Said Kubiak, “You could hear these birds from miles and miles away. “Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats, groaning off steam, with an equal quota of railroad trains passing through covered bridges - imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar. They traveled in huge, noisy flocks, prompting evocative descriptions such as one account from the 1850s that appeared in the Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Commonwealth newspaper: Not everything about them was beautiful, however. “These birds were built for speed,” flying at an estimated 60 miles per hour, Kubiak said. The name passenger comes from the French passager, meaning to pass by in a fleeting manner. Males had slate-blue backs and a cinnamon-colored chest. Passenger pigeons were beautiful birds, about twice the size of a mourning dove. “This bird that numbered in the billions - no one really thought to think about what its biological life and death was until the bird was gone.” ![]() Kubiak said, “It’s amazing that a bird that was this abundant and played such an important role in the lives of early Americans was never really studied in a scientific manner,” he said. The lifesize depiction of a pair of passenger pigeons shows the female feeding the male - the opposite of the birds’ true mating ritual, in which the male would cuddle up to the female and feed her. The “Birds of America” depiction of a pair of passenger pigeons was made in fall 1824, the only bird Audubon is known to have painted in Pittsburgh.ĭespite his reputation for meticulous detail and extensive fieldwork, Audubon’s engraving, while beautiful, is biologically inaccurate, Kubiak said. The University’s set has been digitized and can be viewed at. A set similar to Pitt’s sold for the equivalent of about $11.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2010. ![]() It contains 435 prints, depicting 497 species in a large-format “double elephant folio,” 27 by 40 inches. The book was produced 1827-38 as a four-volume set, based on extensive fieldwork. The annual event showcases the most valuable holding in the library’s collections: one of only 120 known complete sets of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.” Kubiak was the featured speaker at the University Library System’s Nov. The initiative is part of a national effort to use the 100th anniversary of the extinction of what once was the continent’s most numerous bird species as an opportunity to encourage conservation and a sustainable relationship with the natural world. “It’s very rare in history that we can pinpoint the exact time and the exact place that a species went extinct,” he said, noting that the local Audubon group is part of a wider “Project Passenger Pigeon Pittsburgh” ( ). ![]() “It was a sad and telling end to a species that was so important and so large that no one thought could actually go extinct,” said historian Chris Kubiak of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania in a presentation at Hillman Library. Her remains were shipped in a block of ice to the Smithsonian Institute, where her preserved body was put on display. 1, 1914, a 29-year-old passenger pigeon named Martha died in her enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.
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