Yesterday marked the 92nd year to pass since the death of the very last passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius).  Named Martha, she died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914, after which she was put on display in the Smithsonian where she can be seen today.  Like so many other species that have gone extinct or are facing extinction even now, man is to blame [via Coturnix]:

The Passenger Pigeon was a very social bird. It lived in colonies with up to a hundred nests in a single tree, and stretching over hundreds of square miles. During summer, Passenger Pigeons lived throughout the part of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. In the winter, they lived in the southern U.S.

It was hunted for food, hog feed, as live targets for trap shooting and even sometimes as agricultural fertilizer, and shipped by the boxcar-load to the Eastern cities. In New York City in 1805, a brace (pair) of pigeons sold for two cents. Slaves and servants in 18th and 19th century America often saw no other meat. Commercial hunters harvested them in huge amounts for food, and most restaurants in the Eastern United States served pigeon to customers.

In the mid-1800s, it was noticeable that their numbers were dropping. The passenger pigeon only laid one egg at a time, so once numbers started to decline it would have taken time for them to start rising again. Almost all of the remaining quarter-million Passenger Pigeons were killed in a single day in 1896 by sport hunters, who knew they were shooting the last wild flock. The last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot by a 14-year-old boy in Ohio in March of 1900.

Other significant reasons for its extinction were deforestation (the birds relied on acorn and beech mast for breeding and shifted or occupied their breeding colonies in accordance with the food trees’ mast year cycle), and probably social factors—the birds seemed to have initiated courtship and reproduction when they were gathered in large numbers; it was noted that small groups of Passenger Pigeons were notoriously difficult to get to breed successfully.

Let me reiterate the evil that men do.  Knowing they were wiping out the last of their kind, men gathered together and in a single day intentionally destroyed the last flock of these birds — nearly 250,000 of them.  They wallowed in the sick joy of killing an entire species.  They were proud of their part in causing extinction.

And to ensure our children could understand what it felt like to be responsible for the destruction of an entire species, a 14-year-old boy was encouraged to and successfully did kill the very last wild passenger pigeon in the whole wide world.  I sure as hell hope he was proud of himself.

Because the species reproduced so slowly and because they would only mate when in large flocks, captive breeding was impossible — so the entire species died.  Quite a few Homo sapiens watched it happened and laughed and congratulated each other for the blood on their hands.

Why are so few people interested in both past and future losses of this kind?  I’m not being flippant; I’m being quite sincere.  How much destruction have we as a species wrought on this planet?  How many organisms have we seen fit to wipe from the face of the planet out of ignorance and intentional spite and selfishness?  It is far more than you realize, poppets.  Think about what I’ve already discussed here (which is only the tip of the extinction iceberg).

We are devastating the deep seas and thereby causing significant extinctions and habitat destruction, and we already see evidence of extinctions in deep-sea fish populations (and that includes swiftly declining numbers of tuna and orange roughy, placing them at greatest risk for extinction in the near future).

We only recently found the black African rhino is now extinct and that only four northern white rhinos are left alive.

A census of bird species brought us the sad news that at least one bird species goes extinct each year, and that number is climbing and should reach 10 species per year within this century.

The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit (Brachylagus idahoensis) is now essentially extinct as only two females remain alive and can not be used to save the species, but instead will be used for cross-breeding with other rabbits.

A significant study of the animal world found “16,119 animal and plant species are in danger of extinction, including 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 4 mammals and 1 in 3 amphibian species”, not to mention “a quarter of the world’s … coniferous trees”.

Polar bears are now threatened and their numbers are expected to plummet catastrophically over the next 45 years.

“[F]ewer than 300 dama gazelles (Gazella dama) remain, their numbers having crashed by 80% over the past decade.”

“Several species of gazelle and antelope that have specially adapted behaviours, physiologies and metabolisms to survive arid conditions are now facing extinction.”

Again due to misuse of the oceans, “547 species of shark and ray [face extinction] … including the common skate (Dipturus batis)”.

“The angel shark (Squatina squatina), once a common sight in the fish markets of Europe, is now extinct in the North Sea and has been declared critically endangered elsewhere.”

Sharks and rays in general are now frighteningly vulnerable, “and as a result of overfishing their numbers have dropped by 95% in some areas”.

“The hippopotamus population in war-ravaged Congo, meanwhile, has plummeted by 95 percent, mainly because of unregulated hunting for meat and ivory in their teeth.”

Shell alone may cause the extinction of the western grey whale.  “The company is already [single-handedly] responsible for emaciated whales, large bird kills, and many other environmental disasters.”

Remember, those are just the items I’ve mentioned here.  There are many more.  Far too many, in fact.  Using records dating back to 1500 CE, we already know of 784 species extinctions.  There are undoubtedly many we don’t know about, especially coextinctions wherein the death of one species causes the death of another due to interdependence between the two (e.g., the extinction of an insect species solely responsible for pollinating a specific plant would cause the extinction of that plant species as well).

We have in the last 500 years wiped out almost 800 species.  Because we have yet to consider this a problem and take conservation seriously, 20 times that number of species now face extinction, and some of them have already disappeared since the study was completed.  The chain reaction is, of course, tipping the balance in the ecosystem, and that will ripple through our food supply and our own species in ways we can not yet imagine.

If only more people would demonstrate even the smallest amount of humanity.  Perhaps then things might turn out differently.  Then again, maybe this proves we as a species aren’t worth saving and only deserve as good as we’ve given.