Flocks were regularly described in apocalyptical language.Passenger pigeon flocks were so large they would block out the sun and they would take several days to pass over towns.Imagine more than 400 times the entire UK population of pigeons flying together in one group - that's what passenger pigeon flocks were like!.To put that in perspective, the RSPB estimates the UK population of pigeons (wild rock doves and wood pigeons combined) is about 6 million breeding pairs.Alexander Wilson, a great bird observer of the time, estimated a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals.It is thought that the species once constituted 25-40% of the total bird population of the United States.However, Mark Avery, former conservation director of the RSPB, puts the figure between 5 and 10 billion.The passenger pigeon population is estimated to have been somewhere between 3 and 5 billion in the early and mid-1800s.In spring, they would fly north to nest in the region of the Great Lakes and east to New York.In winter they would roost in the southern states, from the Gulf Coast to Arkansas and North Carolina.Passenger pigeons were migratory birds.It was a wild bird, not to be confused with the carrier pigeon, a domesticated bird trained to carry messages.The passenger pigeon was native to North America.Now on the wrong - extant - west side of the Museum. Waterhouse's terracotta passenger pigeon on one of the Cromwell Road pillars. Today there are two notable exceptions to this rule: the passenger pigeon which was alive when the building was erected in the late 1800s, but is now extinct and the coelacanth, which was thought to have gone extinct 85 million years ago, but was rediscovered in 1938.living forms) on the west side extinct on the east side. The terracotta depictions of creatures where placed according to status: extant (i.e.You can see it on the Museum side of the pillars in our fence along Cromwell Road. While not strictly a specimen, we do have another passenger pigeon - this one is a terracotta sculpture designed by Alfred Waterhouse.Two passenger pigeons on display in the Birds gallery in London: a male (left), and female (right). You can see the mounted specimens on display in the Birds gallery in London and Gallery 1 at Tring.2 skeletons (one partial, one complete),.3 mounted specimens (two in London, one in Tring),.Our Museum holds nearly 80 passenger pigeon specimens in its collection, comprised:.The average length of a male passenger pigeon was about 16.5 inches.Colours in the male are brighter and more bold than in the female. Its colour is actually a blue-grey, with shades of red-orange and brown also prominent, as well as iridescent markings at the neck.The passenger pigeon is sometimes called a 'wild pigeon' or 'blue pigeon'.Picture courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Mark Catesby's 1754 illustration of a passenger pigeon. The first published depiction of the species is believed to be by Mark Catesby, in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands volume 1, in 1754, although he called the bird Palumbus migratorius, the pigeon of passage.He mistook the birds he saw for the wild pigeons he was familiar with in Europe but it was later agreed that what he had seen were passenger pigeons. Journeying along the shore of Prince Edward Island, Cartier noted in his journal: 'an infinite number of wood pigeons'.The first recorded mention of the passenger pigeon was by ship captain Jacques Cartier in July 1534.Ectopistes means 'moving about or wandering' and migratorius means 'migrating'.It was later re-classified as Ectopistes migratorius because of its longer wings and tail, and larger overall size, than the dove family Columbidae.It was officially described by Carl Linnaeus in 1766 as Columba migratoria.The scientific name for the passenger pigeon is Ectopistes migratorius.To commemorate, I (with some invaluable help and contributions from my Museum colleagues, the Smithsonian Institution, and Joel Greenberg's book A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction) have compiled a list of 100 passenger pigeon-related facts. After the dodo, it is one of the most famous examples of human-caused extinction in the world. Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of the last living passenger pigeon.

Facts about passenger pigeon