There is a great article about Passenger Pigeons by Bill Loomis in The Detroit News today. It is well worth a read.
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
I hate to be this way, because my commitment to bird conservation is total, but I have been nagged by doubts about the estimates of size of the Passenger Pigeon population. If numbering in the billions like estimated by noted hysterics like Audubon it would be a bird that would have amounted to half or more of the avian bio-mass in North America. The droppings alone would have produced feet, FEET, of droppings within days of roosting in a forest. Yet its disappearance seems to have no known impacts on the environment. Even the conjecture that its lice died with it has now been dis-proven. One would think Native American tradition would have more to say about the spectacle of these flocks. Why has no recipe for Pigeon Pie been handed down from colonial times? I guess I would like a little more scientific information and less anecdotal. Too bad we can’t get any.
Thanks, Corey, for the link to this piece, an excellent (albeit tragic) exploration of the pigeons’ demise. Incidentally, @Bob, colonial-era recipes for pigeon and pigeon pie do exist.