Pigeon Hole Pale Ale

A hoppy American Pale Ale.

In Wisconsin during the 1870s, hunters shipped 100 to 200 barrels filled with passenger pigeons each day. A barrel contained 300 birds. One gun dealer in Sparta reported selling 521,000 bullets in one month in 1871 to pigeoneers. Trains were chartered to carry passenger pigeons to market, some with as many as 300,000 dead birds on board.

As the years went on, fewer passenger pigeons were seen, but because they were nomadic it was easy for people to say they were simply elsewhere. The last passenger pigeon shot in Wisconsin was in 1899 in Babcock, and the last wild one shot anywhere was just three years later in Indiana.

A $2,220 reward offered by the American Ornithologists Union in 1912 for a sighting of a wild passenger pigeon went unclaimed. Meanwhile, some aviculturists were keeping them in captivity, and eventually the only passenger pigeons were in zoos.

Martha’s death in 1914 “was a wake-up call,” said Temple, senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “Remember, in 1914 there were lots of people alive who saw the great flocks.”

Wisconsin environmentalist Aldo Leopold eloquently summed up the meaning behind the passenger pigeon extinction with an essay he delivered at the dedication of a monument to the bird in 1947 at Wyalusing State Park, noting that “for one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing.”

On Sunday, after field trip participants scrambled up Quincy Bluff and listened to Temple paint a picture of a time when millions of the doomed birds nested here, they read out loud Leopold’s essay, passing a booklet of his words from person to person.

“We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds,” Leopold wrote, “sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.”