterly failed to comprehend it, and for thirty years obstinately refused to believe that the species had been suddenly wiped off the map of North America. There was years of talk about the great flocks having "taken refuge in South America," or in Mexico, and being still in existence. There were surmises about their having all "gone out to sea," and perished on the briny deep.

A thousand times, at least, wild pigeons have been "reported" as having been "seen." These rumors have covered nearly every northern state, the whole of the southwest, and California. For years and years we have been patiently writing letters to explain over and over that the band-tailed pigeon of the Pacific coast, and the red-billed pigeon of Arizona and the southwest are neither of them the pa.s.senger pigeon, and never can be.

There was a long period wherein we believed many of the pigeon reports that came from the states where the birds once were most numerous; but that period has absolutely pa.s.sed. During the past five years large cash rewards, aggregating about $5000, have been offered for the discovery of one nesting pair of genuine pa.s.senger pigeons. Many persons have claimed this reward (of Professor C.F. Hodge, of Clark University, Worcester, Ma.s.s.), and many claims have been investigated. The results have disclosed many _mourning doves_, but not one pigeon. Now we understand that the quest is closed, and hope has been abandoned.

The pa.s.senger pigeon is a dead species. The last wild specimen (so we believe) that ever will reach the hands of man, was taken near Detroit, Michigan, on Sept. 14, 1908, and mounted by C. Campion. That is the one definite, positive record of the past ten years.

The fate of this species should be a lasting lesson to the world at large. Any wild bird or mammal species can be exterminated by commercial interests in twenty years time, or less.

THE ESKIMO CURLEW,_--Numenius borealis_, (Forst.). This valuable game bird once ranged all along the Atlantic coast of North America, and wherever found it was prized for the table. It preferred the fields and meadows to the sh.o.r.e lines, and was the companion of the plovers of the uplands, especially the golden plover. "About 1872," says Mr. Forbush, "there was a great flight of these birds on Cape Cod and Nantucket. They were everywhere; and enormous numbers were killed. They could be bought of boys at six cents apiece. Two men killed $300 worth of these birds at that time."

Apparently, that was the beginning of the end of the "dough bird," which was another name for this curlew. In 1908 Mr. G.H. Mackay stated that this bird and the golden plover had decreased 90 per cent in fifty years, and in the last ten years of that period 90 per cent of the remainder had gone. "Now (1908)," says Mr. Forbush, "ornithologists believe that the Eskimo curlew is practically extinct, as only a few specimens have been recorded since the beginning of the twentieth century." The very last record is of two specimens collected at Waco, York County, Nebraska, in March, 1911, and recorded by Mr. August Eiche.

Of course, it is possible that other individuals may still survive; but so far as our knowledge extends, the species is absolutely dead.

In the West Indies and the Guadeloupe Islands, five species of macaws and parrakeets have pa.s.sed out without any serious note of their disappearance on the part of the people of the United States. It is at least time to write brief obituary notices of them.

We are indebted to the Hon. Walter Rothschild, of Tring, England, for essential facts regarding these species as set forth in his sumptuous work "Extinct Birds".

THE CUBAN TRICOLORED MACAW,--_Ara tricolor_, (Gm.). In 1875, when the author visited Cuba and the Isle of Pines, he was informed by Professor Poey that he was "about ten years too late" to find this fine species alive. It was exterminated for food purposes, about 1864, and only four specimens are known to be in existence.

[Ill.u.s.tration SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN Great Auk Pallas Cormorant Labrador Duck Pa.s.senger Pigeon Eskimo Curlew Cuban Tricolor Macaw Gosse's Macaw Guadeloupe Macaw Yellow Winged Green Parrot Purple Guadaloupe Parakeet Carolina Parakeet EXTERMINATED BY CIVILIZED MAN 1840-1910]

GOSSE'S MACAW,--_Ara gossei_, (Roth.).--This species once inhabited the Island of Jamaica. It was exterminated about 1800, and so far as known not one specimen of it is in existence.

GUADELOUPE MACAW,--_Ara guadeloupensis_, (Clark).--All that is known of the life history of this large bird is that once it inhabited the Guadeloupe Islands. The date and history of its disappearance are both unknown, and there is not one specimen of it in existence.

YELLOW-WINGED GREEN PARROT,--_Amazona olivacea_, (Gm.).--Of the history of this Guadeloupe species, also, nothing is known, and there appear to be no specimens of it in existence.

PURPLE GUADELOUPE PARRAKEET,--_Anodorhynchus purpurescens_, (Rothschild).--This is another dead species, that once lived in the Guadeloupe Islands, and pa.s.sed away silently and unnoticed at the time, leaving no records of its existence, and no specimens.

THE CAROLINA PARRAKEET,--_Conuropsis carolinensis_, (Linn.), brings us down to the present moment. To this charming little green-and-yellow bird, we are in the very act of bidding everlasting farewell. Ten specimens remain alive in captivity, six of which are in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, three are in the Was.h.i.+ngton Zoological Park and one is in the New York Zoological Park.

Regarding wild specimens, it is possible that some yet remain, in some obscure and _neglected_ corner of Florida; but it is extremely doubtful whether the world ever will find any of them alive. Mrs. Minnie Moore Willson, of Kissimee, Fla. reports the species as totally extinct in Florida. Unless we would strain at a gnat, we may just as well enter this species in the dead cla.s.s; for there is no reason to hope that any more wild specimens ever will be found.

The former range of this species embraced the whole southeastern and central United States. From the Gulf it extended to Albany, N.Y., northern Ohio and Indiana, northern Iowa, Nebraska, central Colorado and eastern Texas, from which it will be seen that once it was widely distributed. It was shot because it was destructive to fruit and for its plumage, and many were trapped alive, to be kept in captivity. I know that one colony, near the mouth of the Sebastian River, east coast of Florida, was exterminated in 1898 by a local hunter, and I regret to say that it was done in the hope of selling the living birds to a New York bird-dealer. By holding bags over the holes in which the birds were nesting, the entire colony, of about 16 birds, was caught.