A beautiful bird of North America

Common name-Passenger pigeon 

Scientific name-Ectopistes migratorius

Kingdom-Animalia

Phylum- Chordata

Class-Aves

Diet- acorns and beechnuts

Weight- 260-340g

Height- 32cm (13 inch)

Lifespan- 15- 17,but Martha the last female passenger pigeon lived about 29 yrs which make their lifespan unknown.

Habitat- Eastern North America

The passenger pigeon or wild pigeon is an extinct species of pigeon that was endemic to North America. The habitat of the passenger pigeon was mixed hardwood forests. They are domestic pigeons that were trained and used in WWII to carry messages. They are totally different birds! The first known use of passenger pigeon was in 1772.

The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird in the world, with a population size estimated at 3–5 billion in the 1800s; its abrupt extinction in 1914 raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have been driven to extinction in mere decades. Although human exploitation is often blamed, the role of natural population dynamics in the passenger pigeon’s extinction remains unexplored.

The head and upper parts of the male pigeon were a clear bluish gray with black streaks on the scapulars and wing coverts. 

The colors of the female were duller and paler. Her head and back were a brownish gray, the iridescent patches of the throat and back of the neck were less bright, and the breast was a pale cinnamon-rose color.The birds flew at an estimated speed of about sixty miles an hour.

Forty years earlier, Martha’s ancestors numbered in the billions. Their flocks formed avian clouds across eastern North America, obstructing sunlight for days. The sight was so overwhelming that the American conservationist Aldo Leopold called them a “biological storm.”

By the early 1900s, only a handful of birds remained, and these were in captivity. 

One of the last large nestings of passenger pigeons occurred at Petoskey, Michigan, in.1878. Here 50,000 birds per day were killed and this rate continued for nearly five months. More than 100 nests might occupy a single tree that's they were easily caught and used for sports and ate in huge amounts .Some theory explained that they were also die because of hunger after forested habitat changed by human.Their natural enemies were hawks,skunks, owls,weasels,arboreal snakes.

About 1 Sep,1914, at 1 p.m the last known passenger pigeon a female, Martha died at the Cincinnati (Ohio) Zoo. This will become the end of this species...