A lesson in looking

So immediately after I wrote that last post about being unable to find the book, I went back out to the library and looked again. There it was on the top shelf, next to a whole series of Tony Hillerman mysteries. Somehow the book design fit right into the mysteries on the shelf, and it managed to make itself invisible.

Had the passenger pigeon managed to make itself invisible, it might still be around to be found today.

Anyway, now I can read the essay I wanted to see.

[Later] I discover that the essay I recall was not about a roosting (called nesting below), but was a talk given on the occasion of the State of Wisconsin erecting a monument to commemorate the pigeons. Today a marker near Black River Falls north of us bears this text:

Huge flocks of passenger pigeons once roamed North America. Larger than the mourning dove which it resembled, the passenger pigeon derived its name from an Indian word meaning "wanderer" or one who moves from place to place. Flying at a normal speed of sixty miles per hour, the pigeon moved hundreds of miles in migration and 50-100 miles a day during the nesting season, searching for food.

The largest nesting on record anywhere occurred in this area in 1871. The nesting ground covered 850 square miles with an estimated 136,000,000 pigeons. John Muir described the passenger pigeons in flight, "I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long."

Many reasons have been given for the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Each year millions were trapped, clubbed, or shot for food and pleasure. The last known passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.