Imaginative Listening – Thinking about the Sounds of the Passenger Pigeon

Dr.Sabine Feisst, Co-Director, Acoustic Ecology Lab @ASU

The American Bird Conservancy warns that “Hundreds of bird species are on track toward extinction. If these species blink out, we’ll have just one species to blame: ours.” Climate change, habitat loss, overfishing, collisions, and invasive species are among the reasons for the dwindling of almost a hundred bird species in the Americas. What will this mean for our sonic environments?

The extinction of North America’s incredibly abundant passenger pigeon in 1914 was a sonic sea-change. Simon Potagon, a member of the Potawatomi tribe and well-known writer in the 19^thcentury, remembered the mesmerizing and awe-inspiring sounds of the me-me-og – the wild passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). To Potagon, the spring flocks of hundreds of thousands of travelling pigeons sounded as if “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the forests towards me” and like “distant thunder” getting “nearer and nearer.” He found the sound of such large flocks to be as stirring as that of the “grandest waterfall in America,” when “these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.” He enjoyed the sounds of their gurgles, their flapping wings and their feasting on nuts and seeds in the forest.

Wisconsin’s newspaper Commonwealthreported in 1871 that hunters dropped their guns when confronted by the avian wall of sound: “Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats groaning off steam, with an equal quota of R.R. trains passing through covered bridges – imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar.”

When the settlers discovered that this bird was easily obtainable and delicious protein it only took about fifty years for the passenger pigeon to go extinct. Martha, the last member of a the species that once made up a quarter of North America’s bird population, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914 Martha died in Cincinnati Zoo (for more information see the Smithsonian Magazine

No field recordings or transcriptions of the pigeons’ calls are extant. Bohemian-born American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861) who witnessed large passenger pigeon flocks when he settled in America dedicated a symphonic work to this bird: The Columbiad or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons(1858). Listen to a live performance of the work by the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchesta