Great Uncle Fred? This morning Mum and Dad and I were listening to the news on the radio in the car and there was this piece about a jogger being attacked by a buzzard. He had to go to hospital. The jogger,not the buzzard. We got talking, about the last ever Dodo which got fed pebbles and died, and about The Birds, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, which they said was really scary and the birds just stop attacking people for no reason which means it keeps on being scary even after you have stopped watching it. The conversation made me think - what is the worst crime committed by man against bird? But my Mum and Dad had no idea. Great Uncle Fred? What is the worst crime committed by man against bird?" (Jack, Summer 2007

Well Jack, as you know, there have been many, many examples of other species being ill-treated because of the greed or foolishness or violent tendencies of man - but there is no story like that of the passenger pigeon. In about 1850, there were probably more passenger pigeons than any other bird on earth, several billion at a rough estimate. By 1908 there were seven left alive. By 1910 there was one; she was called Martha. In 1914 Martha died and that was the end of the passenger pigeon. You know what a wood pigeon looks like? Well, passenger pigeons were like that but slightly bigger, faster-flying, more powerful and sleeker. They lived in massive flocks around North America, migrating south as far as Mexico in winter. For the Native Americans they were a rich and handy source of food, but the natives` hunting-for-the-pot made no difference to the size of the pigeon population. In 1810 an ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, sat down in Kentucky to count the clouds of passenger pigeons passing overhead. They flew past him at 60 miles an hour in closely packed columns on a front more than a mile wide. They poured past for hours. Wilson reckoned the flock was 240 miles long and contained more than 2,230,000,000 pigeons. John James Audobon calculated the population of another flight in 1813 at over a billion. Their particular vulnerability to man derived from the fact that they were invariably attached to roosting places, returning to them night after night despite finding their daily food perhaps 50 miles away. The nests were as concentrated as the roosts, with sometimes as many as 200 nests in a single tree. As North America was settled, the incomers like the natives found the pigeons useful. When the pigeons came, everyone turned out to kill as many as they could. Roostings and nesting sites were tracked down and plundered. At the same time deforestation deprived the pigeons of many potential sites. They began to buckle under the pressure. And when the telegraph and the railway meant that man in an instant could discover where the pigeons were and chase after them as fast as the pigeons themselves could travel, the species was doomed. A huge demand built up. There was no respect shown for the bird whatsoever. The quickest way to collect a couple of hundred squabs - pigeon chicks - was to chop down the tree they were in, or set it on fire. Millions of birds were shipped to market, and millions more never were shipped, having been burned or trampled, or fed to the pigs or spoiled and left to rot. And of course the dead squabs never became parents. It was too much for a species to take. By 1878, there was one last big nesting left, in Michigan. 500,000 birds a day were taken from it, for monnths. By 1888 there were just scatterings of the birds here and there. By 1898 the only passenger pigeons left were in zoos. There they missed the excitement of numbers and bred only intermittently. And so to Martha, alone, in Cincinnati Zoo, looking around her, wondering why she felt lonely. She was thought to be 29-years-old when she died. That was said to be old, for a passenger pigeon.

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