Over a hundred years ago people appeared to be incapable of understanding that species could be driven to extinction through human exploitation. We know better now, but that hasn’t stopped us. Maybe it’s the inevitable, evolutionary consequence of apex predators reaching sentience, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s an answer, especially as modern humans grow increasingly disconnected from their environment.
Here’s the sad fate of the passenger pigeon, a story being repeated today across the planet for untold numbers of species.
The notion that the species could be driven to extinction was alien to the early colonists, because the number of birds did not appear to diminish, and also because the concept of extinction was yet to be defined. The bird seems to have been slowly pushed westwards after the arrival of Europeans, becoming scarce or absent in the east, though there were still millions of birds in the 1850s. The population must have been decreasing in numbers for many years, though this went unnoticed due to the apparent vast number of birds, which clouded their decline.[58] In 1856 Bénédict Henry Révoil may have been one of the first writers to voice concern about the fate of the passenger pigeon, after witnessing a hunt in 1847:
> Everything leads to the belief that the pigeons, which cannot endure isolation and are forced to flee or to change their way of living according to the rate at which North America is populated by the European inflow, will simply end by disappearing from this continent, and, if the world does not end this before a century, I will wager… that the amateur of ornithology will find no more wild pigeons, except those in the Museums of Natural History.
By the 1870s, the decrease in birds was noticeable, especially after the last large-scale nestings and subsequent slaughters of millions of birds in 1874 and 1878. By this time, large nestings only took place in the north, around the Great Lakes. The last large nesting was in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878 (following one in Pennsylvania a few days earlier), where 50,000 birds were killed each day for nearly five months. The surviving adults attempted a second nesting at new sites, but were killed by professional hunters before they had a chance to raise any young. Scattered nestings are reported into the 1880s, but the birds were now wary, and commonly abandoned their nests if persecuted.
