Missing Birds

The birds here have either gone extinct or their fate is so precarious they are unlikely to survive as a species. Human encroachment has led to habitats too small to sustain minimum populations; overhunting for food, fashion, or fly tying has decimated populations of birds that once sang out in our forests and skies.   The passenger pigeon, my first piece in this series and a relation to doves and common pigeons, was considered a pest that filled the skies and left messes in our cities.  It took only decades to decimate that population and the final bird, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.