What If Passenger Pigeons Were Still Alive

What If Passenger Pigeons Never Went Extinct: at high noon over Cincinnati, Ohio, the sky goes black. A roar like a freight train rolls overhead as three billion passenger pigeons return to modern America. Everyone thinks they've come to eat the country. By the end, you'll know what they're really looking for. Ohio farmer Hank Kowalski watches part of the cloud strip his newly planted corn in ten minutes. At the Cincinnati Zoo, Dr. Lucia Ortiz walks out to the little pagoda-shaped aviary where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914. The flock turns down the Ohio River toward the airport, and tower supervisor Dana Price has to stop departures. By evening it's a national problem, and the wildlife authorities put lethal control on the table. Lucia has forty-eight hours. But the birds roost every night and leave every dawn, and when her survey team searches the roosts for nests, they find nothing. Everyone is talking about a population explosion. Lucia is worried about the opposite. In this episode: • Passenger pigeon facts: about fifteen inches long, a long pointed tail, a slate-blue back and a copper-red chest. Not a city pigeon. • How many passenger pigeons were there: an estimated three to five billion, perhaps a quarter or more of all the birds in North America. • John James Audubon's 1813 migration over Kentucky that lasted three days and darkened the daylight like an eclipse. • Why passenger pigeons went extinct: the telegraph, the railroads, market hunting, raided nesting colonies and cleared forests, including Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. • Martha, the last passenger pigeon, and what her story really proves. • Why a bird that laid a single egg needed huge colonies, nut-producing forests of oak and beech, and room to move. • How weather radar already tracks bird migration, and the 2009 Hudson River landing that shows what one flock can do to a jet. CHAPTERS 00:00 High noon: the sky goes black 0:29 Hank's field, gone in ten minutes 1:00 Scattered pigeons, heavy at times 1:25 What is a passenger pigeon? 1:48 The aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo 2:11 Martha, the last one 2:31 Three to five billion birds 2:54 The cloud turns toward the airport 3:13 What one flock can do to a jet 3:45 A national problem 4:13 The Cincinnati way 4:34 How it ended last time 5:00 Petoskey, 1878 5:28 Why do they never stay? 5:46 The night survey 6:02 Nothing 6:23 Not proof, but a warning 6:35 One egg and a crowd 7:06 What modern America is missing 7:17 What Martha really proves 7:36 Noise cannons and a petition 8:04 The pigeon forecast 8:22 Lucia's radar idea 8:58 A forest map 9:22 Where can they stay? 9:58 Day five 10:26 What they were looking for 10:43 Three weeks later 10:55 The cull is shelved 11:15 The egg hatches 11:31 Last time vs this time 12:03 A hundred years from now 12:23 High noon, one more time This is a speculative, animated what-if story. The passenger pigeon history is real; the return, the people and the events in Ohio are fiction. In real life, scientists at Revive & Restore aim to recreate passenger pigeons in the 2030s. Every episode brings one extinct animal back to the present day and follows the people who have to live with it. Subscribe for the next one, and tell us in the comments which extinct bird should come back next. #passengerpigeon #whatif #extinctanimals #deextinction #birds