I have, over recent weeks, been reading about birds. Specifically, I have been reading things here and there about how many species of birds are being pushed to extinction.
All the usual reasons for that:
loss of habitat, over-hunting, pesticides and herbicides, housecats, wind
turbines, glass buildings, and on and on.
We need only talk about one
bird to fully understand: the passenger pigeon.
In the early 1800s, some 6 billion
passenger pigeons filled the skies of North America. They were the most abundant bird on the
continent. Migrating flocks of them painted
colors across the skies for hours.
And they were good eating,
which proved their undoing.
By the latter half of the 1800s,
market hunters had set forth, some dispersing across the country by train to
shoot and sell the birds. The birds,
very much a flock creature, tended to remain in tight formations and made
themselves a cinch to find. They also
clustered together in trees to roost.
Easy marks.
Between gross over-hunting and
loss of habitat, the passenger pigeon was utterly doomed by the turn of the new
century. The last passenger pigeon, a
female named Martha, died in 1914 while being cared for at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Today, far too many bird
species are on the verge of being lost, and my give-a-damn level for everything
else suffers for it. I don’t care about
the latest political hatchet job, the next new app, or much of anything else.
Without birds, we are nothing.
—Mitchell Hegman
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