Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: A Feathered River Across the Sky

Subtitle: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction

Author: Joel Greenberg

Narrator: Andy Caploe

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-07-14

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 21 votes

Genres: History, World

Publisher's Summary:

In the early 19th century passenger pigeons accounted for 25 to 40 percent of North Americas birds, traveling in flocks so massive as to block out the sun for hours. Although adults weighed only twelve ounces, they nested and roosted in the millions, destroying large oaks as if hit by hurricanes. Their favorite foods were the seeds and nuts of beech, chestnuts, and other forest trees, but they also raided farmers buckwheat, wheat, corn, and rye crops.

John James Audubon, remarking on their speed and agility in flight, said a lone passenger pigeon streaking through the forest passes like a thought. The observation was prophetic, for although a billion pigeons streamed over Toronto in May of 1860, a mere forty years later passenger pigeons were almost extinct. Martha, the last of the species, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

Their congregation in large numbers made it easy to kill them en masse, and the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines facilitated large hunting parties that supplied pigeons by the thousands to help feed people in growing cities. Audubon, novelist Gene Stratton-Porter, and James Fenimore Cooper were among those who advocated saving the passenger pigeon, but it was too late. Naturalist Joel Greenbergs beautifully written story of the passenger pigeon provides a cautionary tale that no matter how abundant a resource is - animals, water or oil - it can be wiped out if we are not careful.

Members Reviews:

Humans With the Sympathy of Weasels

In this book the now-long-dead describe how horrid they were to passenger pigeons. It's author found a fund of their quotes in newspapers, regional diaries and journals, unpublished accounts, obscure books, etc. Dead ancestors describe how to kill pigeons in great numbers, how to cook the adults, and note how delicious the babies taste. Nineteenth century reporters give numerous mention to how many pigeons so-and-so killed the previous day with only a single shotgun blast. It seems our deceased kin valued wild pigeons only as a commodity, like grain, or as fun targets to plink as they flew past. Gleaning their attitude from their quotes, the birds weren't sympathized with nor acted kindly towards, only marketed, or shot as some boy's rite of passage. Perhaps vast numbers lost passenger pigeons individual their value? Descending in rolling clouds, each bird was part of a "thing" carrying three possibilities: food, profit, or sport. In one cited instance, rather than allow a few pigeons to escape a large net pinning them to the ground, a pigeon hunter yelled for his assistants to jump prone upon the birds and bite the heads that stuck out of the webbing. Another netter used blacksmith's iron tongs to crush the skull of each pigeon he caught, one by one. Only a handful of citations in Joel Greenberg's narrative describe humans acting humanely. There was an old pigeon trapper, for instance, who had a favorite female stool pigeon he gave a name to. After a while the bird suffered a decline in health. He removed the threads that tied her eyelids shut and let her go, giving her a chance to recover in the wild. The author writes that such gestures were rare until the bird was nearly gone.

Do not blame professional hunters working for distant companies, netting pigeons in tens of thousands for dooming the bird, writes Greenberg.