nonfiction by anna molenaar

Birds of a Feather

Consider the pigeon, also known as the common rock dove. You see them so often it probably took mere milliseconds to render an image in your mind. Feathers in shades of gray, an iridescent neck bobbing along jauntily as it walks. How many individual pigeons have you seen in your life? Hundreds? Thousands? It is estimated that there can be as many as 400 million pigeons in the world, so widespread as to have colonized every continent save for the poles. So ubiquitous hardly anyone bothers to see them at all anymore. 

Imagine now that pigeons disappear so rapidly, drop off the face of the earth so effectively, that there is hardly a record left of them. How many pictures of pigeons do you have on your phone? Good ones, representative of a whole species?

On September 1, 1914, the last Passenger Pigeon died in captivity. We had nearly no pictures of the living specimen. We had some study skins, some feathers and nests, but so few images of the bird as it lived; what it looked like preening, how it slept, what it looked like as it tended to babies. How many videos have you taken of a pigeon acting normally in nature? Given the closeness in genetic makeup, it is assumed a Passenger Pigeon behaved in much the same way as its cousin the rock dove, and thus all our knowledge of the creature is based on its cousin. Nobody was thinking of the future. Even considered that there would be a future that threatened the Passenger Pigeon. 

Or worse: didn’t contain them.

Would you have noticed? How long would it take you to realize that you hadn’t seen a pigeon for a while? Days? Weeks? By the time you noticed its absence, would you have also noticed you cared? Maybe you would have scrolled frantically through your camera roll, searching desperately for a pigeon in the background of a picture, any picture, just to prove that they did exist in so many numbers. Would New Yorkers carry on business as usual, the streets suddenly free from those moving obstacles that so bravely snatch up forgotten food? Would a bistro owner in Paris sweep his section of the sidewalk in the morning and realize there used to be something more to do, some creature he used to chase away from the bread crumbs?

Would you help to look for them, keep an eye on the sky for an errant bird, one of the last of billions? Or would you let it go as all talk, there had to still be pigeons, such a populous species can’t just go extinct?

To imagine a world removed of pigeons is like trying to imagine a world free of ants, or squirrels. True, many have a neutral or no opinion on such creatures, but it is still unnerving to consider.

Because to consider that they can disappear is to consider that maybe our place in this world is not as concrete as we may have thought either.

*

An “Endling” is the last individual of a species. A lonesome thought, to be the very last of your kind. Would you want to know it was just you, that you were the last? I wouldn’t want to know—it removes the chance for hope. I’d rather be left to search, fruitlessly, for another like me, just in case they might be out there. From Benjamin the Tasmanian Tiger nervously pacing his cage, to Lonesome George the giant Pinta Island Tortoise slowly pivoting his head, to Martha, the very last Passenger Pigeon, alone in a cage, endlings have come and gone, saddled with the incredibly sad honor of being the last image of an entire species, the last breathing individual looked upon before they become memory.

Imagine a pigeon. Not difficult, is it? The shades of gray, the iridescent neck bobbing in time with steps. Rather silly steps, not linked with much intelligence. Somehow over the last century we have forgotten the pigeons who, with crucial messages from one army general to another strapped to their legs, flew like bullets over the trenches of World War I. There are bloodlines today that could in theory attribute their continued existence to a single pigeon who flew like the wind and delivered a message that changed the course of a war. These pigeons saved lives. They received medals of honor. 

Pigeons have also served honorably as guinea pigs, acting as scientific models for how the mind works and just what intelligence these “bird brains” possess. They have been taught to operate machinery, guide missiles on a map, and differentiate between Monet and Van Gogh painting styles. Pigeons are easily trained—offer them food and they are sufficiently motivated to complete any task you ask of them. For this they make lovely pets, much calmer and quieter than the parrots society seems to favor. But pigeons are too suburban, too drab, too common. They had their time, and now they are largely unneeded. Unwanted. Nothing but a drop of paint on a backdrop.

Would you notice if they disappeared? Before Europeans colonized North America, it was estimated that there may have been as many as 5 billion Passenger Pigeons flitting about, enough to block out the sun when passing overhead. Habitat loss and encroachment on forests over a sluggish seventy years slowly lessened the populations, then from 1870 to 1890, a decimation. Killed for their meat, for their feathers, for creating huge communal nests on human structures, for just being there. In less than a century, a bird as ubiquitous to North America as the Bald Eagle was gone.

*

Martha was her name. Named after Martha Washington, first lady, and with a mysterious past fitting of a Hollywood starlet, Martha found her final home to be a cage in the Cincinnati zoo. After her cagemates died, she became an endling. The very last one. Previous attempts to breed her had failed, and while Martha puttered around an empty cage, the humans who put her there were staring down the tunnel of extinction on her behalf.

Still, there was hope. The Cincinnati zoo offered a handsome prize of $1000 to anyone who could bring Martha a mate, bringing in media attention and an earnest attempt, but with no success. She continued to live out her days as nature intended, fulfilling her natural lifespan, unaware that with her death would come the death of all the Passenger Pigeons there ever were or would be.

In her final years, Martha suffered a stroke. Her keepers noticed the old girl could no longer make it to her nightly roost; it had become too high for her weakened body. They built her a lower roost, and she adapted. Continued to live. 

Here is what we know: at 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, Martha was found lifeless at the bottom of her cage. On the afternoon of September 1, 1914, the Passenger Pigeon had become officially extinct. 

You can visit Martha’s stuffed and mounted body at the Smithsonian. But you might want to hurry—I am told the exhibit is closing in 2025.  

I guess even the dead can go extinct.

*

De-extinction is tracking to become a reality in the near future. There are efforts to engineer mammoth fetuses from mummified DNA and implant them into elephant surrogate mothers. The Tasmanian Tiger genome has been sequenced and is ready for recreation. And the Passenger Pigeon has gained enough respect to be included in such efforts.

Unfortunately, some of the last DNA remaining from the birds has deteriorated beyond hopes of a pure recreation of the species. The non-profit Revive & Restore has taken this as a small setback, however, and aims to recreate the phenotype of the Pigeon anyway, despite the incomplete genome. They will be filling in the gaps with genetic information from the closest living genetic match: the Band-tailed Pigeon.

What this means is that, in the near future, we may have a bird on earth that walks like a Passenger Pigeon, sounds like a Passenger Pigeon, and looks like a Passenger Pigeon, but that is, at its molecular level, not a Passenger Pigeon. Not technically. 

But if all that stood between you and seeing a pigeon, a simple rock dove pecking at the pavement, was a line or two of DNA, I’m not sure you would mind too terribly. I know I wouldn’t.