Young Naturalists
Lost Thunder
Passenger pigeons once flew in great flocks across Minnesota. They are now extinct, but their story and its lessons live on.
David Mather
Picture yourself: You are a bird. Not just any bird, but a passenger pigeon, flying high in an endless flock traveling across half the continent 200 years ago. You are one among thousands of millions, maybe even millions of millions. You’ve been flying, moving from place to place over great distances for practically your whole life. This leg of the flight has lasted most of a day so far. Your flock surrounds you so tightly that it’s hard to see anything but birds in shades of blue and brown. You get glimpses of water, or sometimes trees far below. Now you swerve and dive, because that’s what the rest of the flock is doing too. You all move together. You don’t have to think about it because it just happens.
You’re bigger than domestic pigeons, the ones that are so familiar in cities today. Those were brought to North America by European colonists centuries ago, but you’ve been here longer than people can remember, maybe a million years at least according to paleontologists who have found fossilized remains. Generations of your flocks shared the world with woolly mammoths long before bison herds, and later cattle, dotted the land.
Your tail is long. So are your wings, giving you strength for these epic flights. The “passenger” in your name is from the French word passager meaning “to pass fleetingly.” This is a reference to your great migrations, and how French fur traders viewed them beginning in the 1500s. At that time, passenger pigeons lived and migrated in eastern North America, although smaller numbers of birds flew further westward still.
