Described as having a beautiful rising and falling whistling call. From Choiseul, one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea. Choiseul had no carnivorous mammals (other than man, who sometimes hunted it for food) before the introduction of feral cats by visitors to the islands; the indigenous population on the island told researchers that the pigeon was wiped out by these cats.   It was apparently very tame and would let local hunters approach it and pick it off its perch by hand.

The last unconfirmed report of a Choiseul Pigeon was in the early 1940s.

From New Zealand. They liked the forest floor and rooting around in underbrush. They built nests like little cups in trees only a few feet away from the ground. Piopios had a beautiful call, and also often mimicked the call of other birds as well.

Two things did away with them: deforestation, and the introduction of new predators, particularly rats. The islands of New Zealand were relatively isolated and had no native mammals other than bats, which is why the nation is famous for the wide diversity of unique birds that evolved there. New Zealand was a land of birds until settlement by outsiders and when Captain James Cook arrived in the 1770s he described the bird song as deafening. Today the strange, almost blind, flightless kiwi is a national symbol of New Zealand and New Zealanders.

European settlement  in the 19th century brought a lot of change to the island: hunting, clearing of the forest for farming, industrialization, rats and other mammals, and many kinds of birds, almost a third of the original number of species, did not make it through. The last verified North Island Piopio was shot in 1902, although people claimed to have spotted ones as late as the 1970s. The South Island Piopio was last recorded in 1905.

Collectors in the nineteenth century weren’t just interested in raiding nests for eggs, or collecting birds to be kept on mantelpieces. There was also the exploding market for hats with birds on them:

Hats adorned with real feathers, wings, and stuffed whole wild birds were the height of fashion in the late-19th century. Woodpeckers, blue jays, waxwings and quails: all were popular adornments, but most prized were ostrich, peacocks, pheasants, egrets, vultures, eagles, swans, herons, and turkeys, all coveted for their dramatic plumage.

The trade was fairly merciless. Hunters would kill and skin adult egrets during breeding season (when their wispy feathers were particularly attractive) and leave the orphaned nestlings to starve to death. The millinery trade took a tremendous toll on bird populations – 200 million wild birds per year by some estimates. Numbers of the most hunted species declined quickly.

New York and London were two main centers of the trade in feathers. Colonial expansion across the globe and the exploration of foreign lands had brought new and exotic specimens to the European marketplace throughout the century. New York was one of the places that helped bring these new specimens to Europe, including previously unknown varieties of birds, fuelling the fashionable demand for feathers, wings and even entire birds as decoration.

In the US, two women banded together to fight the slaughter. Two Boston Socialites, Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall, started a boycott of the trade, which gained steam due to their social connections. They sent out circulars protesting the practice and hosted tea parties where they educated their guests about the cost to bird life. Their tea parties grew in popularity and culminated in the founding of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and later, passage of the Weeks-McLean Law, also known as the Migratory Bird Act, by Congress on March 4, 1913. The law banned market hunting and the interstate transport of birds.

There’s a fascinating online exhibition here called Fashioning Feathers, if you’re interested. There’s also a great article here by the always entertaining Lapham’s Quarterly.

So, as I’ve mentioned, I am slowly working on a field guide to extinct birds, partly because  paper field guides are one of the kinds of printed books that are probably going to disappear (like dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, travel guides, etc.) to be replaced by easily portable, easily updated apps. One of things that apps are better at is recording and communicating birdsong. I love the ways that writers have translated birdsong into printed language. (See here.) But if what you want to do is figure out, what is that bird over there? And quickly, before it flies away? Then print is probably not the best option at this point.

Then I read this, and remembered that all the fancy technology in the world doesn’t solve our tendency to be jackasses. (and often it just highlights it). What happens if bird sanctuaries have to ban mobile apps?

(Mobile app causing harm to birds.)

After Audubon, ornithology began to take shape as a field of study. As an example, one of his protegees, Spencer Fullerton Baird, helped to create and direct the National Museum of Natural History for the Smithsonian. Baird cultivated a far-flung network of collectors and ornithologists who sent him specimens of birds. Many of them were US Army officers patrolling the frontier, since they had access to the most remote areas of the country.

Academic ornithologists collected specimens of all kinds of birds for museum collections. As collection-based ornithology progressed, it permitted more accurate identification of birds in the field. And ornithologists were rabidly interested in acquiring the rarest specimens they could. They were encountering hundreds of new species, and without any published material like field guides to help them sort out one kind from another. Binoculars were primitive, and the only way to sift through the confusion, the species and subspecies, was to collect and scrutinize specimens.

But just in case you weren’t clear on this point: specimens were birds that were shot, and then stuffed. Sometimes these birds were common and abundant, and sometimes they were rare and endangered. The rarer the bird, the higher the price a museum collection would pay for it, so that their collection would be as complete as possible.

The nineteenth century is famous for its mania for natural history collections. When it came to birds, not only ornithologists and museums, but all kinds of people collected specimens of birds, which fueled a whole class of professionals who made a living collecting birds and their eggs.

Victorian homes often included “glass bird cages”: small arrangements of a couple dozen stuffed songbirds, both adults and babies, mounted on branches and displayed under a glass dome that sat on a shelf.  Taxidermy shops cranked out work like this to meet the growing demand, usually using whatever local species were around. But often for a handsome price you could upgrade and fill your mantel with a collection of glittering South American hummingbirds.

Eggs were the focus of the most extreme kind of collecting obsession. Oology, the study and collection of eggs carefully blown clean of their contents, was a genuine rage in North American and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oologists were tremendously competitive and each aimed to assemble the most complete collections. Eggs were usually taken not one at a time, but in entire clutches from the nest.

A small Hawaiian honeycreeper. It liked the seeds and flowers of a particular sort of palm tree, and when those started to disappeared, so did the bird. Its name means “the red bird that eats the fruit of the hawane palm”. Last seen in 1892.

“No kid is safe from their attacks. Should a number be together, the birds unite their forces, and, with great noise and flapping of their wings, generally manage to separate the weakest one and dispatch it….The birds are cruel to the extreme, and the torture sometimes inflicted upon the defenseless animals is painful to witness. Even when food is plenty, they often attach living animals instead of contenting themselves with the carcasses of those already dead, seeming to delight in killing.”- Edward Palmer, 1876

It’s impossible to tell now how bloodthirsty this bird, a member of the falcon family, actually was; this description was written by a goat herder on Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Mexico. Goat herders banded together in the 19th century and conducted a formal campaign to drive this particular bird to extinction. The Caracara occasionally fed on young goats, though it seems like their role as predator has been exaggerated.

It stands to note that its home was at that time being devastated by tens of thousands of goats gone feral, leading to the extinction of several other endemic species, caused by the near-total destruction of habitat. It also stand to note that goats were not endemic to the island, but had been brought there by settlers. They were originally brought there in the early 19th century by Russia whalers for provisions when stopping over. Goats eventually eliminated most vegetation on the island, along with several other species, before their population collapsed.

Look at how handsome he is. This is another New Zealand bird. His cry sounded like “a series of dismal shrieks frequently repeated”,  or, alternately, as “a peculiar laughing cry, uttered with a descending scale of notes”. No one is really sure what happened to the Laughing Owl;  by the time European naturalists starting paying attention to it it was already in decline. Some say fewer Maori rats meant fewer owls. Others say new introduced predators took their toll; these owls seemed to have walked more than flown. They had disappeared by the early 20th Century, though like many extinct birds, there are people who say that there’s one or two hiding out there somewhere. Errol Fuller has this advice for Laughing Owl fans:

Anyone still believing in the Laughing Owl’s survival and hoping to find its last resting place, might do worse than learn to play the accordion… “It could always be brought from its lurking place in the rocks, after dusk, by the strains of an accordion. Soon after the music had commenced the bird would silently flit over and face the performer, and finally take up its station in the vicinity, and remain within easy hearing till it had ceased.”

There you have it: an accordion-loving owl. I’ve found my favorite extinct bird.

Live Action Birdwatching on Governor’s Island.

This hawk swooped down and all the birds in the neighborhood said, ‘Uh, I’m leaving now.”

From New Zealand. The Maori prized their feathers and wore them in battle. They made jewelry, amulets and carved boxes especially to hold Huia feathers. They gave them to each other as tokens of friendship and of respect, and used them in funeral rites. At first only powerful chiefs were allowed to wear their feathers, but soon after the Europeans arrived that went by the wayside, and anyone who could get their hands on them started collecting and wearing them. The Europeans themselves were happy to have stuffed Huias decorate their colonial drawing rooms, and many others were exported to museums and private curiosity cabinets back home.

John Zorn named an album after this guy. They were a kind of honeyeater.

Generations of Hawaiian Royalty trapped Mamos and used their yellow rump feathers for ceremonial royal war cloaks. The Kings of Hawaii supposed ruled that anyone who trapped a Mamo was prevented from killing it, and were required to turn them loose once their yellow feathers had been plucked. It’s impossible to say if this was an effective edict, or if the Mamo really wanted to go out without half its feathers.  By the end of the nineteenth century they had almost completely disappeared, probably due to loss of habitat coupled with hunting.