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When passenger pigeons found an area with grain or nuts to eat, they formed a long, linear front that advanced forward, heads peck-peck-pecking at the ground. Acorns, beechnuts, and chestnuts; strawberries, huckleberries, and blackberries; wheat, oats, and maize—all went down the pigeons’ iridescently feathered gullets. To grab their share, the pigeons at the rear constantly fluttered over the heads of their compatriots and landed at the leading edge of the front. Then the birds in the back flew over them. The line of birds advanced in a continuous swirl, the conservationist John Muir recalled, “revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing roar that could be heard a long way off.”

Passenger pigeons traveled in massive assemblies, billions strong, that rained enough excrement to force people indoors. As a boy Muir saw a mob of birds sweep “thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few minutes.” Pigeons destroyed farm fields so often that the bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated the species in 1703. A hundred and ten years later the artist and naturalist John J. Audubon saw a flock passing overhead in a single cloud for three whole days. “The air,” Audubon wrote later, “was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.” When he visited their roost, the “dung lay almost two inches deep” for miles.

The Pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash, and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found it quite useless to speak [over the roar of wings], or even to shout to those persons who were nearest to me.

According to Arlie W. Schorger, author of a definitive study on the bird, in Audubon’s day at least one out of every four birds in North America was a passenger pigeon.

In colonial times, the Haudenosaunee celebrated pigeon roostings by gathering around the birds for a massive feast. Horatio Jones, captured as a teenager by the Seneca (one of the six nations in the alliance), participated around 1782 in a mass pigeon hunt near the Genesee River. The birds, roosting on low branches, were too full and too stupid to flee. Men knocked them down with poles or toppled the trees they were sitting on. Children wrung the birds’ necks while women stewed them in pots, smoked them over fires, and dried them to preserve in storehouses. Sometimes the Seneca ate half a dozen squabs at a time, necks tied together in a carnivorous sculpture. “It was a festival season,” Jones later recalled. “Even the meanest dog in camp had his fill of pigeon meat.” In Haudenosaunee lore, the birds represented nature’s generosity, a species literally selected by the spirit world to nourish humankind.

Non-Indians, too, saw the pigeon as a symbol of the earth’s richness—“the living, pulsing, throbbing, and picturesque illustration of the abundance of food, prepared by bountiful Nature, in all her supreme ecstasy of redundant production of life and energy,” one businessman/pigeon enthusiast gushed. Colonists grilled the birds, stewed them with salt pork, and baked them into pies; they plucked their feathers to stuff mattresses, pickled them in barrels as a winter treat, and fed them to livestock. Incredibly, hunters in the countryside captured tens of thousands of pigeons in nets and sent the living birds to urban hunting clubs for target practice.

Then, suddenly, the passenger pigeon vanished—the last bird, Martha, named after Martha Washington, died on September 1, 1914. The passenger pigeon remained an emblem of natural bounty, but now it also represented the squandering of that bounty. In 1947 the conservationist Aldo Leopold dedicated a monument to the pigeon near the site of its greatest recorded nesting,