Unhappy Anniversaries

If forced to select the most miserable year in recorded history, a strong case could be made for 1914.  Some reasons for this choice are immediately obvious, such as the outbreak of World War I, Europe's four year long danse macabre.  Other events, while perhaps not as patently catastrophic, also speak to the quality and quantity of the year's misery. One of these other tragedies is the extinction of the passenger pigeon, a specie that just a few decades previously had been so numerous that it numbered in the billions and had flew in flocks miles long.

In a sense, both the extinction and the war can be seen as the denouement of the intertwined trends of the antebellum: technological advancement, industrial expansion, and imperial ideology.  Just as railroads delivered machine gun ammunition and phosgene gas to the front at the Somme, Ypres, and Verdun so that hundreds of thousands of young men could be mowed down in the name of God and country, so too railroads delivered thousands of hunters to every corner of a Manifest-Destiny-driven United States so that passenger pigeons could be mowed down in their nesting grounds and their meat sold back east.  The going rate was about 50 cents per dozen.





Even the language used to describe the two events can become parallel at times.  Compare, for instance, any given passage about the Western Front with this depiction from the Smithsonian of a pigeon hunt:

There were no laws restricting the number of pigeons killed or the way they were taken. Because the birds were communal in habit, they were easily netted by using baited traps and decoys. The birds were shot at the nesting sites, young squabs were knocked out of nests with long sticks, and pots of burning sulphur were placed under the roosting trees so the fumes would daze the birds and they would fall to the ground...One of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons occurred at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. Here 50,000 birds per day were killed and this rate continued for nearly five months. 

The last passenger pigeon, however, was not a victim of anonymous slaughter.  A resident of the Cincinnati Zoo ¹, Martha, named in a somewhat perverse case of patriotism after Martha Washington, instead obtained a degree of celebrity before succumbing to old age. Unlike nearly all the rest of her species, the date of her death was recorded down to the hour.  I can therefore say with certainty that it has been 100 years and one day since anyone anywhere has seen a passenger pigeon alive.

1914 was a very bad year.

The End

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1 The same institution where the last Carolina Parakeet died in 1918. One wonders if the entrance to its ornithological wing bears the inscription "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."^↩