The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [431]
Unable to stay idle, Roosevelt began drafting an ornithological report for AOU on how sparrows were different in Long Island and Virginia owing to climate variations. And he was perplexed by some avian mysteries. Why did wood thrushes flourish at Sagamore Hill whereas they were scarce at Pine Knot? He kept detailed bird lists for Virginia about species he encountered: Baltimore and orchard orioles, flickers, redheaded woodpeckers, purple grackles, bluebirds, all nesting “within a stone’s throw of the rambling attractive house, with its numerous outbuildings, old garden, orchard, and venerable locusts and catalpas.”27
For an Audubonist, this was a real feast. But Roosevelt had an eerie experience that May, which he would talk about for years to come. Keenly observant, he saw a flock of passenger pigeons near Charlottesville. Because Darwin, whose name Roosevelt still uttered with reverence, had begun On the Origin of Species with a report about experiments conducted on backyard pigeons from around the world, Roosevelt was interested in their evolutionary characteristics. Darwin had successfully bred pigeons, concluding that they were all descendants of Columba livia (the rock dove). He had speculated that if the varied pigeon species mated in the wild, the offspring would eventually lose their unique traits and resemble the rock dove: this was due to a process that Darwin called reversion.28
What Roosevelt also knew that May 18 about the passenger pigeons (a species on the edge of extinction) was that no flock had been sighted in the wild by an ornithologist for more than twenty-five years. In the era before DNA records containing gene analysis and ancestral chromosome fusions, knowledge about birds’s genetic makeup came from detailed field reports in many towns. Roosevelt was thus fulfilling his public duty by reporting on what he saw near Pine Knot. “There were about a dozen, unmistakable with their pointed tails and brown-red breasts, flying in characteristically tight formation to and fro before alighting on a tall, dead pine,” the historian Edmund Morris writes in Theodore Rex. “He compared them to some mourning doves in the field beyond; and there was no question of the difference between the two species.”29
Because pigeons were delicious, many species were being driven into extinction by market hunters. For example, in 1904 the Choiseul crested pigeon (Microgoura meeki) had vanished; the last one was sighted in the Solomon Islands near New Guinea. In early 1907 two American birds had gone extinct in Hawaii: the Molokai’O’o (Moho bishopi) and black mano (Oreganis funera). This led Roosevelt to create, in 1909, a huge federal bird reservation in the westernmost Hawaiian islands. But the Molokai’O’o and black mano were rare birds, easily shot by hunters. By contrast, the destruction of the passenger pigeon affected all of North America, where it was known to be the most abundant bird of all time. Before the Europeans arrived in the New World, nearly half of all the birds there were passenger pigeons. To pioneers, they were an unlimited food supply.
Robert B. Roosevelt had tried to stop this slaughter of passenger pigeons in the 1880s, introducing skeet shooting to sportsmen as an alternative, but to little avail. The last recorded passenger pigeon was shot around 1900—nobody had gotten within sight of a flock since then. William T. Hornaday had already shown passenger pigeons in a tombstone cartoon as being extinct (though he added a hopeful question mark). But now Roosevelt had seen a flock at Pine Knot in 1907. Excitedly, Roosevelt hurried back to the cabin and wrote Oom John an effusive letter, insisting that they were “no doubt” passenger pigeons. Burroughs quickly wrote back an encouraging