ON THIS DAY: 1 September 1914 – The world lost its last passenger pigeon when Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio. Named after First Lady Martha Washington, she lived to be about 29 years old and became a symbol of one of the most dramatic extinctions in modern history.
Passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) were once the most abundant birds in North America – and perhaps the world. In the early 1800s, their population numbered an estimated 3 to 5 billion.
So vast were their flocks that early settlers and naturalists described the skies going dark for hours as pigeons streamed overhead. John James Audubon compared the sound of their wings to thunder rolling across the horizon.
Passenger pigeons were medium-sized birds, about 15–16 inches long, with sleek wings built for speed. But what truly defined them was their social nature. They travelled, roosted and nested in enormous colonies sometimes numbering millions of birds.
Breeding colonies could stretch for miles, with trees so heavily laden with nests that branches snapped under the weight. Their diet consisted mainly of acorns, beechnuts, seeds and berries, which they consumed in astonishing quantities as they moved across the continent.
Yet abundance was no safeguard. In the span of just a few decades, human activity brought the species to the brink. Their meat was cheap and sold widely, first as food for enslaved people and the poor, later in urban markets. Hunters killed them by the millions – shooting, netting and trapping entire flocks. Trainloads of carcasses were shipped daily to cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. And widespread deforestation eliminated crucial feeding and nesting grounds. By the early 1900s, the passenger pigeon was virtually extinct in the wild.
Martha spent her final years at the Cincinnati Zoo, sometimes sharing her enclosure with a male pigeon named George, who died before her. Her body was carefully preserved, shipped on ice to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and later mounted for display.
Martha’s death was more than the end of a species; it was a wake-up call. The passenger pigeon’s story became one of the earliest and most powerful examples of how human activity can erase even the most abundant life.
In the years that followed, this tragedy helped inspire landmark conservation efforts, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 – a law still protecting countless species today.