The great American naturalist John James Audubon is best known for his
beautiful drawings of birds, collected in The Birds of America
(1827-1838). The five-volume Ornithological Biography, a companion to
the collection of drawings, was published in 1831 and includes this
essay on the now-extinct passenger pigeon. In it, Audubon describes the
bird's remarkable power of flight, power of vision, and hard-to-believe
abundance. As he writes of a flock numbering more than one billion
birds, a flock so large it darkens the noonday sky, Audubon says, "The
multitudes of Wild Pigeons in our woods are astonishing. Indeed, after
having viewed them so often, and under so many circumstances, I even now
feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate
is fact." Most astonishing of all is the fact that the passenger pigeon
became extinct in the wild by 1900. The last known individual was a
female named Martha, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. This short
work is part of Applewood's "American Roots" series, tactile mementos of
American passions by some of America's most famous writers and thinkers.