Passenger Pigeon

Status Extinct. Formerly bred.

Remarks It scarcely seems fitting to dismiss this bird with the single word "extinct." Little is now known about this one-time member of our avifauna.

Among the records so meticulously prepared by the late Harry Piers there are some references with dates concerning the Passenger Pigeon in Nova Scotia which merit inclusion here lest they be lost forever. One reads:

"James P. Kelly (son of Pat J. Kelly, who mounted birds) told me, August 28, 1919 that when he was a boy, say about fifteen years old, (which would be about 1857) about the end of August, he and Tom J. Egan, on returning from shooting across the North West Arm, Halifax, saw a bird near Kenny's at foot of South Street, on east side of the Arm. Kelly shot it and it proved to be a Passenger Pigeon not a Carolina Dove. It was the only Passenger Pigeon that Kelly ever saw, although his father had told him that they used to be common about Halifax."

In another passage Piers writes:

"W.A. Purcell, taxidermist of Halifax, tells me that about 1846 or 1847 Passenger Pigeons were abundant and his father, at Purcell's Cove, used to shoot large numbers of them. He says they disappeared about 1850."

A last record for Annapolis County came from John F. Tufts, based on recollections of his early life at Albany, where he was born in 1843. In the autumn of 1855, while working on his father's farm, he saw a flock of about 20 "wild pigeons" alight on the branches of a tall, dead pine tree. Though he had seen wild pigeons before, they were none too common. As he stood watching them, a shot rang out, fired from the thick underbrush beneath the tree, and three birds were seen to fall. He ran over to investigate and found an Indian trapper sitting on the ground with a wounded pigeon in each hand and a third lying dead beside him.

To Blakiston and Bland (1856), it was still "sometimes very abundant; arrives about the end of July." This suggests that it no longer nested extensively by the middle of the nineteenth century. Jones (1879) states that "this bird some thirty or forty years ago was extremely abundant in fall but now apparently forsaken the province." McKinlay (1885) details its abundance and refers to nestings in Pictou County in pioneer times. The report of one on Sable Island in 1903 (McLaren 1981a) should probably not be taken seriously. The last passenger pigeon died in captivity in a Cincinnati zoo on 1 September 1914.