# Are Passenger Pigeon populations overestimated? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 31, 2014, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091 "2014-08-31T23:37:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/41 "2014-09-02T16:21:40Z")
To clarify: what Mann suggests in _1491_ is that the disappearance of Native American populations (almost entirely due to epidemic diseases introduced by Europeans) led to a spike in Passenger Pigeon population. So the incredible numbers reported could be accurate despite the lack of evidence that such numbers had been present in the past. ---
**Author:** ![bldysabba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/42 "2014-09-02T17:29:53Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > As I’ve noted on this Board, more than once, when I was a kid (in the 1960s – we’re not talking about Ancient Times here) flocks of some kind of bird used to appear in the sky forming a dark “river” that went from Southern to Northern horizon in an unbroken flow. It wasn’t nearly as wide (although, oddly, it had well-defined “edges”), and it didn’t “darken the sky”, but there were a helluva lot of birds up there at once. > > I don’t know what kind of bird it was, because they were up too high, but you could hear their cries from far off. And this moving river of birds was continually moving, and appeared to have n o beginning and no end. You could stand there, staring up, watching this flock for45 minutes without seeing the whole thing. I don’t know how long it lasted,. because I never tried to wait out to the end. To this day, I don’t know what kind of bird it was. Starlings, maybe. But, having seen a partial skyful of birds, I can easily believe a sky completely filled with birds. They wouldn’t have to literally “eclipse the sun”, or cover the ground with droppings (I don’t recall seeing any from these swarms of my childhood), but that didn’t mean that there weren’t an awful lot of birds up there in a largely organized mass. > When I mentioned this on the Board before, someone asked what the front of the flock looked like. This showed that he wasn’t paying attention. THERE WAS NO FRONT. Or, at any rate, the start of this apparently endless river of birds was well over the horizon, and the end was over the opposite horizon. THAT’S how many birds there were. > I haven’t seen anything like this in decades and decades. That probably suggests that something has gone awry with the world – even if they were starlings (an invasive species not native to the US), it means that the environment has undergone some extreme change since then. Over-urbanization, perhaps. Surely some video/photographic evidence of such a phenomenon exists? ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/43 "2014-09-02T18:07:15Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I have been under a flock of weaver birds that literally blotted out the sun, and took over 3 hours to pass, outside the Kruger NP here in South Africa. Good observation. The closest modern cognate to the Passenger Pigeon ( at least in numbers ) is probably the Red-Billed Quelea. A smaller bird that doesn’t congregate in quite the mind-bending flocks of the pigeon, but still impressively super-abundant and can be found locally in massive numbers. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/44 "2014-09-02T18:20:14Z")
> [@bldysabba](#): > > Surely some video/photographic evidence of such a phenomenon exists? Probably. Damned if I’d know where it is, though. The thing is, nobody takes pictures of things they have seen often before. Weird and odd as the “rivers of birds” thing sounds today, it was a commonplace, and didn’t get articles written about it, or segments on the Nightly News (the way the swarming of Monarch butterflies does) ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/45 "2014-09-02T19:19:29Z")
> [@Little\_Pig](#): > > Appears their numbers were not exaggerated. Interestingly, there may have been [more than one reason](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/century-extinction)for their extinction. The link brings up a very good question. Once the population had been reduced into the thousands, what killed the rest of them? Hunting birds in flocks that darken the sky is easy, but hunters aren’t going to track them down one by one. Environmental changes must have killed them off in the end, and from some of the responses here possibly could have been more responsible for their demise than the mass hunting. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/46 "2014-09-02T19:31:14Z")
> [@bldysabba](#): > > Surely some video/photographic evidence of such a phenomenon exists? It’s quite difficult to photograph or videotape such a phenomenon in such a way that you would get the full effect of it. You can really only photograph as small section of such a flock, unless you have an extreme wide angle lens - and with such a lens each individual bird will appear very tiny. You really can’t get the effect except in person (based on my observations of migratory raptor flocks numbering in the hundreds of thousands). > [@TriPolar](#): > > The link brings up a very good question. Once the population had been reduced into the thousands, what killed the rest of them? One idea is that the pigeons virtually required large colonies in order to breed. Once they had been reduced to small scattered flocks they didn’t have the kind of behavioral feedback that they needed to breed successfully. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/47 "2014-09-02T19:40:28Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > The link brings up a very good question. Once the population had been reduced into the thousands, what killed the rest of them? No cite, but the answer I’ve heard is that, once the population got below a certain critical point, there just weren’t enough birds left for the rest of them to act and breed normally. They had evolved to be part of this giant social mass and the remainders didn’t migrate together when they should have, seek breeding partners, etc because they didn’t have the quantities of birds around them doing the same. ---
**Author:** ![jbaker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/59ef9b/32.png) [@jbaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jbaker)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2014, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/48 "2014-09-02T23:16:13Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > As I’ve noted on this Board, more than once, when I was a kid (in the 1960s – we’re not talking about Ancient Times here) flocks of some kind of bird used to appear in the sky forming a dark “river” that went from Southern to Northern horizon in an unbroken flow. It wasn’t nearly as wide (although, oddly, it had well-defined “edges”), and it didn’t “darken the sky”, but there were a helluva lot of birds up there at once. > > I don’t know what kind of bird it was, because they were up too high, but you could hear their cries from far off. And this moving river of birds was continually moving, and appeared to have n o beginning and no end. You could stand there, staring up, watching this flock for45 minutes without seeing the whole thing. I don’t know how long it lasted,. because I never tried to wait out to the end. To this day, I don’t know what kind of bird it was. Starlings, maybe. But, having seen a partial skyful of birds, I can easily believe a sky completely filled with birds. They wouldn’t have to literally “eclipse the sun”, or cover the ground with droppings (I don’t recall seeing any from these swarms of my childhood), but that didn’t mean that there weren’t an awful lot of birds up there in a largely organized mass. > When I mentioned this on the Board before, someone asked what the front of the flock looked like. This showed that he wasn’t paying attention. THERE WAS NO FRONT. Or, at any rate, the start of this apparently endless river of birds was well over the horizon, and the end was over the opposite horizon. THAT’S how many birds there were. > I haven’t seen anything like this in decades and decades. That probably suggests that something has gone awry with the world – even if they were starlings (an invasive species not native to the US), it means that the environment has undergone some extreme change since then. Over-urbanization, perhaps. I remember this too. The river of birds (blackbirds of some kind, I think, though that’s just a guess) would continue for an extended period of time back in the 1960s, at least 20 to 30 minutes, probably more. It very much did suggest a river with well-defined banks but a poorly-defined end, as stragglers in their smaller groups of thousands and hundreds would continue for some time after the main group had passed. In the 1970s these flocks, though still massive, were much smaller, and I haven’t seen them since then. It was a wonderful sight, as long as you were not actually standing under the path of the flock. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2014, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/49 "2014-09-03T13:31:53Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > Good observation. The closest modern cognate to the Passenger Pigeon ( at least in numbers ) is probably the Red-Billed Quelea. A smaller bird that doesn’t congregate in quite the mind-bending flocks of the pigeon, but still impressively super-abundant and can be found locally in massive numbers. These weren’t quelea. They were one of the yellow weavers, but it was literally too dark to tell specifics. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2014, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/50 "2014-09-03T17:09:52Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > One idea is that the pigeons virtually required large colonies in order to breed. Once they had been reduced to small scattered flocks they didn’t have the kind of behavioral feedback that they needed to breed successfully. > [@Jophiel](#): > > No cite, but the answer I’ve heard is that, once the population got below a certain critical point, there just weren’t enough birds left for the rest of them to act and breed normally. They had evolved to be part of this giant social mass and the remainders didn’t migrate together when they should have, seek breeding partners, etc because they didn’t have the quantities of birds around them doing the same. These things make sense. I can see hunters continue to go after the large flocks until they are greatly reduced in size. There could be a hundred thousand birds left in smaller groups, but not enough in one place to resume their traditional behavior. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2014, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/51 "2014-09-04T02:47:35Z")
Also recommend Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” about the abundant wildlife before the settlers arrived. Has numerous cites from journals of the times. ---
**Author:** ![Pushkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2014, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/52 "2014-09-05T14:01:16Z")
> [@Askance](#): > > I see I’ve been ninjaed on my own citing, but yes, that was all drawn from (my memory of!) Charles Mann’s **1491**. Getting time to re-read it yet again … > > At one point he quotes the settlers marvelling that that could drive through the forests of trees in their horsed carriages, as if they were in a park or an orchard … it never occurred to them they were in fact in an orchard! I don’t have my copy to hand to check, but I thought [The World Without Us](http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html) by Alan Weisman had something about tree management in North America. Someone [in an old thread I passed by in Googling](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-445704.html) thought it might. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c57346/32.png) [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2014, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091/53 "2014-09-12T04:28:48Z")
Go here to find the video entitled,[From Billions To None.](http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/video) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-passenger-pigeon-populations-overestimated/697091.md?page=2)