SUN JOURNAL • September 29, 2021
Call it a sad footnote that history somehow forgot, but four years after Press Clay Southworth killed a passenger pigeon in Ohio in 1900, somebody in Bar Harbor gunned down a female passenger pigeon. That bird on Maine’s Mount Desert Island may have been the last passenger pigeon to fly free on this planet. John Josselyn wrote in 1663 that during his second voyage to New England, he saw “millions and millions” of the pigeons in a flock “so thick that I could see no sun.” It is said there were more passenger pigeons than all the other birds in North America combined. Passenger pigeons, to their great misfortune, made for a tasty meal. An old settler in western Maine said they’d kill the birds by digging a long trench, scattering wheat in it and then, when the pigeons came to eat in great numbers, fire at them with “an old flintlock musket loaded with a handful of shot” that could kill as many as 75 birds at once. That the last known wild passenger pigeon’s last moment came in Bar Harbor should be worth remembering.