I believe that the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon is one of the most terrible examples of mass slaughter by men. The Passenger Pigeon was a very beautiful bird with a slender body, long pointed tail, brown back and pink breast. The male passenger pigeon bill is straight, of ordinary length, rather slender, broader than deep at the hase, with a tumid fleshy covering above, compressed towards the end, rather obtuse; upper mandible slightly declinate at the tip; edges inflected. Wings long, the second quill longest. The female bird could only lay one egg a year. .
Their roosting sites were correspondingly enormous- some covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree - branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the These passenger pigeon were also delicate birds because they always flew so thickly packed that a single shot could bring down thirty or forty birds and many were killed simply by hitting them with pieces of wood as they flew over hilltops. .
These birds were harmless creatures living happily in the forest with no human intervention. It so happened that people came to take over the forest and started cutting down trees that were these birds habitat and also their source of food. They were shot and sent to city food markets for sale. Many persons saw this as a source of income but little did they think that the birds were going to get extinct so quickly. People were just thinking about their selves and not about these innocent little birds that were harmless to anyone around. .
These birds were tortured so much until they became extinct. I could not have imagined that the most numerous birds on earth would have been extinct by the 21st Century. In my opinion the people who were around then should have taken action against the senseless killing of these birds from the time they found out that the female passenger pigeon only laid one egg a year, which made it difficult to replace these birds.
