TORONTO – On Sept. 1, around 1 p.m., Martha, the last of her kind, died.
Martha was the last confirmed passenger pigeon. She died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden and was later donated to the Smithsonian Institution.
It is believed that at one time, the passenger pigeon was prolific across what is now North America, with three to five billion of them in the wild.
As the United States and Canada were settled, the birds lost their nesting grounds and food sources. They turned to farmers’ fields and were considered a pest and killed. Then hunters began to kill them and sell them as meat in markets. By the mid 1800s, their numbers were falling dramatically.
And now, they are no more.
It would seem that humanity would learn from past mistakes, but life continues…
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