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cc >> Hello, and welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year form here at the Biotech Center at the UW-Madison. My name is Bruce Johnson. I'm with Wisconsin Public Television, and I'm filling in for Tom Zinnen who's taken a well-deserved vacation. Tonight we're going to talk about the passenger pigeon, a bird that at the turn of the last century, I'm told, you could see blackening the skies for days at a time. They were basically killed into extinction. Stanley Temple is the Beers-Bascom Professor Emeritus in conservation in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For 32 years he has held the academic position once occupied by Aldo Leopold. I'm sure we all know something Mr. Leopold. He and his students have helped save many of the world's endangered species and the habitats on which they depend. He is currently a senior fellow with The Aldo Leopold Foundation. He has received major conservation awards from The Society for Conservation Biology, The Wildlife Society, and the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. Among his other achievements, he is a fellow of the American Ornithologist Union. That's hard to say. The Explorers' Club, The Wildlife Conservation Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science and The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Art and Letters. He has been president of the The Society for Conservation Biology and chairman of the board of The Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin. Let's all welcome Stanley to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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>> Thank you. As you heard in that introduction, I sent my career trying to save species from extinction. So why in 2014 am I focusing on an extinct bird? The reason is that the passenger pigeon is sort of the ultimate cautionary tale about our relationship with wildlife. It is, as my title suggests, something that we need to remember. Unfortunately, a hundred years after the fact, it is something that most people have forgotten. They don't know the story of the passenger pigeon, and they don't really understand, therefore, the significance of that tragic event for our ongoing relationship with the other creatures that share the planet with us. Part of what I'm going to so tonight and what I've been doing throughout the year, is telling the story. It needs to be retold. And it needs to be retold not only because people have forgotten, but many people are confused about the passenger pigeon. One of the first talks that I gave this year in January at the Schlitz Audubon Society near Milwaukee, an elderly woman came up with a shoe box in her hand and said, "Professor Temple, you're wrong. The passenger pigeon did not go extinct in 1914 and I have the proof right here. This passenger pigeon died in my grandfather's barn in 1924. We can prove the date because the bird has a band on it's leg." Well, of course, it was a homing pigeon, someone's racing pigeon that got lost and unfortunately died in her relative's barn. She was mortified, of course. Her family has been telling this story to anyone who will listen for ninety years. But carrier pigeons, homing pigeons, messenger pigeons, not related at all. The real passenger pigeon is a very distinct species. It is a bird that is not particularly spectacular in terms of its physical appearance. It's a subtly beautiful bird but certainly not spectacular in its appearance. What was spectacular about the passenger pigeon was everything that it did was done in almost unbelievable numbers. It's really hard to get your head around what it was like in the eastern half of North America when these birds were around. The estimate was that at the start of the 19th century there were three to five billion passenger pigeons. I can say that, and three to five billion doesn't mean a lot unless you have some sort of frame of reference. It meant that at that time, one bird in every four in North America was a passenger pigeon. If you lined those pigeons up beak to tail and strung them out in a row, they would circle the earth at the equator 23 times. In other words, this was a super abundant bird. It was definitely the most abundant species in North America, and arguably the most abundant bird in the world. What do we know about the passenger pigeon? Obviously, it when extinct before modern field biologists were able to study it. So basically what we know about the bird are taken from the observations of 19th century and earlier, explorers, naturalists, people who had encountered the bird in the wild, and were moved, essentially, to comment on it. The earliest records go all the way back to the very early explorer of North America, Cartier, Hudson, Champlain all encountered these enormous flocks, unlike anything they had ever seen in Europe. They commented about it in their logs. But most of what we know comes from 19th century naturalists. Alexander Wilson, arguably many would say, the first ornithologist in the US in that he basically studied birds more or less full-time, had this to say about the birds in Kentucky, and it's an observation that was repeated by many observers. The birds would congregate in such numbers that they would literally break branches off of trees, and in some cases actually topple trees with their weight. Probably the best known of those 19th century accounts comes from Audubon. He was on a river boat traveling down the Ohio River when they happened to run into one of these enormous flocks of passenger pigeons. It flew over him for several days, darkening the skies almost continuously. It was estimated that that flock numbered almost two billion birds. Most people sort of stop with the quote where you end up with obscuring the sky. They don't get to the part about the dung.

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But you can imagine if two billion pigeons fly over you continuously for two days, there is dung to be contended with. And indeed, many people recounted that the passing of these passenger pigeons as leaving the landscape looking as if though a snowstorm had hit. Aldo Leopold described the passage of these birds through the forest as a biological storm, that they essentially where such a huge force on the eastern deciduous forest. Our own John Muir, growing up near Portage, commented that it was a great memorable day. And indeed, that's a sentiment that was felt by many. It was certainly felt by Native American, and it was felt by many of the early settlers of the eastern US. When these pigeons happened to come through your neighborhood for a day or two, you had a tremendous supply of fresh meat. It was pigeon pie on the table for several days. The issue for hunting them, which goes all the way back to Native Americans though, was that these birds were more or less constantly on the move. You had no idea that they were going to appear. Suddenly there was a noise on the horizon and suddenly the sky was dark with pigeons, and they passed overhead and that was it. They were gone on their way. So you had a very short period of time to take advantage of them. As a result, Native Americans and early settlers really didn't do too much damage to the passenger pigeon population. So there are all of these thousands of observations that were made of the birds. It fell to Wisconsin's Bill Schorger, a close colleague of Aldo Leopold's and adjunct professor in Leopold's department, who spent the second half of his life, essentially after his early retirement, pursuing his passion in life which was uncovering the history of wildlife in early America. If that was his passion, his obsession was the passenger pigeon. He traveled around the US visiting archives and museums and libraries ferreting out any reference that he could find to passenger pigeons, especially eyewitness accounts. He was able to find over 9,000 of these eyewitness accounts. To his credit, he was able to integrate all of these scattered observations into what we think of as the passenger pigeon's story. And he published his book, which to this day stands as the definitive treatment of the biology and extinction of the passenger pigeon. My friend here, the pigeon that's on the podium, was Bill Schorger's pigeon. This fellow, really in this year especially, deserves a great vote of thanks because basically, much of what we know about the pigeon is due to his scholarship. We'll give him the last word and I think he's right, that the passenger pigeon was certainly if not the most impressive, one of the most impressive birds that we've ever known. So what did Bill Schorger discover about the passenger pigeon? For one thing he was able to fairly accurately plot out its geographic range. It was essentially a bird of the eastern half of North America, essentially the eastern deciduous forest. It wandered out into the fringes of the prairie during the summer after the nesting season, but for most of the year it was a bird of the eastern forest. Within that geographic range it was somewhat unique in that it was nomadic. They were constantly on the move. They didn't settle for long in any place. It was very unpredictable when and where they might occur. But they did wander in these enormous flocks and wandered throughout that extensive range in purple. During the nesting season, the one time of year that they stopped moving for about a month, is shown here in red. It is essentially a band across the lower Great Lake states. It was in this range that all of these pigeons from across the eastern deciduous forests sort of settled in once a year to nest. The passenger pigeon was indeed a bird that although it didn't occupy all of the eastern half of North America all the time, at some point or another if you lived in the eastern US during the 19th century or earlier, at some point you were going to be awed by one of these enormous flocks passing over you. As a result, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of place names around the eastern US that are named for a pigeon. I've given talks in a number of these places, and people today don't know what the pigeon of their locality was. Of course, it was the passenger pigeon. One of the early settlers in these locations obviously was treated to a flight of passenger pigeons and was inspired to name the place after them, including a few that had the dubious distinction of being named Pigeon Droppings.

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And so on. But it gives you an idea that it was impressive. When you saw them, it left an impression. This painting of passenger pigeons basically sort of depicts them in a typical setting. That is, in a forest in a large unbroken deciduous forest, in this case, dominated by oak trees. And indeed, the passenger pigeon's main food were acorns and beech nuts. These were the things that really sustained them. They fed on lots of other plant material as well, but it was clear that the nuts of these two trees was what really kept them going. The reason for that is that beech and oak are masting species. They don't produce nuts every year, but when they do they produce them in great abundance. It's very unpredictable in time and space where a local population of oaks and beech are going to be producing one of these prolific mast crops, which is why the passenger pigeons were nomadic. They were constantly wandering around in these large flocks looking for the place in a particular year where there was an abundant mast crop. They would settle in and basically vacuum up the nuts and move on to the next place. They were very strong fliers so they could cover great distances, and basically, pretty much patrolled the eastern deciduous forest. As I said, the only time they basically stayed still was during the nesting season. Just like everything else that they did, suddenly they would appear, they would decide that this was the spot, they would settle in very quickly, build a rather crude nest and lay their single egg. They got down to nesting very quickly. They nested like everything else they did, in almost unbelievable numbers. Part of the reason for this was that it was a defensive mechanism against predators. By being in a large flock, a large herd, a large school, you minimize your individual risk of being hit by a predator. So these enormous nesting colonies would form quickly, the birds would feed on the mast that had been produced the previous fall. They would fatten up their babies, the squabs, until the young pigeon became absolutely obese. That was about half-way through its development. At that point the parents would essentially leave, and the squab would finish growing up on its accumulated fat. This was obviously a strategy for taking advantage of that abundance of food. But when all the food with the sort of foraging range was gone, basically they had to leave the nestling to grow up on the accumulated fat, which worked perfectly well as a strategy. And indeed, the pigeons were, obviously, able to maintain their numbers and do quite well for millennia using this strategy. But things went horribly wrong, essentially, in the second half of the 19th century. Suddenly they were up against a predator that was unlike any predator that they had ever had to contend with in the past. Of course, the predator was us. Basically, during this 50 year period after the Civil War, almost every nesting attempt was ruthlessly pillaged by commercial market hunters who killed the birds and sold them at market. Both the adults and the nestlings were killed. They caused sure a disturbance in the nesting colonies that very few young were raised. One of the parents would be killed by the hunters, or the disturbance was just too great and the parents would abandon and leave the colony. To make matters worse, the market hunters eventually were able to track the birds year-round and continued killing them 365 days a year. You really don't need to be a population biologist to figure out, if you're killing these bird on an industrial scale and preventing them from reproducing, extinction becomes a mathematical certainty. The reason for the killing was this, it was market hunting. Although it's hard for us to imagine today, during the 19th century there were no conservation laws, there was nothing preventing people from killing wildlife at will. The national mindset was essentially, still, that that natural resources of the continent were inexhaustible, and especially something that was perceived to be as abundant as the passenger pigeon. No one could have imagined that in such a short period of time we could basically wipe them out. This is a scene from a market in Chicago. If you look closely you can see just about every species of bird or mammal that could be sold for a profit, either for its flesh, for its fur, for its feathers, whatever. Market hunting was a major profession. The US census data from that period revealed that there were probably tens of thousands of people who described their profession as pigeoner. A pigeoner was somebody who, 365 day a year, did nothing but kill pigeons. It was obviously a slaughter. The pigeoners were greatly aided by two technological advances. The first of these was the telegraph system, and arguably it was the most important. Once the telegraph system was in place the market hunters could know almost instantly where the passenger pigeons were at any moment in time and they could go to that place. Prior to the advent of the telegraph system it was very difficult for all of these thousands of hunters in the eastern US to sort of converge on a place. You'd only have a small number of hunters targeting the bird. But once the telegraph was in place, every one of these hunters from the eastern US would converge on the place. The second technological advancement was the rail system. It underwent tremendous expansion after the Civil War. Somewhat unfortunately, if you look at the map, you can see that the railroad system expanded the most almost exactly coincident with the nesting range of the passenger pigeon. Once they had the rail system in place it allowed the pigeoners to do something that, again, they hadn't been able to do previously, that was that they could ship the birds to distant markets rather than selling them locally. So the birds literally were killed, they were plucked and gutted 300 bird to a barrel full of ice. They were put on trains and the trains would haul them off to the growing urban areas in the Midwest and the East where they were sold at market. The magnitude of the killing-- We got the first quantitative estimates of what it was like from the records that the rail companies kept of their cargo. We know that in some cases there were individual trains that had 1,000 barrels of passenger pigeons on board, 300,000 pigeons headed for market. Although this is obviously a cartoon it very accurately depicts what was going on during that period. Well, right in the middle of this Wisconsin, in 1871, hosted the largest nesting of passenger pigeons ever recorded. It covered 850 square miles of central Wisconsin, essentially from Wisconsin Rapids down to what today is Wisconsin Dells and over to Black River Falls. The accounts all describe this as virtually every tree in 850 square miles had nesting pigeons. It was clearly hundreds of millions, if not over a billion pigeons that concentrated into that small area. Unfortunately, this was right at the peak of the market hunting period. The market hunters descended on central Wisconsin in almost unbelievable numbers, certainly tens of millions, if not hundreds millions of pigeons died during that nesting period. Because of the massive disruption, very few young were raised. Bill Schorger paid particular attention to this particular nesting, because of course, it was right in his backyard and he had lots and lots of accounts of what happened during that period. Just a few extracts from some of the accounts that he uncovered gives you an idea of the sort of magnitude of what went on, that you could catch over a thousand birds in a single toss of a net. We were shipping them off by the thousands of barrels. The killing and trapping continued day and night. Bill Schorger estimated that over 100,000 people participated in the killing. That would have been several tens of thousands of professional market hunters and an almost equal or larger number of people who would hop on the trains coming back empty from the urban centers to come up to central Wisconsin to shoot pigeons for a few days. So it was really something that it's hard to imagine. The last one is one that caught my eye. Sparta, Wisconsin wasn't much more than a crossroads on the railroad back then, but it was of course, near the lead mining area of Wisconsin. There was a gun shop there that made ammunition. During the nesting season that one gun dealer sold half a million rounds of ammunition. And you can be sure, they were all fired at passenger pigeons. Well, as if it wasn't bad enough, the slaughter that was going on at the nesting areas, the birds now with telegraph system could be tracked year-round and the market hunters just continued to pursue them wherever they went. As in the past, the birds were constantly on the move, so they could only kill smaller numbers to sell to the local markets. But nonetheless, they just kept up with the birds and continued to kill them year-round. They quickly figured out that you could actually make more money capturing the birds alive and selling them alive. The reason was that during the 19th century a very popular recreational activity were pigeon shoots. These were contests in which people sort of demonstrated their prowess with a shotgun by shooting at passenger pigeons that were released for them essentially for target practice. These were big events. There would be thousands of passenger pigeons used for each individual event. The pigeoners got very good at their art. In the upper left is a picture of the huge nets that they would erect in the places that they anticipated the pigeons were going to move next. What they would do, they would erect these huge nets, they would bait the nets with grain. In the center of the net they would put some lure pigeons, some live passenger pigeons that they used to lure the wild flocks in. In the upper right is one of the few photographs that we actually have of pigeoners. By their gear, these two guys are trappers, and in the white circle there, if you look carefully, on a wicker basket, perched on the handle are two passenger pigeons who were their lure birds. They would place those birds in the center of the net, they would have a little string attached to them so that they could make them flap their wings, and it would bring the wild birds in. In the pigeoners parlance, those were called stool pigeons.

laughter

Of course, we have incorporated that into our vocabulary today as someone who deceives their comrades. But the shooting of passenger pigeons for recreation, of course, continued pretty much to the end. And of course, once we ran out of passenger pigeons to shoot, again, a legacy of the period, today if you want to show your prowess with a shotgun you shoot at clay pigeons. But it all traces back to the pigeon shoots of the 19th century. Obviously, this couldn't go on forever. And indeed, the last big nesting of passenger pigeons was in 1878. After that all of the accounts are of much smaller nestings. They were all targeted by the pigeoners. The killing continued unabated. There was essentially nothing done to really stop the pigeoners, the market hunting from continuing. So Bill Schorger amassed all of these records. It's so far been true that virtually every one of the over 70 places now that I've given this lecture, I've been able to go to Bill Schorger's notes and actually find some documentation of passenger pigeons in that locality. For Dane County here are some quotes from newspapers and journal accounts, mostly right here in Madison. The important thing to note here is not only the abundance of birds, but the killing that they document, and also the ever diminishing descriptions of how many pigeons were around. You start off with, you know, immense numbers and numberless, darkening the sky. I love the one with large numbers flying around the Capitol. It goes on and on, but by the late 19th century you're down to a few pigeons passing over the area, the first transit in four or five years. And finally it was big news in 1891 when a flock of 20 passed over Madison. So from immense, numberless flocks down to 20 making the news, you sort of get the picture of what was going on. Indeed, during this period the same type of trail of records documents their demise everywhere, so people were aware, obviously, of the fact that the birds were disappearing. So why weren't people more concerned about it? Probably not only was there the attitude toward the natural resources of the country, but there was also the fact that people were quite accustomed to the idea that you didn't see passenger pigeons every year. The easy explanation when they didn't show up was that they're somewhere else. You read all kinds of accounts of people basically passing this off as, the pigeons are just somewhere else. And the somewhere else really became almost absurd. The most imaginative was from Henry Ford who was of the opinion that all the passenger pigeons had drowned in the Pacific Ocean trying to fly to Japan.

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No idea where he came up with that idea. But people were essentially in denial that this could be happening even as it was very publicly documented. In fact, my wife's family has lived in Madison for many generations, and her great, great-grandmother contributed to a cookbook published here in Madison in 1902. Jane pulled this cookbook out one day and was paging through it to find her great-grandmother's recipe for biscuits, and all of a sudden there was a gasp from the living room. She said, Oh, my gosh! Here's a recipe for potted passenger pigeon--

groans

--with a little footnote. "They're getting hard to come by these days." Well, no kidding! By 1902 they were gone in the wild. The last few birds-- There were no longer flocks in 1900, they were just isolated birds. They were shot. The very last wild bird was shot in 1902 in Indiana. Despite the fact that many organizations offered substantial rewards for any evidence of a live passenger pigeon in the wild, all of those rewards went unclaimed. And eventually the very last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. And like all of the last few passenger pigeons that were alive, Martha, in particular, was a rock star. People came from all over the world to see her. By the time she died, on September 1st in 1914, it was known that she was the last passenger pigeon. Martha's death basically was big news. It was a shock to the American public that, indeed, there were people alive in 1914 who had witnessed these huge flights of passenger pigeons and who now woke up to the fact that they're all gone. There are none left. Martha is dead. Martha's death was one of those instances where we know almost to the hour when the extinction took place. She was 28 year old. She was old for a passenger pigeon. She wasn't looking very well at noon, and when her keeper checked in on her at one o'clock she was dead. She was packed in a large block of ice and shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution where she lies in state. Basically, at that time the extinction of the passenger pigeon was undoubtedly the catalyst for the modern 20th century conservation movement. It inspired organizations to form, like National Audubon Society. It inspired the first wave of wildlife protection laws in the country. It essentially woke the public up to this idea that the wildlife resources of the country where not inexhaustible. One of the very first things that was done was the passage of the Lacey Act. Today we think of the Lacey Act as being the federal regulation on interstate commerce, and indeed, at the time in 1900, it was thought that by regulating interstate commerce as John Lacey described it, you would break the back of the market hunter because they couldn't transport the wildlife that they were killing across state lines. But, as John Lacey introducing his bill commented, as virtually everyone commented on conservation issues of the day, the passenger pigeon is mentioned as the catalyst. It came in time to save the bison. The bison was down to, of course, just a few hundred individuals. It came in time for the plume-bearing birds that were killed for the fashion industry. But not in time for the passenger pigeon. And indeed, after 1914, all we could do was sort of reflect on what we had done to the most abundant bird on the continent. One of the places that a public commemoration, grieving essentially over the passing of the passenger pigeon, took place right here in Wisconsin at Wyalusing State Park. How many of you have been over to Wyalusing and seen the passenger pigeon monument? Quite a few of you. Well, that monument was erected in 1947 by The Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. It was, indeed, a very remarkable event. It was the first time that any sort of public sort of grieving, mourning over the loss of a species that we had clearly caused to go extinct had ever taken place. And indeed, it is so recognized in the Guinness Book of Records for whatever that's worth. On the occasion Aldo Leopold was asked to write an essay. Many consider it to be one of his most moving essays. It's certainly the most poignant essay ever written on extinction, "On a Monument to the Pigeon." He very correctly captures the importance of that monument by saying that "For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun." It was essentially a change in our attitude toward wildlife. Leopold's essay goes on to say, "There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights... They live forever by not living at all." It's a wonderful essay. He included it in the collection, in A Sand County Almanac, which I'm sure many of you have read. I'll put on my Emeritus Professor cap and say, if you haven't read that recently, go back to your copy of A Sand County Almanac and read "On a Monument to the Pigeon." It's a beautiful piece. But indeed, today we think if a species was in such trouble we would have mounted a last-ditch effort to save them. And many people are shocked to realize that passenger pigeons were actually relatively easy to breed in captivity. Aviculturists at the time breed them without much difficulty. But at that period captive breeding wasn't thought of as a conservation strategy, it was simply a hobby. And indeed, many of these aviculturists who kept passenger pigeons, their fascination was actually trying to get them to hybridize with other species of pigeons. You see down in the lower left, this poor passenger pigeon with some kind of turtledove or something next to it. But these are photographs of a flock of passenger pigeons that was kept by an aviculturist in Milwaukee. He had been quite successful at breeding the birds. One of the birds that he raised was Martha. Martha's a Badger. We don't know for sure from the records whether she was actually breed in captivity or whether she was taken from the wild as a squab, but by the dates on the photograph we're pretty sure that that fat squab in the bottom is probably Martha. The bird in the lower right is definitely Martha in her first year of life. Well, the Milwaukee aviculturist got tired of the birds, passed them on to a Chicago aviculturist who didn't have much luck with them. The flock dwindled. He eventually got tired of them and sent the last few remaining birds to the Cincinnati Zoo, where it dwindled down to Martha. So the passenger pigeon is gone, and all we can do is essentially learn from the cautionary tale of what we did to this remarkable bird. The cautionary tale, of course, has to do with overkill, killing animals faster than they can reproduce. Unfortunately, we as human being have a really tragic history of doing this over and over and over again. And unfortunately, we are still doing it today. The passenger pigeon, of course, wasn't the only bird of North America that we exterminated, we caused to go extinct by overkill. The great auks of the north Atlantic went extinct earlier because sailors clubbed these large flightless birds on the few nesting islands where they congregated. The Labrador duck went extinct due to market hunting, presumably it had life pretty comfortable in Labrador where it nested. It had the unfortunate habit of spending the winter in Long Island Sound right next to New York City where the market hunters took aim at it. The Carolina parakeet went extinct not because it was commercially valuable, but because it was a pest. We killed it because we didn't like it. Probably the last bird of North America to go extinct was the Eskimo curlew. It was hunted on its migration. But the worst cases really that we have, and the worst ongoing cases of extinction by overkill, are in the fisheries of the world. This is where our behavior is just totally irresponsible. We seem to not be able to help ourselves from overfishing. It happens over and over again. Right in our backyard we've had several species of very valuable commercial fish go extinct because of overfishing. This is sort of my mia culpa moment. The blue pike was the most valuable commercial fisheries in the Great Lakes. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. As a kid, Friday night fish fries meant blue pike. I ate hundreds of the things. I contributed in some small way to their extinction. But even closer to home, the white fish, the cisco of Lake Michigan, were similarly overfished. You might think that by the time these species were being fished to extinction we knew how to avoid doing this. We knew how to fish sustainably, and yet we still to this day, don't seem to be able to force ourselves to exercise restraint in capturing fish. The next slide shows you three examples of commercially valuable fish that, right now, today, as we speak, are essentially following almost exactly the same trajectory as the passenger pigeon did in the late 19th century. The music that accompanies it is what I like to think of as the anthem to overkill. Back before the second war We could catch Our fish in shore Boats were small And gear was rough We caught fish But left enough And now there's No more fish because The trawler fleets Took all there was We could see it coming then No more fish No fishermen Shelley Posen's a Canadian folk-- In fact, he's the curator of the Canadian Folklore Museum. It turned out, by chance Shelley Posen and I were both graduate students. We were in Newfoundland for very different reasons. I was studying birds, he was studying maritime folklore, but we were there for the crash of the Grand Banks cod, which of course, has yet to recover from the catastrophic overfishing. Some of you may have remembered a couple of years ago one Atlantic blue fin tuna sold at market for sushi, essentially, for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Carl Safina, one of the prominent marine conservationists of our day, commented on his blog. He said, "The fisherman who inevitably pulls the very last blue fin tuna out of the Atlantic Ocean will be a multimillionaire overnight." We just don't seem to be able to restrain ourselves. Well, it's not all gloom and doom. There are the great comeback stories. The species that were essentially saved in the nick of time by the conservation movement that was catalyzed by the passenger pigeon's extinction, species like trumpeter swans that have now made a comeback. Wood duck that would in 1900, have been listed as an endangered species, which today are a popular game bird. The plume-bearing birds, the egrets, the sandhill cranes, and especially the wild turkey. The wild turkey, it's hard to believe today, but in 1900 it was almost extinct. Today, of course, they're virtually everywhere, and once again a very valuable natural resource. Some of the great whales have responded very positively. The Pacific gray whale has recovered from the whaling era. All the bison that we have today are essentially descendants of that small herd of bison at the New York Zoological Society in 1900. Beaver where almost trapped out for their pelts. Now, of course, they're abundant enough to be considered a nuisance. In the center, the Aleutian fur seals were just about wiped out by Russian and American sealers for their fur. After a bilateral agreement between Russia and the US their numbers increased dramatically during the 20th century. But in recent years, the last couple of decades, their numbers are starting to really decline rapidly again. This time it's not because we're overkilling them, it's because we're overfishing the pollock on which they depend for their food. We're essentially starving them to death. And indeed, although there are these amazing comeback stories and many others of species that benefited from the lesson of the passenger pigeon, unfortunately the statistics tell us that we're still in deep trouble, and we're getting deeper into trouble all the time. As endangered species lists continue to grow, it's somewhat tragic that in addition to things like habitat loss and ecosystem stresses like climate change and invasive species, that there are still substantial numbers of endangered species that are endangered because we're overkilling them, that we still haven't gotten over that most brutal form of causing a species to go extinct. Some of you undoubtedly saw the story in the newspaper just in the last couple of days about elephants, that they're being killed faster than ever, and indeed, look as though they're headed for extinction, following the path of the passenger pigeon. It's happening to rhinos, it's happening to any number of species that are commercially valuable. We just don't seem to be able to adequately protect them in the face of a market and a demand for the products. So unfortunately, it looks as though extinction by overkill is not something that we can sort of put behind us and say, that's part of our dark past. It's still a part of the present. And we really should care about the fact that we're causing so many other species to become endangered and to go extinct. There are basically two reasons why we should be concerned, why we should care, and why we should change our behavior. The first are the very selfish reasons, the anthropocentric reasons. This is sometimes just plain stupid, especially for commercially valuable species. Why would you wipe out something that has already demonstrated it's great value to us. It doesn't make any sense. You're depriving both current and future generations of something that we know is of great value to us. We also know, unfortunately from a lot of experience of causing species to go extinct, that the extinction sometimes have a nasty habit of coming back and biting us. In the passenger pigeon's case, that bite it very real. Now the story, I think, is pretty well nailed down that the current epidemic of Lyme disease that we're experiencing in the eastern US traces it's roots back to the passenger pigeon's extinction. Lyme disease, the organism Borrelia, the reservoir for the disease is actually small rodents, especially mice in the forest. These mice can erupt in numbers and become super abundant when there's an abundant food supply, like a mast crop of beech and oak. When passenger pigeon were around there wasn't a lot lying around on the forest floor for these rodents to feed on and their numbers never exploded. Passenger pigeons kept the numbers pretty much in check. Once the passenger pigeon was gone, when there's a mast crop, these rodents increased to large numbers, incredible densities. I live in the country in Mazomanie, and I can tell you in a good oak mast year, if you go out on a still night the woods are just alive with deer mice out there, the principle reservoir for the disease. Humans and deer are, to some extent, inadvertent targets that are passed on by the tick. But the epidemiologists are now fairly convinced that the passenger pigeon played a roll in this epidemic. There are also the altruistic reasons, the ecocentric reasons. Aldo Leopold was, of course, the great champion of the ethics of our relationship with nature, and certainly was one who posited the idea that it was simply unethical, it was immoral, for us to cause another species to go extinct. There's also the unfortunate lesson that when you cause species to go extinct it's often very disruptive to the entire ecosystem. And indeed, it's hard to imagine the three to five billion passenger pigeons didn't have a major impact of the eastern deciduous forest which is now missing for lack of an organism that could fill that role. And indeed, there are endangered species in the eastern deciduous forest that are primarily endangered because of the loss of the passenger pigeon. So what should we be doing about this? Well, clearly there are some forms of overkill that are going on today that we simply shouldn't be doing. There's absolutely no justification for overfishing. We know how to fish sustainably. There's absolutely no justification for killing rhinos and elephants for their horn or their tusk for, essentially, trinkets or worthless medicine. There's really no justification any longer for killing tens of millions of sharks so that we can whack their fins off to make shark fin soup. Basically, science has moved on. We know how to harvest natural resources, biological resources sustainably. There is no excuse. In the 19th century you could perhaps excuse people. They didn't know about sustainable harvesting, they didn't really realize the exhaustibility of the natural resources of the continent. But today there's no excuse. Basically, all forms of exploitation of wildlife today, there's no reason that it shouldn't be sustainable. Endangered species, of course, the growing numbers of endangered species, they need more protection, not less. Unfortunately, every year since 1973 when our Endangered Species Act was passed, special interest groups have lobbied congress to either get rid of the act or significantly weaken it because it's an inconvenience to have to basically sacrifice your development plans because an endangered species happens to be in the way. Right now, right now in congress, there are two bills that would essentially repeal the Endangered Species Act, and two that would so significantly weaken it that it would no longer be effective. One of our senators seems to be a strong supporter of this idea. Existing protections need to be enforced. Elephants and rhinos are protected. We just don't have the capacity to, indeed, enforce the protection in the face of the very lucrative illicit markets in these animals. There's a hopeful sign. Earlier this spring 27 nations of the world signed a treaty in London saying that they would elevate the illegal trade in wildlife to be a major felony in their countries. These included some of the countries, including the US, that are major consumers of illegal wildlife products. Maybe we will move on and actually enforce the protections that are already in place. For all of these reasons, the cautionary tales about what it tells us about our relationship with wildlife, a number of years ago a group of ornithologist and conservationists decided to take advantage of this very teachable moment that 2014 presents and we formed Project Passenger Pigeon. You can visit our website and see all of the information that we provide there. But basically we're trying to take every opportunity that we can to speak to the public about the story of the passenger pigeon, to remind them of the story and its lessons. So we are pulling out all the stops. We're doing everything we can to reach out to as many audiences as possible. Next month, in September, a documentary film, From Billions to None, will show on Public Television. There are a number of books for all age groups. Probably the best for your age group is Joel Greenberg's book. A number of artists have been inspired to do artwork commemorating the passenger pigeon's passing. This year the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum in Wausau is going to devote a significant portion of their Birds in Art exhibit to extinct species. The sculpture of the passenger pigeon there is part of Todd McGrain's Lost Bird project. He's doing these giant sculptures of extinct birds and placing them in locations where the birds lived. This huge mural, those passenger pigeons are about eight to ten feet long, is on the wall of a building near the Cincinnati Zoo where Martha died, and the theme of the painting, of the mural, is Martha, the large bird in the lead, leading a flock of passenger pigeons out of the cage which she lived in at the Cincinnati Zoo, which is today sort of a memorial to her. But probably the most remarkable discovery that we unearthed is going to be an attraction for fans of classical music. We discovered that the first symphony ever written in the United States was written by Anthony Philip Heinrich. He was a European immigrant who came to the US, came to America to experience the wilderness. And by chance he was on the boat with John James Audubon when they encountered that enormous flock of passenger pigeons on the Ohio River. He was so awed by this sight that he composed a symphony. He spent several years in the Kentucky wilderness and became known as the Log Cabin Composer. He went on to be one of founders of the New York Philharmonic. But his passenger pigeon symphony has only been performed once in the world, in 1858 in Prague. It's never been performed in the US. You are going to get a treat. November 2nd, the UW Symphony Orchestra is going to perform Heinrich's symphony. We don't know, of course, since no one's performed it, what it sounds like.

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But we did have a pianist at least play part of the piano score. And it ranges from somewhat somber to very exuberant when two billion passenger pigeons are passing over head. So that weekend of November 1st and November 2nd the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters is hosting Passenger Pigeon Weekend. We'll be screening the film, we'll have a series of lectures and book signings. There will be a play, a staged reading of a new play that features passenger pigeons. There will be the symphony. There's just something for everyone. So please, keep your eyes open for that event and plan to attend. My contribution in reaching out to the public, and especially the public here in Wisconsin, in trying to think, how can you reach the largest number of people in Wisconsin with the message about the passenger pigeon? This is what I came up with.

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The Capitol Brewery, which I'm such you're all familiar with, is going to release Passenger Pigeon Pale Ale on September 4th. If you are so inclined, please join us that evening for food and beer and music, and sort of celebrate the release of the beer. I figure, if you can't get the attention of Wisconsinites with this, I'm wasting my time this year.

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So please visit passengerpigeon.org. You'll learn a lot more about passenger pigeons than I could squeeze into 50 minutes. Please encourage your friends to take advantage of all the many events that are taking place, that will allow them to remember the story of a lost bird. Thank you.

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