Animals I would have known...

The North American passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius. From one of the most abundant birds in the world in the nineteenth century, to extinction due to hunting and habitat loss in the twentieth. The migrations of passenger pigeons were a natural wonder. In 1605, Samuel de Champlain reported "countless numbers," Gabriel Sagard-Theodat wrote of "infinite multitudes," and Cotton Mather described a flock a mile in width and taking several hours to pass overhead. The last known passenger pigeon died in captivity in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

"The air was literally filled with pigeons, the light of noon-day was obscured as if by an eclipse." John James Audubon, of his experience seeing passenger pigeons in Kentucky in 1813.


John James Audubon, Passenger pigeons, Pittsburgh, 1824