The passenger pigeon's demise is probably the best known North American extinction history.136 It had been one of the most numerous birds on the planet, perhaps five billion once blackening the skies of North America. When John James Audubon published his description of passenger pigeons in Birds of America, he remarked upon seeing a migration in 1813 that "poured in in countless multitudes" so that "the air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow." Yet less than a century later in 1907, W. B. Mershon remarked, "it is not to be wondered at that the wild passenger pigeon, insignificant, and not even classed as a game bird, so soon became extinct." A capitalist network of commercial hunters, railways, and urban markets had turned millions of pigeons into food for the East Coast's growing urban populace.139 This extensive hunting, along with habitat destruction, biology, and bad weather events, led to its rapid decline. The last known passenger pigeon, a female called Martha by her keepers at the Cincinnati Zoo, died on September 1, 1914.
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