A traveler from southeastern New York, Christian Schultz, descended the Ohio River in 1807. He stopped at the mouth of the Ohio River on the Missouri side on October 24, 1807, and noticed a strange phenomenon. Willows growing on mudflats appeared “at a distance of having suffered from a hurricane or tornado…Here was a space of about forty acres of willows which had not only all the branches broken off, but likewise many of the middling sized saplings …. bent to the ground, while the surface was literally coated over with dung and feathers. I soon discovered that this was a pigeon roost, and that, from the myriads which come every evening to the same place, the branches …. are broken off." The traveler observed the aftereffects of roosting by a now-extinct bird, the Passenger Pigeon.
Pigeons were a common sight in Missouri until late in the 1800s. A French observer, Granvier, first reported them from the mouth of the Ohio in October 1700, when, “We saw so great a number of wood-pigeons that the sky was quite hidden by them." Accounts by local observers throughout the U. S. are similar, documenting flocks that blocked the sun, or that might take over a day to pass a fixed point.
Passenger Pigeons nested, flew, fed, and roosted in huge flocks. Breeding occurred in forests with abundant acorns, nuts, and beechnuts. They laid a single egg per nesting. During migration, they ate various seeds and berries, including agricultural crops. However, their habit of congregating in large flocks made them easy to slaughter. Whether for sport or food, a gathering of Passenger Pigeons meant hunters or trappers converged on these flocks. After railroads expanded after the Civil War, entrepreneurs could ship crates of live or killed pigeons to big-city markets.
A historian of Missouri’s wildlife, Daniel McKinley, summarized information about Passenger Pigeons in Missouri. Migrating pigeons arrived in February, spring migration peaked in late March and April before it ceased in May. Fall migration began in September and peaked in October and November. Breeding colonies and winter roosts were less common than migrating flocks. Most winter roosts were in southern Missouri.
The constant and unrestricted persecution and clearing of mature mast-producing forests took their toll. Millions of pigeons still occurred until the 1880s. A final enormous roost persisted in Ripley County in 1883-1884, possibly because the site was over 50 miles from the nearest railroad. Thereafter there were only reports of small groups in Missouri.
Charles U. Holden, Jr., shot a pair of pigeons from a flock of 50 near Attie, Oregon County, December 17, 1896—the last confirmed sighting. The final sight record was at New Haven, Franklin County, in September 1902. The species declined throughout the eastern U.S., and the last known captive died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
The ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold put it best when he stated, “The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.”
