During the years after the Civil War, America embraced an economic philosophy called laissez-faire, celebrating the notion ...

Fast travel and communication allowed hunters to follow the swarms, and soon a booming commercial hunting industry was born. Source: Audubon The passenger pigeon used a strange communal defense ...

Historical records state passenger pigeons were once so numerous they darkened the skies when flying overhead. They were so easy to hunt that multiple pigeons could be killed with a single shotgun ...

These awesome congregations also made the birds easy to hunt, and their numbers started to decline rapidly in the late 19 th century. The last known passenger pigeon, Martha, lived at the ...

It’s impossible to adapt to mass murder In retrospect, it’s obvious that the passenger pigeon could not tolerate much hunting -- and certainly not the sort of intense, consistent massacre that ...

It had developed enough to take care of itself and soon fluttered to the ground to hunt for its food. Authorities differ as to how many times the passenger pigeon nested in a season. The general ...

pigeon hunting and killing was the national pastime − or so it seems. Like the dodo (who suffered a similar fate), the passenger pigeon generally disregarded the presence of human beings in its ...

Hunting, also, may have done the species in; they went from huge numbers to extinct in just 40 years. 10. Scientists are trying to bring the passenger pigeon back. Biodiversity Heritage Library ...

The passenger pigeon population declined in the mid-1800s as hunters started hunting them commercially. Due to their incredible population size, passenger pigeons were thought to be so prolific that ...

And then they were gone. Only a century after that flock passed through Kentucky like a hurricane, the last passenger pigeon died in a drab cage at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Her name was ...