Passenger Pigeons Once Numbered in the Billions and Blotted Out the Skies for Days. They Went Extinct in 30 Years.

History Unplugged Podcast · Apr 30, 2026 · 43m

In America’s first hundred years, the animal you were most likely to see was a passenger pigeon. And you saw a lot of them. Flocks were so numerous they literally blotted out the sun for days and their combined weight snapped the branches of entire forests where they roosted. Yet by 1914, the last specimen, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, marking the complete extinction of what had been North America's most abundant bird numbering in the billions just decades earlier. Early Americans assumed the nation's bird populations were infinite, so market hunters fashioned…