Article From SubmitYOURArticle.com: The Forgetting of America's Passenger Pigeon

Sometimes a story begins in a novelist's mind
with a character, and sometimes the character is
other than human. In the summer of 2005 I became
intrigued with the idea of building a novel
around a modern-day pandemic, a global bird flu
outbreak, and it occurred to me an intriguing
bird might have the strength to propel the story
through a plague every bit as deadly as the 1918
flu. I considered several possibilities-the
crow, with its natural intelligence being a
leading contender. For a while, I considered the
Ivory Bill Woodpecker, an "extinct" bird making
headlines at the time. But, these birds had
current, widespread media coverage. I was
looking for a ghost-a real one. The bird I was
waiting for had to have been overlooked in
history, maybe even slightly tarnished, because
it would, in my mind, provide the controversial
antidote in my evolving novel.

When I found the passenger pigeon, I knew the
crevice in history was just right to accommodate
a pandemic and this particular species. In
actuality, the passenger pigeon missed the last
flu epidemic by four years. The single remaining
bird of its kind, a female named Martha, died in
the Cincinnati Zoo in September 1914. I looked
for some kind of connection between the die-out
of the passengers and the pandemic that was
building to a crescendo in the human population
the first years of the 20th century, but there
really was none. They seemed to be two separate
disasters coming together at almost the same
time. So when I began the process of building
the dynamic of keeping a bird "alive" through its
apparent extinction and having it come together
head-on with another pandemic one hundred years
later, the power in the story, I realized, was
being generated by the bird itself. No longer
just a footnote to a violent, deadly time in
American history, the passenger pigeon was now a
vital force to reckon with. It had been given
re-birth through story.

I continued to read accountings of people who
witnessed these pigeons in their amazing
heyday-Audubon, settlers in the Midwest, a Native
American Chief. A much-later book, Hope Is The
Thing With Feathers, recalled not only the
success, but horrific fall of birds that once
filled America's skies in flocks virtually days
long. From this, I became obsessed with the idea
of creating a male passenger pigeon having the
body of a passenger and the attitude of a
peregrine. But facts witnessed and documented
couldn't be denied. According to the most
trusted bird watchers of that time, the passenger
was prolific and dynamic in flight, but was
mindless without its massive numbers. The
trigger was man, and when he began to cut forest
and hunt mercilessly, the bird succumbed. There
was no turning back for the famous bird of
passage.

Nothing strikes a meaner blow than to hear of
what we've wrought upon so many bird species.
Audubon, himself, with his great love of birds,
destroyed many for the sake of accuracy in his
art. But the widespread slaughter of America's
passenger pigeon is almost without equal. One
accounting in the spring of 1880 in a Michigan
nesting site notes dry birch trees being set
afire in an explosion that blasted its way up
trees sending young birds leaping outward,
flightless, while parents flew upward amid
flames, their plumage scorched and dying.
Several thousand were witnessed to die by this
manner, and this was only one incident. Cruelty
aside, the vast numbers were diminished, even by
1880, and the passenger was doomed. There was
and still is a sadness I feel about it, as if I
witnessed it through my grandparents and their
parents. As if their compassion, fruitless as it
must have been, has been rekindled in me.

Perhaps that is why in this time of fleeting
glimpses of Ivory Bills and now oil-sodden brown
pelicans, I decided to take a moment to remember
a bird long forgotten-whose fate happened to
throw in with the birth of industrialization, of
a thriving timber industry, and the disregard of
most of America. No doubt, it would've been
incompatible with us in its sheer numbers, its
dung falling like snow across hundreds of miles
of forest. No pilot could've maneuvered through
millions of birds in flocks that took days to
pass. Today, the passenger pigeon would, no
doubt, meet with the same fate. Conditions in
the 21st century are even less tolerant for birds
that cannot adapt to that tenuous edge between
threatened and extinct-a convenient place to keep
a species when flourishing might mean a clear and
natural "inconvenience." More than most other
extinctions, this particular bird provided a
glorious show, then an even more glorious
disappearance. Mute and caged, the long-lived
Martha gave her life to scrutiny, and when she
died in September 1914 the pronouncement of
"Extinct Species" was heard round the world.
Like the pandemic that followed, it still haunts
some of us even now, all these many years later.

----------------------------------------------------
Could the passenger pigeon cause a pandemic, then
cure it, all the while outwitting extinction?
Sherrida Woodley's novel, Quick Fall of Light,
considers these questions in a story of a
modern-day flu pandemic. A novel of speculative
fiction, some have called it an all-out
eco-thriller for our time. Find out more at
http://www.quickfalloflight.com

EasyPublish this article: http://submityourarticle.com/articles/easypublish.php?art_id=123728

>