From sky-darkening flocks to a closed museum drawer
The passenger pigeon, a bird found only in North America, is now extinct. Named from a French word for passing by because of its migrations, it was shot on a massive scale in the nineteenth century to supply cheap meat, while logging stripped away the forests it needed to breed.
Its scientific name, Ectopistes migratorius, roughly means migratory wanderer, and the bird was also simply called the wild pigeon. Indigenous peoples had their own names: amimi among the Lenape, omiimii among the Ojibwe, “lost dove” in Choctaw, and jahgowa, or big bread, among the Seneca, who relied on it for food. It lived mainly in the broadleaf forests of the east.
Males and females looked distinctly different. The birds weighed roughly 260 to 340 grams, and a male had a blue-grey head, a pinkish-rufous breast, coral-red legs, a carmine iris and neck feathers that flashed bronze, violet or golden-green depending on the light. White-edged tail feathers with dark spots showed clearly in flight. Females were slightly shorter and browner, and young birds resembled them but lacked the shimmer.
Naming it took over a century. In 1758 Carl Linnaeus lumped it with the mourning dove as Columba macroura, drawing on earlier illustrated accounts by Mark Catesby and George Edwards rather than specimens, and only in 1766 did he separate the two. William Swainson gave it its own genus in 1827, citing its long wings and wedge-shaped tail. The oldest fossil of the genus, a single upper-arm bone from North Carolina, is between 5.3 and 3.6 million years old.
Because it resembled the mourning dove, the two were long considered close kin. Ancient DNA told another story: a 2002 study first linked it to Asian cuckoo-doves, and larger analyses in 2010 and 2012 placed it beside the New World Patagioenas pigeons, such as the band-tailed pigeon. Museum skins, sampled from the toe pads to spare them, have since helped scientists develop better ways of rebuilding genomes from degraded DNA.
Source: Passenger pigeon
