Under a Wild Sky (25 page)

American white pelicans were numerous around Henderson in the fall. Audubon observed them in large flocks sitting on low islands or swimming in the river shallows, often so densely packed together that he killed several at a time with a single discharge of his gun. Although Audubon found all birds beautiful, he considered the white pelican unusually handsome. This was due in part, he thought, to the bird's careful grooming of its plumage, which was frequently passed feather by feather through its long bill when the bird was at rest. Audubon was impressed at how different the bird was from its cousin, the brown pelican, in the way it fished. White pelicans, he said, never dive upon their prey from the air but instead swim after fish and sweep them up by extending their necks and thrusting their heads underwater. Sometimes a flock hunted together in a militaristically choreographed group deployment. One Indian summer afternoon, as the sun lowered and the day cooled, Audubon watched a flock of white pelicans lazing on a sandbar. The forest was changing its colors and the red of the sunset touched only the tops of the trees. A commotion started in a small bay a little way off from the flock, which was instantly alert. The birds waddled into the water, where their ungainly land movements disappeared and they began to glide forward across the current in a surging mass toward the place where a school of small fish had begun thrashing the surface. The fish, Audubon said, seemed at play. They made the water sparkle. As the pelicans approached, the splashing continued. The birds swam closer together and, nearing the shoal, spread out their wings so that they formed a solid wall
pushing forward. Now the pelicans propelled themselves faster still, sending the fish fleeing ahead, into ever shallower water, herding the school toward its demise. When the fish were at last trapped against the shore, the pelicans moved in, heads lowering, and devoured them by the thousands.

Audubon made notes and kept journals of his field observations. Years later, when he was writing about America's birds, he consulted these records for the traits and the descriptions of each species, sometimes in conjunction with an examination of more recently killed specimens. But he relied, too, on his memory. However far he traveled from the lush forests of Kentucky, his days there went with him. Wherever he was, Audubon seemed always able to see the woods and the birds as he'd seen them as a young man. He could remember how white a pelican looked in the afternoon sun and how cool it was in the shade of a towering sycamore as he leaned against its smooth trunk. He took with him the feel of his gun pounding into his shoulder and rubbing against his cheek where it was pressed to the stock. He remembered what it was like when the stillness of a pallid dawn was split by the whistle of wings cutting through the air, sometimes like a gentle breeze and other times in a prolonged
aaahhhh
, like the sound of silk tearing. Audubon could forever hear the calls and songs that rang through the trees, as well as the sounds of rivers and storms and horses. He could feel the pull of a swamp against his shins and recall the torment of mosquitoes and withering heat spells and terrible winters when life on the earth seemed to stop and the rivers ceased to flow. Much of what Audubon saw and remembered now exists only in remnants, and some of it is gone entirely. For everything that Audubon took from America—and he took a lot—he left behind a spirited portrait of a country that is no more.

The Carolina parakeet—or parrot as it was also known—was already in decline when Audubon began observing it in Kentucky, though its numbers had been so great that the bird was still seen in immense flocks across much of the eastern portion of North America. Like the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet was disappearing in defiance of the usual precondition for extinction, which is rarity. Animals that go extinct typically shrink to very small numbers over a long period of time before they reach the vanishing point. Populations become isolated and contract
to a handful of individuals, which are wiped out one by one. Usually this is a natural process. Species average about a million years on earth, and many more animals have gone extinct than exist today. But in the cases of both the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon, the birds persisted in huge numbers right up to the time when they went very suddenly extinct. It's now believed that both species were adapted to survive and breed only in massive flocks of millions upon millions of individuals, so that even when many remained there were not enough.
The last time anyone saw a Carolina parakeet in the wild was in 1905.
The passenger pigeon had disappeared five years earlier. The very last individuals of both species died in zoos not long after.

The Carolina parakeet was one of the few species of bird that Audubon worried about. The only parrot native to North America, it was a large, noisy resident of the forest, as common at it was beautiful:

Bill white. Iris hazel. Bare orbital space whitish. Feet pale flesh-colour, claws dusky. Fore part of the head and cheeks bright scarlet, that colour extending over and behind the eye, the rest of the head and neck pure bright yellow; the edge of the wing bright yellow, spotted with orange. The general colour of the other parts is emerald-green, with light blue reflections, lighter beneath. Primary coverts deep bluish-green; secondary coverts greenish-yellow. Quills bluish-green on the outer web, brownish-red on the inner, the primaries bright yellow at the base of the outer web. Two middle tail-feathers deep green, the rest of the same colour externally, their inner webs brownish-red. Tibial feathers yellow, the lowest deep orange.

But loss of habitat and a great continuing slaughter—by market hunters after the bird's extravagant feathers and by farmers trying to save their crops from marauding flocks—devastated a species that many then regarded as a pest. Audubon, whose published drawing of the Carolina parakeet was from specimens he eventually shot in Louisiana, observed the bird in decline while he was still at Henderson.
Carolina parakeets, he wrote, were fond of cockle-burs, the small, spiny fruit that is found, as Audubon noted, “much too plentifully” across the eastern and southern parts of America. Cockle-burs were—and still are—a great nuisance, sticking to clothing and livestock. The parrot ate cockle-burs with
abandon, plucking them from the stem and then manipulating the bur while holding it with one foot until its “joint” was aimed at the bird's mouth—whereupon it would squeeze out the inner flesh and then drop the barbed husk to the ground. Anyone with cockle-burs on their property should have been glad to have Carolina parakeets alight and dig in, thought Audubon, though he was careful to add that while there was as yet no known use for the cockle-bur, it could not be assumed that it would not in the future prove useful in “medicine or chemistry,” as had other plants thought to be of no value.

The problem for the Carolina parakeet, Audubon said, was that it loved every kind of fruit and grain “indiscriminately,” corn being about the only farm crop it wouldn't eat. A flock of Carolina parakeets—think of a roiling, deep green ocean falling out of the sky—could lay waste to a large area of cropland. Farmers hated the birds and killed as many as they could. When feeding, the Carolina parakeet was oblivious to its surroundings and easily approached. Even after being shot at, the birds remained easy targets. Younger parakeets, Audubon reported, were “tolerable” table fare. But mainly the birds were shot just to be rid of them. Audubon described how farmers walked up to Carolina parakeets feeding on stacks of grain and shot them until the farmers got tired of it. At the sound of gunfire, the round of killings began:

All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundred destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots.

Carolina parakeets issued a sharp, screeching call—a “scream” to Audubon's ears—that was hard to endure at close range. Although they could be tamed by being repeatedly dunked in water, a lamentable practice with which Audubon was evidently familiar, Carolina parakeets could not mimic human speech and never gave up their own call, which made
the birds “so disagreeable as to render them at best very indifferent companions.” The bird was wild and wanted to stay that way.

In the fall of 1813, while on his way by horseback from Henderson to Louisville, Audubon saw a low smudge in the sky, at first like a dark cloud, pulsing and growing larger. Presently he heard a rumble, and in the same moment the smudge became a surging mass of dark points. It was a flock of passenger pigeons, flying directly at him. There seemed to him to be a great many birds, even by passenger pigeon standards. Passenger pigeons were almost certainly one of the most abundant bird species to have ever lived. A darkly beautiful, medium-sized bird, the passenger pigeon looked like a slightly larger version of the rock dove—the bird we know as the common city pigeon—only more richly colored. Its sleek, rounded head was slate-blue, as were its shoulders and back. This coloration blended into a deep reddish-brown on the chest. Seen at a glance, the passenger pigeon looked purple. From the moment European settlers arrived in North America, they were awestruck by the incredible numbers of “wild pigeons” that traveled in immense groups, ceaselessly traversing the continent in search of food. So huge were these flocks that they were more like storm systems than assemblages of birds, and they moved with the speed and power of hurricanes. Alexander Wilson reported seeing a flock that he estimated at more than 2 billion individuals.

As the line of birds approached Audubon, he climbed down from his horse and made an attempt to count what at first seemed to be successions of discrete flocks. But he soon lost track, as the “flocks” merged into an endless, indistinguishable black column proceeding across the sky, lengthening, and stretching out toward the opposite horizon. Mounting his horse and moving on, Audubon found the pigeon numbers increasing as he went. Although it was midday, the sky darkened. Audubon said it reminded him of an eclipse. Pigeon droppings fell like snow, and Audubon felt himself lulled into something like a trance as he listened to the rush of wings overhead.

Audubon rode on, surprised that not a single bird landed or even strayed near the earth. There was no acorn mast in the area, and Audubon concluded that the pigeons were in transit, flying fast and high. Once, he tried a rifle shot on the flock, which was far out of range of his fowling gun. He was amazed to find that, despite their numbers, he could
not hit a pigeon or even startle the flock with the report from his gun. By the end of the day, Audubon reached Louisville. The pigeons were still flying, their ranks undiminished. Near the river the pigeons descended—not alighting but merely flying low over the broad Ohio. Audubon found the riverbanks at Louisville “crowded with men and boys incessantly shooting.” The whole population was “all in arms,” Audubon said, destroying pigeons by the “multitudes.” When he went to bed that night, the pigeons were still flying, the roaring columns of the great flock spanning the sky. The next morning, they were still passing overhead. So it went for three consecutive days, with no pause as the birds streamed past. Nobody in Louisville could talk of anything else. Everyone ate pigeon meat all day. The air smelled of pigeons.

The passenger pigeon was a force of nature that even the imaginative Audubon was unable to exaggerate. Fast and sharp-sighted, the pigeons flew with great purpose, sweeping past areas devoid of food. When traveling like this, pigeons ascended to great heights and spread out their ranks to maximize the area they surveyed below. When they encountered an area with food, the flock descended in waves, like a succession of breakers rolling onto a beach, with the rear guard flying ahead and landing, and then the next group coming up and over them, and so on, spilling across the countryside until they covered it.

Some years after seeing the big flock in Kentucky, Audubon made a series of ingenious observations about passenger pigeons that are probably as good a description of the species as we will ever have. Audubon, who sometimes dissected his birds and sketched their internal organs, determined that passenger pigeons completely digested their food in about twelve hours. He also learned that pigeons killed in New York were sometimes found to be full of rice. Since rice grew only as far north as the Carolinas, Audubon was able to make a rough calculation of the birds' sustained speed. To arrive in New York with rice still in their crops, the pigeons would have to travel around a mile a minute, Audubon figured. Sixty miles an hour is a speed we now know is typical of some larger ducks, like mallards and canvasbacks.

Audubon reasoned that, if you knew how fast passenger pigeons flew, you could estimate how many birds might be in a “typical” flock. As with many of his scientific observations—which eventually involved several expert collaborators—he may have had help translating his own impressions from the field into a more rigorous form. But there's no doubt he sensed
the enormity of pigeon numbers in the size and speed of their hurtling masses. Imagine, Audubon wrote, a column of passenger pigeons one mile wide. This, he said, was a modest premise. Now assume that this mile-wide flock passes overhead in three hours. This, too, would be conservative. If the birds are flying at sixty miles an hour, then the whole flock could be visualized as occupying a rectangular area one mile wide and 180 miles long—or 180 square miles. Now, assume a density of two birds per square yard—with a body length of about sixteen inches and a twenty-five-inch wingspan, this seemed plausible to Audubon—and you can figure the total number of birds in this 180-square-mile “layer” of pigeons at just over 1.1 billion. If Audubon were even close in his estimates, then the big flock he saw pass by over the course of three days in Kentucky might have contained more than 25 billion birds.