Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons

Download or read book Pilgrims of the Air: The Passing of the Passenger Pigeons written by John Wilson Foster and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of a scarcely credible abundance, of flocks of birds so vast they made the sky invisible. It is also a story of a collapse into extinction so startling as to provoke a mystery. In the fate of the North American passenger pigeon we can read much of the story of wild America—the astonishment that accompanied its discovery, the allure of its natural “productions” the ruthless exploitation of its “commodities” and the ultimate betrayal of its peculiar genius. And in the bird’s fate can be read, too, the essential vulnerability of species, the unpredictable passage of life itself.