#ectopistes

[revsssart]

pls tell me you understand the joke

[fabfuta1234]

DinApril Day 13: A Quaternary dinosaur.

Welcome to DinApril 2024! Our thirteenth day features a Quaternary dinosaur: Ectopistes migratorius! This male is fighting an eastern gray squirrel over a white oak acorn; the passenger pigeon is currently winning.

This piece was inspired by the fact that extant pigeons will fight squirrels over nuts, so logically extinct ones like passenger pigeons (who were famous for eating so many acorns that their extinction caused a dramatic shift in the species composition of the east coast's oak forest) would also fight squirrels over acorns, thus continuing the longstanding tradition of dinosaur-on-mammal violence.

Coloration inspired by the actual animal, taxidermies of which I have seen in real life at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. Sucks that we can't see living ones, but hey, we're at least theoretically able to clone them.

[wonder-rooms]

Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius - The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1754) - Mark Catesby

[dendroica]

As long as America was rural and untraversed by railroads, the killing did not seem to do much more than dent the vast pigeon population. After the Civil War, however, things began to change rapidly. You could find out by telegraph where pigeons were nesting, get there quickly by train, and sell what you killed to a city hundreds of miles away. Soon market hunters began operating on an enormous scale, cramming tens of thousands of birds into boxcars—especially after Gustavus Swift introduced the refrigerator car, in 1878. This meant that rural migrants to growing cities could still get wild game, and the well-heeled could eat Ballotine of Squab à la Madison, served by a new class of restaurant, like Delmonico’s, in New York, where fine dining was becoming a feature of urban life. All this coincided with an explosion in logging, which began destroying the habitat of pigeons just as hunters were destroying the pigeons themselves.

Jonathan Rosen: Why the Passenger Pigeon Became Extinct : The New Yorker

[dendroica]

Answering even basic questions about the passenger pigeon requires a sort of forensic ornithology, which gives “Feathered River Across the Sky” an unexpected poignancy at the very points where it is most nature-nerdy. A characteristic sentence begins, “Yet another of the great questions that can never be answered regarding the life history of this species is how many times a year they bred.” But the central question that Greenberg sets out to answer is how a bird could go from a population of billions to zero in less than fifty years. The short answer is that it tasted good. Also, it was easy to kill and so abundant that it often seemed, in the days before refrigeration, like the quail that fell on the Israelites in Exodus. In 1781, after a crop failure, a flock of pigeons saved a large swath of New Hampshire from starvation. Despite the occasional apocalyptic shiver, most Americans looked up and decided that it was cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

Jonathan Rosen: Why the Passenger Pigeon Became Extinct : The New Yorker

[jadafitch]

Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), acrylic on wood