February 21, 2018 • 29 mins
On February 21, 1918, the last known Carolina parakeet died at the Cincinnati Zoo. We examine the stories of this endling and two others to see how abundant species can quickly become extinct.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey listeners, quick heads up. We have our one thousandth
episode coming up and we are going to have a
little celebration on Facebook Live on March one, So come
over to our Facebook which is at Facebook dot com
slash missed in History for more details. Welcome to Steph
(00:20):
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. On February one, eighteen, a bird named
Incas died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas was a Carolina
(00:43):
parakeet and his mate Lady Jane, had died the year before.
They were the last of their species. In the nine nineties,
physician Robert Webster of Jasper, Georgia coined a name for
the last living member of a species, which was endling,
and so word he realized the need for while he
was treating a patient who told him that she was
(01:03):
the last living member of her family line. Endling isn't
in Miriam Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary as of
when we are recording the show, but it's been picked
up by museums and journals and magazines and their discussions
of last animals, especially ones that people cared enough about
to name and then write about them when they died.
(01:24):
So a few other examples of these endlings are booming
ben the heath hen, who was last seen on Martha's Vineyard,
Massachusetts on March eleventh, ninety two. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger,
died on September seventh, nineteen thirty six, at the Hobart
Zoo in Tasmania. And some of these are really recent. Toffy,
who was the last known RABS fringe limbed tree frog,
(01:48):
died on September at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Frog Pod
Laboratory for Amphibian Conservation. So since we're coming up on
the centennial of its extinction today, we're going to talk
about the Carolina parakeet, along with two other endlings who
were marked, the Passenger pigeon and Lonesome George, the Penta
Island tortoise. Just in case not clear, uh, this episode
(02:15):
would get the I think they've changed the way they
do these ratings, but it used to be at does
the Dog Die dot Com there would be a sad
face of a dog if the dog died. This This
would have like all sad faces. This whole episode is
about animals dying. Yeah uh. Once upon a time, Eastern
North America had its own native parrot species Conopsis carol
(02:39):
nnensis that are known as the Carolina parakeet or sometimes
the Carolina parrot. A subspecies, Conopsis carolinensis ludovicianus was sometimes
known as the Louisiana parakeet, but in writings about them,
they're generally grouped together just as the Carolina parakeet. It
is not clear who coined the term Carolina parakeet, but
(03:01):
it was sometime after the Carolina Colony was chartered in
sixteen sixty three. The birds first mentions in writing date
back to the fifteen eighties, obviously without the Carolina moniker
as part of them. In sixteen twelve, William Strachey described
them this way in the History of Travel into Virginia, Britannia.
(03:23):
Quote paraketos. I have seen many in the winter, and
known diverse killed. Yet they be a foul, most swift
of wing. Their wings and breasts are of a greenish color,
with forked tails. Their heads some crimson, some yellow, some orange, tawny.
Very beautiful. You'll just have to imagine the seventeenth century
(03:44):
spelling of that passage, because it's delightful, it is, and
it's one of those great examples that reminds me of
the episode we did about how language shifts and the
rules are made up, because there's some fast and loose
spelling that changes from mentioned to mention there and I
love it. My favorite is that they are very b
e a U T y f u l L. It's
(04:05):
like the way little kids say beauty beautiful. Um. Of course,
North America's indigenous people already had their own names for
these birds, and they're represented in indigenous art going back
to prehistory, including in pipes and calcite and hematite ornaments.
Their feathers and other parts were also used in native
clothing and ornaments. Most sources described the bird's range is
(04:28):
covering almost all of the eastern United States, but research
that was published in twenty seventeen suggests that the Carolina
and Louisiana subspecies really had smaller ranges that didn't really
overlap each other very much. According to this research, Carolina
parakeets lived all through Florida and then in coastal regions
from Texas up to Virginia. Louisiana parakeets lived in the
(04:52):
central part of the country in a squarish blob with
the southwest corner in central Texas and the northeast corner
in central oh Hio. These were bright green birds, roughly
twelve inches or thirty centimeters long. Juveniles were green all over,
and as they matured their heads turned yellow, with little
reddish orange masks along their eyes, running down beside their
(05:14):
beaks and across the tops of their heads. And the
words of James Hall, writing in eighteen thirty eight, they
were quote a bird of beautiful plumage, but very bad character.
But their character probably got a lot worse after the
arrival of European colonists in North America. Really yearned to
(05:36):
know what gave them? Were they just sassy? Where they
really they talk about food. That's the next thing that
we're talking about. I like it. It's like a far
side cartoon, right with like the birds from the wrong
side of the tracks kind of thing in my head.
That's how this plays out. Carolina parakeets ate fruit plants,
some insects, and a lot of seeds, and they were
particularly fond of cockle burr's seeds, so Cocklebers are native
(06:01):
to North America, but they're invasive in other parts of
the world, and even in North America, these plants are
annoying since they're covered in prickly, clinging seed ponds. Cocklebers
didn't really run rampant in pre colonial forests, but once
colonists started clearing those fors for farmlands, they thrived in
the disturbed soil. The plants themselves could choke out crops
(06:23):
and make them difficult to harvest, and the birds could
ruin sheep's wool and cause problems for other livestock. Cocklebert
seeds contain a glucocide that's toxic to mammals, but Carolina
parakeets love to grab one with claw, eat the seeds
out of the middle of it, and then dropped the
prickly part on the ground. Carolina parakeets love of these
(06:43):
seeds made them useful for cocklebert control and for control
of the similarly annoying sand spur, which they also liked
to eat. But European colonists also we're planting orchards of
fruit trees, and the parakeets treated these crops exactly the
same way that they treated coppers. They grabbed the fruit
with a foot, pecked the seeds out of it, and
(07:03):
then threw the ruined fruit down on the ground. That
is their bad characters, litter bugs. They're wasteful. I somehow
feel guilty also joking about it. MI stinct species. I don't.
I'm gonna put this away now. Uh. Carolina parakeets went
after cultivated fields of corn and other grains as well,
spoiling more food than they ate. John James Audubon described
(07:26):
them as covering fields of stacked grains so completely that
they looked like a bright carpet. On top of all
this crop destruction, Carolina parakeets were highly social, gregarious birds
that traveled in huge, noisy flocks and left lots of
droppings behind, so a lot of colonists thought they were
an enormous nuisance. Farmers hunted them aggressively to keep them
(07:47):
away from crops, and people also hunted them for food
and for their feathers. That very vibrant, beautiful plumage made
them really popular among milliners. The bird's own behavior also
made them easy targets. They congregated in large flocks and
they would fly off at the sound of gunfire. But
then all the birds would return to the same spot,
(08:07):
especially if they heard one of their own injured. There
By the early nineteenth century, the Carolina parakeets numbers where
an obvious decline. John J. Audubon published his Birds of
America in Installments from eighteen seven to eighteen thirty eight,
and in that book he described the decline as recent.
He said that they had been plentiful years before. In
(08:29):
this drop in population can't really be pinned on just
one cause. In addition to the relentless hunting, the birds
lost huge amounts of habitats through deforestation, especially after the
Cotton gin made cotton a profitable crop in the South.
It's also possible that the birds were forced out of
nesting sites after the introduction of honey bees to North America.
(08:51):
There was never a formal study of these birds in
the wild, so there is a bit of debate about
whether they nested in hollow trees like honey bees do,
or if they built nest sound of sticks, or if
they possibly did some of both. In the last few
decades of their existence, Carolina parakeets were viewed as much
less of a nuisance. Their numbers had dropped to the
(09:11):
point that their control of cockle BER's outweighed their potential
damage to crops. Farmers were more inclined to just let
them be, which may have ultimately led to their extinction.
We really don't know what tipped the scale from a
reduced population to one that was actively dying out, but
one theory is that Carolina parakeets contracted a viral disease
(09:32):
from domesticated poultry, and that only would have been possible
after they were allowed to hang around farms instead of
being shot on site. In nineteen o four, the last
known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Okachobee County, Florida.
Carolina parakeets were easy to keep as pets, although they
could not be trained to talk. Breeding pairs and small
(09:54):
groups also lived in zoos on both sides of the
Atlantic until the early twentieth century, and they had been
brandon captivity since eighteen seventy seven. There wasn't any sort
of organized breeding program to try to repopulate the species
or create a genetically diverse breeding pool. At the Cincinnati Zoo,
Incus and Lady Jane produced several eggs, but they tended
(10:16):
to throw them out of the nest. And they weren't
retrieved or incubated. After Incus's death on February twenty one,
nineteen eighteen, it took a while to confirm that the
species really was extinct. The official determination came in nineteen
thirty nine, following a national Audubon Society search of South
Carolina after a purported sighting there. None of these reported
(10:37):
sightings were ever substantiated, and a few of them turned
out to be feral parents or parakeets that had previously
been somebody's pets and had wound up out in the wild.
I grew up in North Carolina, and I always as
a child having heard about the Carolina parakeet, the fact
that I was from North Carolina and that they were
from North Carolina, and when the name Carolina parakeet meant
(10:59):
that were my personal species of parakeet that was now extinct,
and I was very put out about that. Uh. And
when Incus died, it was purportedly in the same cage
where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had also died. And
we're going to talk about Martha and passenger pigeons in general.
After we first paused for a little sponsor break, Passenger
(11:27):
pigeons or ectoscopies migratorists used to be the most common
bird and what's now the United States. Their winter range
stretched from eastern Canada down to Florida that went all
across the Mississippi River, covering more than half of the continent.
They're breeding range was a smaller pocket, primarily around the
Great Lakes and what's now New York. Male passenger pigeons
(11:51):
were blue gray with a rosy pink throat and chest.
They were about sixteen and a half inches that's about
forty two centimeters in length, and females were slightly smaller
and not as distinctively colored. They were closer to brown
gray than blue gray, and they had more subdued coloring
on their throat and chest. They looked enough like mourning
doves that this often led to cases of mistaken identity,
(12:15):
although passenger pigeons were usually a couple of inches larger
than mourning doves. The eight nuts acorns, seeds, and berries,
along with some worms and insects in the spring and summer.
So when we say the most common bird, it's estimated
that before European arrival in North America, there were between
(12:35):
three and five billion of them, that is billion, with
a bee making up between twenty five and of all
the birds in the places where they lived. They formed
enormous colonies, with up to a hundred nests in an
individual tree. Sometimes so many birds would nest in a
tree that branches would snap off of it or the
tree itself would fall. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
(12:59):
missionary Aambriel Sagartiadat described their numbers as infinite multitudes, and
Cotton Mother wrote about mild wide flocks that took hours
to pass overhead. Here's how John J. Audubon described a
flock he saw in eighteen thirteen quote, The air was
literally filled with pigeons. The light of noonday was obscured
(13:21):
as buy an eclipse. The dung fell in spots, not
unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of
the wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.
An eighteen fifty five account from Columbus, Ohio described the
local response to the passing of an enormous pigeon flock. Quote.
(13:41):
Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long
skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores, horses bolted,
a few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of
the millennium, and several dropped onto their knees and prayed.
According to this account, this flocks passage took two hours.
There have been a number of remarks about like we
(14:01):
don't have any kind of pictures or I mean obviously
not video quite at that point, um showing how dramatic
these flocks of birds were. But like the over and over,
they're described as literally blotting out the sun and just
waiting for hours and hours as this massive flock of
birds that blotted out the sun flew over and left
(14:26):
droppings everywhere. Yeah, I think the fact that people responded
as though the apocalypse was nine is a pretty good
indicator of how significant this bird flight was. Uh. This
eighteen fifty five account is somewhat surprising because the passenger
pigeon had a pretty similar trajectory to the Carolina parakeet,
(14:46):
and by eighteen fifty five their numbers were noticeably declining.
This decline came primarily from over hunting. Passenger pigeons formed
such enormous flocks that they vastly outnumbered animal predators, so
normal predation and even some hunting by humans wasn't enough
to really reduce their numbers. But the passenger pigeon could
(15:07):
not overcome industrialization and are rapidly increasing human population in
the nineteenth century. To technologies were a huge part of
the end of the species, the telegraph and the railroad.
The telegraph made it easy to send word of where
passenger pigeons were roosting, and the railroad made it possible
to ship huge barrels of pigeons around the country to
(15:29):
use as a cheap source of meat. There were no
conservation laws restricting how people hunted passenger pigeons or how
many could be killed, so people hunted them at their
nesting sites, and they killed massively unsustainable numbers in one go.
One eight seventy eight hunt in Michigan took fifty thousand
birds a day from their nesting site. As we said earlier,
(15:53):
people had been noticing that the pigeon population was dropping
as early as the eighteen fifties. People were still hunting
these pigeons in massive numbers decades after they noticed their decline.
States began passing laws to try to protect the passenger
pigeon including outlawing hunting near their nesting areas and in
(16:13):
one case, closing the pigeon hunting season entirely. In nine hundred,
President William McKinley signed the Lacey Act, which was the
nation's first federal conservation law meant to protect fish and wildlife.
One of the motivations for passing the Lacy Act was
the plummeting stock of passenger pigeons, and it made it
illegal to poach pigeons from one state with the intent
(16:35):
of selling them in another. This was far too late
for the passenger pigeon, though by this point some states
where the birds had been widespread hadn't spotted one in years.
The last confirmed sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was
on March twenty four, nineteen hundred, in Pike County, Ohio,
almost two months to the day before the passage of
(16:58):
the Lacy Act. Ornithologists mounted organized searches, including offering up
a reward of fifteen hundred dollars to anyone who could
find a passenger pigeon between nineteen o nine and nineteen twelve,
but none were found. By the nineteenteens, the birds were
extinct in the wild and the only captive populations were
in three zoos, the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the Milwaukee Zoo,
(17:22):
and the Cincinnati Zoo. Attempts to set up a breeding
program failed because the birds highly social nature meant that
they just didn't breed well in captivity. Martha, the last
of the passenger pigeons, was born in the Brookfield Zoo
and then donated to Cincinnati. She was named after Martha
Washington and her later years, her keepers had to keep
(17:43):
lowering her perch as she became less able to fly,
so they basically had to get it low enough that
she could just climb up there. The last male passenger
pigeon died at the zoo on July nineteen, and then
Martha died on September one, nineteen fourteen, at the age
of about twenty line. After her death, Martha was packed
in a three hundred pound block of ice and shipped
(18:06):
to the Smithsonian by train. Taxidermist Nelson would mounted. Her
remains and her internal organs are part of the Smithsonian's
wet collections. Martha is still part of the Smithsonian collection
as well, although she is not usually on display because
she is so delicate and very valuable. There's also a
passenger pigeon memorial at the Cincinnati Zoo. Our last endling
(18:30):
was also preserved through taxid army couldn't confirm whether Incus
was or not, and we will get to that last
story after one more quick sponsor break. The Galapagos Islands
off the coast of Ecuador are famous for their diversity
of plant and animal life, with a lot of species
(18:52):
that are unique to each individual island. Charles Darwin conducted
research there during the second Voyage aboard the Hibs Beagle,
which contributed to his theory of evolution by means of
natural selection. Giant tortoises are one of the most famous
animals found in the Galapagos. Galapago in Spanish means turtle,
and there are fifteen different species which fall into two
(19:15):
primary categories, domed and saddle backed. Penta Island tortoises were
saddle backed tortoises, with the shape of their shell allowing
them to stretch their heads up to reach for food.
This was also a form of communication among the tortoises.
They would stretch their heads up as far as possible
when settling disputes. These tortoises were as their name suggests
(19:38):
found on Penta Island. Penta Island as a shield volcano,
and it's the northernmost island of the Galapagos, so for
whalers who passed through the area, Penta Island was usually
the first and last island they passed on their journey.
From the seventeen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds, whalers hunted
a lot of tortoises from Penta Island to use his food,
(20:00):
and as was the case with the Carolina parakeet, the
tortoises own traits made them susceptible to this. Tortoises can
live for an extended period without food or water. Whalers
realized that this meant that they could capture live tortoises
on the island and keep them alive on board their
ships without a lot of effort, allowing them to have
fresh tortoise meat in transit. It's hard to pinpoint how
(20:24):
many tortoises were taken from Penta Island alone, but it's
estimated that more than one hundred thousand tortoises were killed
in the Galapagos in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By
the early twentieth century, researchers believed that the Penta Island
tortoise was already extinct. At that time, the island's ecosystem
was in pretty good condition apart from the absence of tortoises.
(20:47):
But in nineteen fifty nine, some fishermen released three goats
onto the island, hoping to use them as a food supply.
When they passed through the area, as will surprise no
one who has ever been around goats, they ran rampant
over the island. They ate their way through a lot
of the vegetation, and they produced lots and lots more goats.
(21:07):
At that point, researchers concluded that if there had somehow
been any tortoises left on Pensa Island, the feral goats
would have destroyed their habitat completely. And yet in a
Hungarian scientist who was on the island studying snails spotted
a tortoise. The scientists name and apologies if this is
(21:28):
a butchering job, was Yojeva, and when he got back
to port, he reported what he had seen, and a
year later Galapagos National Park rangers went to the island
to look for themselves, and there they found one tortoise
and they took him to the Tortoise Center on Santa
Cruz to keep him safe. The American media later started
(21:50):
calling him Lonesome George, after TV comedian George Gobel, who
had given himself that same nickname for decades. They tried
to find a breeding partner for Lonesome George. They tried
pairing him with other tortoise species, including two female wolf
Volcano giant tortoises from Isabella Island. Later, DNA research revealed
(22:12):
that Pensa Island tortoises might be more compatible with the
Espaniola tortoise. To female Espaniola tortoises from a breeding program
were housed in Georgia's corral, but none of the eggs
that they produced were fertile. Lonesome George died on June
and he was probably at least a hundred and that
sounds like quite old, but he was actually on the
(22:34):
younger side for a Penta Island tortoise. Uh those tortoises
could live to be up to two hundred, but the
average age was more like around a hundred and fifty.
And other than some weight gain which is common among
tortoises and captivity, he had been in good health and
his death was really unexpected. His unexpected death meant that
his keepers were unprepared for preserving his body. The islands
(22:58):
are remote and the temperature was around a hundred degrees
fahrenheit or thirty eight celsius. They eventually secured enough plastic
wrap to cover his entire body and a freezer to
store him in lonesome George's remains were transported to the
United States, where New Jersey taxidermist George Dante preserved them
in a year long, thirty dollar process that took five
(23:21):
hundred hours of labor to complete. George spent some time
on display at the American Museum of Natural History before
being returned to Ecuador. There was a little bit of
a dispute between the researchers and the Gallopacus and the
the government of Ecuador about where he should be kept
once he was returned. The government's argument was that a
(23:41):
lot more people would be able to see him on
display in the capital of Quito, and they also argued
that there wasn't a facility in the Gallopacus Islands that
could guarantee precise enough temperature and humidity control, I mean
after after an animal specimen is preserved through taxidermy like
that doesn't mean it stops decaying for the rest of time, right,
(24:05):
It's still it's still tissue that's going to have to
be preserved. So there is a bronze statue of George
at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz and the Galapagos. Instead, in
the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Park Service
launched Project Isabella, which was a massive conservation project meant
(24:26):
to restore several islands that had been damaged through the
introduction of non native plants and animals, and this included
exterminating hundreds of thousands of feral goats. The work at
Penta Islands started in nine and in two thousand and
three the island was declared goat free. Fortunately, it appears
that none of the island's plant species became extinct during
(24:49):
the goat infestation, and May thirty nine, sterilized adult tortoises
were released on the island to continue the restoration process.
So basically they're there to serve the purpose that tortoises
fulfill in that ecology, but not to make more baby
tortoises yet. Gonna work on that part later in a
(25:14):
breeding program was announced to try to bring back the
Penta Island tortoise, or at least a tortoise that is
genetically similar. The starting point is a population of Isabella
Island tortoises that had interbred with some Penta Island tortoises
that sailors throw overboard about a hundred years ago. There
has also been talk of cloning Lonesome George himself, although
(25:37):
that has of course raised a number of ethical questions,
along with concerns that people won't care about protecting endangered
animal species if we just clone them later. We said
at the top of the show, or at the top
of this chapter of the show, that there were fifteen
species of tortoise and the Galapagos, but now there are
only ten. Some of those species were only saved from
(25:59):
extinction through very careful breeding programs and other conservation efforts,
and although they used to live elsewhere in the world,
giant tortoises are now found only in the Galapagos and
in the Aldabra atoll UH in the Seychelles. Uh. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail for us?
I do. I have two really short ones, and I'm
going to read both of them. The first one is
(26:19):
from Lauren, and Lauren says, I just listened to the
Memphis Sanitation Workers strike episode and wanted to write in
since I grew up right outside the city. Unfortunately, I
don't remember ever learning about the strike in our school curriculum,
which is sad because there's so much history in the
city that I never knew until I was older. However,
the National Civil Rights Museum is based in Memphis, adjacent
(26:39):
to the Lorraine Motel where Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Was assassinated, and I was lucky enough to tour it
before moving away. It's a powerful, moving experience with exhibits
that opened my eyes and deepened my empathy for the
civil rights movement. I strongly encourage visitors to Memphis to
go through the museum, especially if classes tend to only
scratch the surface of the turmoil of the time. Thank
(27:02):
you for telling these stories and broadening my horizons, Lauren.
And then the other is from Sarah. Sarah says, I
was excited to see the Memphis podcast in my que
since I grew up in a suburb of Memphis. As such,
I had several school field trips to the historic Lorrain Mottel,
which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Inside there
are some great exhibits, including a full size garbage truck
(27:23):
in the room talking about sanitation strike. At the end
of the museum, you're able to walk past the room
where MLK Junior stayed and you can look out the
window where there is a reef hanging on the railing
where he was shot. I was surprised that you didn't
mention that the Lorraine Motel is now a museum. If
you're ever in Memphis, I highly recommend going there, even
more than Graceland or Beal Street, especially when it comes
(27:45):
to seeing an important part of history displayed in a
historic place. Have a wonderful day, Sarah. Thank you, Lauren
and Sarah. I originally had a lengthy discussion of that
museum in the notes for the show, because there's a
whole long arc about how when it went from your hotel,
it remained a hotel for a long time, and then
(28:07):
the owners had financial difficulties. Long story short, then it
was purchased and made into a museum. But because that
episode was running long, uh and I really wanted as
much of the focus to stay on the strike and
the striking workers themselves. That was one of the things
that wound up being removed for the sake of time.
So yes, the Lorraine Motel that was the site of
(28:28):
Martin Luther King's junior's assassination is now um a National
Civil Rights Museum. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast,
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook
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are also at missed in History. You can find our
(28:50):
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a whole lot more at our web site, which is
missing history dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M
Hey listeners, quick heads up. We have our one thousandth
episode coming up and we are going to have a
little celebration on Facebook Live on March one, So come
over to our Facebook which is at Facebook dot com
slash missed in History for more details. Welcome to Steph
(00:20):
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Fry. On February one, eighteen, a bird named
Incas died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Incas was a Carolina
(00:43):
parakeet and his mate Lady Jane, had died the year before.
They were the last of their species. In the nine nineties,
physician Robert Webster of Jasper, Georgia coined a name for
the last living member of a species, which was endling,
and so word he realized the need for while he
was treating a patient who told him that she was
(01:03):
the last living member of her family line. Endling isn't
in Miriam Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary as of
when we are recording the show, but it's been picked
up by museums and journals and magazines and their discussions
of last animals, especially ones that people cared enough about
to name and then write about them when they died.
(01:24):
So a few other examples of these endlings are booming
ben the heath hen, who was last seen on Martha's Vineyard,
Massachusetts on March eleventh, ninety two. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger,
died on September seventh, nineteen thirty six, at the Hobart
Zoo in Tasmania. And some of these are really recent. Toffy,
who was the last known RABS fringe limbed tree frog,
(01:48):
died on September at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Frog Pod
Laboratory for Amphibian Conservation. So since we're coming up on
the centennial of its extinction today, we're going to talk
about the Carolina parakeet, along with two other endlings who
were marked, the Passenger pigeon and Lonesome George, the Penta
Island tortoise. Just in case not clear, uh, this episode
(02:15):
would get the I think they've changed the way they
do these ratings, but it used to be at does
the Dog Die dot Com there would be a sad
face of a dog if the dog died. This This
would have like all sad faces. This whole episode is
about animals dying. Yeah uh. Once upon a time, Eastern
North America had its own native parrot species Conopsis carol
(02:39):
nnensis that are known as the Carolina parakeet or sometimes
the Carolina parrot. A subspecies, Conopsis carolinensis ludovicianus was sometimes
known as the Louisiana parakeet, but in writings about them,
they're generally grouped together just as the Carolina parakeet. It
is not clear who coined the term Carolina parakeet, but
(03:01):
it was sometime after the Carolina Colony was chartered in
sixteen sixty three. The birds first mentions in writing date
back to the fifteen eighties, obviously without the Carolina moniker
as part of them. In sixteen twelve, William Strachey described
them this way in the History of Travel into Virginia, Britannia.
(03:23):
Quote paraketos. I have seen many in the winter, and
known diverse killed. Yet they be a foul, most swift
of wing. Their wings and breasts are of a greenish color,
with forked tails. Their heads some crimson, some yellow, some orange, tawny.
Very beautiful. You'll just have to imagine the seventeenth century
(03:44):
spelling of that passage, because it's delightful, it is, and
it's one of those great examples that reminds me of
the episode we did about how language shifts and the
rules are made up, because there's some fast and loose
spelling that changes from mentioned to mention there and I
love it. My favorite is that they are very b
e a U T y f u l L. It's
(04:05):
like the way little kids say beauty beautiful. Um. Of course,
North America's indigenous people already had their own names for
these birds, and they're represented in indigenous art going back
to prehistory, including in pipes and calcite and hematite ornaments.
Their feathers and other parts were also used in native
clothing and ornaments. Most sources described the bird's range is
(04:28):
covering almost all of the eastern United States, but research
that was published in twenty seventeen suggests that the Carolina
and Louisiana subspecies really had smaller ranges that didn't really
overlap each other very much. According to this research, Carolina
parakeets lived all through Florida and then in coastal regions
from Texas up to Virginia. Louisiana parakeets lived in the
(04:52):
central part of the country in a squarish blob with
the southwest corner in central Texas and the northeast corner
in central oh Hio. These were bright green birds, roughly
twelve inches or thirty centimeters long. Juveniles were green all over,
and as they matured their heads turned yellow, with little
reddish orange masks along their eyes, running down beside their
(05:14):
beaks and across the tops of their heads. And the
words of James Hall, writing in eighteen thirty eight, they
were quote a bird of beautiful plumage, but very bad character.
But their character probably got a lot worse after the
arrival of European colonists in North America. Really yearned to
(05:36):
know what gave them? Were they just sassy? Where they
really they talk about food. That's the next thing that
we're talking about. I like it. It's like a far
side cartoon, right with like the birds from the wrong
side of the tracks kind of thing in my head.
That's how this plays out. Carolina parakeets ate fruit plants,
some insects, and a lot of seeds, and they were
particularly fond of cockle burr's seeds, so Cocklebers are native
(06:01):
to North America, but they're invasive in other parts of
the world, and even in North America, these plants are
annoying since they're covered in prickly, clinging seed ponds. Cocklebers
didn't really run rampant in pre colonial forests, but once
colonists started clearing those fors for farmlands, they thrived in
the disturbed soil. The plants themselves could choke out crops
(06:23):
and make them difficult to harvest, and the birds could
ruin sheep's wool and cause problems for other livestock. Cocklebert
seeds contain a glucocide that's toxic to mammals, but Carolina
parakeets love to grab one with claw, eat the seeds
out of the middle of it, and then dropped the
prickly part on the ground. Carolina parakeets love of these
(06:43):
seeds made them useful for cocklebert control and for control
of the similarly annoying sand spur, which they also liked
to eat. But European colonists also we're planting orchards of
fruit trees, and the parakeets treated these crops exactly the
same way that they treated coppers. They grabbed the fruit
with a foot, pecked the seeds out of it, and
(07:03):
then threw the ruined fruit down on the ground. That
is their bad characters, litter bugs. They're wasteful. I somehow
feel guilty also joking about it. MI stinct species. I don't.
I'm gonna put this away now. Uh. Carolina parakeets went
after cultivated fields of corn and other grains as well,
spoiling more food than they ate. John James Audubon described
(07:26):
them as covering fields of stacked grains so completely that
they looked like a bright carpet. On top of all
this crop destruction, Carolina parakeets were highly social, gregarious birds
that traveled in huge, noisy flocks and left lots of
droppings behind, so a lot of colonists thought they were
an enormous nuisance. Farmers hunted them aggressively to keep them
(07:47):
away from crops, and people also hunted them for food
and for their feathers. That very vibrant, beautiful plumage made
them really popular among milliners. The bird's own behavior also
made them easy targets. They congregated in large flocks and
they would fly off at the sound of gunfire. But
then all the birds would return to the same spot,
(08:07):
especially if they heard one of their own injured. There
By the early nineteenth century, the Carolina parakeets numbers where
an obvious decline. John J. Audubon published his Birds of
America in Installments from eighteen seven to eighteen thirty eight,
and in that book he described the decline as recent.
He said that they had been plentiful years before. In
(08:29):
this drop in population can't really be pinned on just
one cause. In addition to the relentless hunting, the birds
lost huge amounts of habitats through deforestation, especially after the
Cotton gin made cotton a profitable crop in the South.
It's also possible that the birds were forced out of
nesting sites after the introduction of honey bees to North America.
(08:51):
There was never a formal study of these birds in
the wild, so there is a bit of debate about
whether they nested in hollow trees like honey bees do,
or if they built nest sound of sticks, or if
they possibly did some of both. In the last few
decades of their existence, Carolina parakeets were viewed as much
less of a nuisance. Their numbers had dropped to the
(09:11):
point that their control of cockle BER's outweighed their potential
damage to crops. Farmers were more inclined to just let
them be, which may have ultimately led to their extinction.
We really don't know what tipped the scale from a
reduced population to one that was actively dying out, but
one theory is that Carolina parakeets contracted a viral disease
(09:32):
from domesticated poultry, and that only would have been possible
after they were allowed to hang around farms instead of
being shot on site. In nineteen o four, the last
known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Okachobee County, Florida.
Carolina parakeets were easy to keep as pets, although they
could not be trained to talk. Breeding pairs and small
(09:54):
groups also lived in zoos on both sides of the
Atlantic until the early twentieth century, and they had been
brandon captivity since eighteen seventy seven. There wasn't any sort
of organized breeding program to try to repopulate the species
or create a genetically diverse breeding pool. At the Cincinnati Zoo,
Incus and Lady Jane produced several eggs, but they tended
(10:16):
to throw them out of the nest. And they weren't
retrieved or incubated. After Incus's death on February twenty one,
nineteen eighteen, it took a while to confirm that the
species really was extinct. The official determination came in nineteen
thirty nine, following a national Audubon Society search of South
Carolina after a purported sighting there. None of these reported
(10:37):
sightings were ever substantiated, and a few of them turned
out to be feral parents or parakeets that had previously
been somebody's pets and had wound up out in the wild.
I grew up in North Carolina, and I always as
a child having heard about the Carolina parakeet, the fact
that I was from North Carolina and that they were
from North Carolina, and when the name Carolina parakeet meant
(10:59):
that were my personal species of parakeet that was now extinct,
and I was very put out about that. Uh. And
when Incus died, it was purportedly in the same cage
where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had also died. And
we're going to talk about Martha and passenger pigeons in general.
After we first paused for a little sponsor break, Passenger
(11:27):
pigeons or ectoscopies migratorists used to be the most common
bird and what's now the United States. Their winter range
stretched from eastern Canada down to Florida that went all
across the Mississippi River, covering more than half of the continent.
They're breeding range was a smaller pocket, primarily around the
Great Lakes and what's now New York. Male passenger pigeons
(11:51):
were blue gray with a rosy pink throat and chest.
They were about sixteen and a half inches that's about
forty two centimeters in length, and females were slightly smaller
and not as distinctively colored. They were closer to brown
gray than blue gray, and they had more subdued coloring
on their throat and chest. They looked enough like mourning
doves that this often led to cases of mistaken identity,
(12:15):
although passenger pigeons were usually a couple of inches larger
than mourning doves. The eight nuts acorns, seeds, and berries,
along with some worms and insects in the spring and summer.
So when we say the most common bird, it's estimated
that before European arrival in North America, there were between
(12:35):
three and five billion of them, that is billion, with
a bee making up between twenty five and of all
the birds in the places where they lived. They formed
enormous colonies, with up to a hundred nests in an
individual tree. Sometimes so many birds would nest in a
tree that branches would snap off of it or the
tree itself would fall. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
(12:59):
missionary Aambriel Sagartiadat described their numbers as infinite multitudes, and
Cotton Mother wrote about mild wide flocks that took hours
to pass overhead. Here's how John J. Audubon described a
flock he saw in eighteen thirteen quote, The air was
literally filled with pigeons. The light of noonday was obscured
(13:21):
as buy an eclipse. The dung fell in spots, not
unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of
the wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.
An eighteen fifty five account from Columbus, Ohio described the
local response to the passing of an enormous pigeon flock. Quote.
(13:41):
Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long
skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores, horses bolted,
a few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of
the millennium, and several dropped onto their knees and prayed.
According to this account, this flocks passage took two hours.
There have been a number of remarks about like we
(14:01):
don't have any kind of pictures or I mean obviously
not video quite at that point, um showing how dramatic
these flocks of birds were. But like the over and over,
they're described as literally blotting out the sun and just
waiting for hours and hours as this massive flock of
birds that blotted out the sun flew over and left
(14:26):
droppings everywhere. Yeah, I think the fact that people responded
as though the apocalypse was nine is a pretty good
indicator of how significant this bird flight was. Uh. This
eighteen fifty five account is somewhat surprising because the passenger
pigeon had a pretty similar trajectory to the Carolina parakeet,
(14:46):
and by eighteen fifty five their numbers were noticeably declining.
This decline came primarily from over hunting. Passenger pigeons formed
such enormous flocks that they vastly outnumbered animal predators, so
normal predation and even some hunting by humans wasn't enough
to really reduce their numbers. But the passenger pigeon could
(15:07):
not overcome industrialization and are rapidly increasing human population in
the nineteenth century. To technologies were a huge part of
the end of the species, the telegraph and the railroad.
The telegraph made it easy to send word of where
passenger pigeons were roosting, and the railroad made it possible
to ship huge barrels of pigeons around the country to
(15:29):
use as a cheap source of meat. There were no
conservation laws restricting how people hunted passenger pigeons or how
many could be killed, so people hunted them at their
nesting sites, and they killed massively unsustainable numbers in one go.
One eight seventy eight hunt in Michigan took fifty thousand
birds a day from their nesting site. As we said earlier,
(15:53):
people had been noticing that the pigeon population was dropping
as early as the eighteen fifties. People were still hunting
these pigeons in massive numbers decades after they noticed their decline.
States began passing laws to try to protect the passenger
pigeon including outlawing hunting near their nesting areas and in
(16:13):
one case, closing the pigeon hunting season entirely. In nine hundred,
President William McKinley signed the Lacey Act, which was the
nation's first federal conservation law meant to protect fish and wildlife.
One of the motivations for passing the Lacy Act was
the plummeting stock of passenger pigeons, and it made it
illegal to poach pigeons from one state with the intent
(16:35):
of selling them in another. This was far too late
for the passenger pigeon, though by this point some states
where the birds had been widespread hadn't spotted one in years.
The last confirmed sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was
on March twenty four, nineteen hundred, in Pike County, Ohio,
almost two months to the day before the passage of
(16:58):
the Lacy Act. Ornithologists mounted organized searches, including offering up
a reward of fifteen hundred dollars to anyone who could
find a passenger pigeon between nineteen o nine and nineteen twelve,
but none were found. By the nineteenteens, the birds were
extinct in the wild and the only captive populations were
in three zoos, the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the Milwaukee Zoo,
(17:22):
and the Cincinnati Zoo. Attempts to set up a breeding
program failed because the birds highly social nature meant that
they just didn't breed well in captivity. Martha, the last
of the passenger pigeons, was born in the Brookfield Zoo
and then donated to Cincinnati. She was named after Martha
Washington and her later years, her keepers had to keep
(17:43):
lowering her perch as she became less able to fly,
so they basically had to get it low enough that
she could just climb up there. The last male passenger
pigeon died at the zoo on July nineteen, and then
Martha died on September one, nineteen fourteen, at the age
of about twenty line. After her death, Martha was packed
in a three hundred pound block of ice and shipped
(18:06):
to the Smithsonian by train. Taxidermist Nelson would mounted. Her
remains and her internal organs are part of the Smithsonian's
wet collections. Martha is still part of the Smithsonian collection
as well, although she is not usually on display because
she is so delicate and very valuable. There's also a
passenger pigeon memorial at the Cincinnati Zoo. Our last endling
(18:30):
was also preserved through taxid army couldn't confirm whether Incus
was or not, and we will get to that last
story after one more quick sponsor break. The Galapagos Islands
off the coast of Ecuador are famous for their diversity
of plant and animal life, with a lot of species
(18:52):
that are unique to each individual island. Charles Darwin conducted
research there during the second Voyage aboard the Hibs Beagle,
which contributed to his theory of evolution by means of
natural selection. Giant tortoises are one of the most famous
animals found in the Galapagos. Galapago in Spanish means turtle,
and there are fifteen different species which fall into two
(19:15):
primary categories, domed and saddle backed. Penta Island tortoises were
saddle backed tortoises, with the shape of their shell allowing
them to stretch their heads up to reach for food.
This was also a form of communication among the tortoises.
They would stretch their heads up as far as possible
when settling disputes. These tortoises were as their name suggests
(19:38):
found on Penta Island. Penta Island as a shield volcano,
and it's the northernmost island of the Galapagos, so for
whalers who passed through the area, Penta Island was usually
the first and last island they passed on their journey.
From the seventeen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds, whalers hunted
a lot of tortoises from Penta Island to use his food,
(20:00):
and as was the case with the Carolina parakeet, the
tortoises own traits made them susceptible to this. Tortoises can
live for an extended period without food or water. Whalers
realized that this meant that they could capture live tortoises
on the island and keep them alive on board their
ships without a lot of effort, allowing them to have
fresh tortoise meat in transit. It's hard to pinpoint how
(20:24):
many tortoises were taken from Penta Island alone, but it's
estimated that more than one hundred thousand tortoises were killed
in the Galapagos in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By
the early twentieth century, researchers believed that the Penta Island
tortoise was already extinct. At that time, the island's ecosystem
was in pretty good condition apart from the absence of tortoises.
(20:47):
But in nineteen fifty nine, some fishermen released three goats
onto the island, hoping to use them as a food supply.
When they passed through the area, as will surprise no
one who has ever been around goats, they ran rampant
over the island. They ate their way through a lot
of the vegetation, and they produced lots and lots more goats.
(21:07):
At that point, researchers concluded that if there had somehow
been any tortoises left on Pensa Island, the feral goats
would have destroyed their habitat completely. And yet in a
Hungarian scientist who was on the island studying snails spotted
a tortoise. The scientists name and apologies if this is
(21:28):
a butchering job, was Yojeva, and when he got back
to port, he reported what he had seen, and a
year later Galapagos National Park rangers went to the island
to look for themselves, and there they found one tortoise
and they took him to the Tortoise Center on Santa
Cruz to keep him safe. The American media later started
(21:50):
calling him Lonesome George, after TV comedian George Gobel, who
had given himself that same nickname for decades. They tried
to find a breeding partner for Lonesome George. They tried
pairing him with other tortoise species, including two female wolf
Volcano giant tortoises from Isabella Island. Later, DNA research revealed
(22:12):
that Pensa Island tortoises might be more compatible with the
Espaniola tortoise. To female Espaniola tortoises from a breeding program
were housed in Georgia's corral, but none of the eggs
that they produced were fertile. Lonesome George died on June
and he was probably at least a hundred and that
sounds like quite old, but he was actually on the
(22:34):
younger side for a Penta Island tortoise. Uh those tortoises
could live to be up to two hundred, but the
average age was more like around a hundred and fifty.
And other than some weight gain which is common among
tortoises and captivity, he had been in good health and
his death was really unexpected. His unexpected death meant that
his keepers were unprepared for preserving his body. The islands
(22:58):
are remote and the temperature was around a hundred degrees
fahrenheit or thirty eight celsius. They eventually secured enough plastic
wrap to cover his entire body and a freezer to
store him in lonesome George's remains were transported to the
United States, where New Jersey taxidermist George Dante preserved them
in a year long, thirty dollar process that took five
(23:21):
hundred hours of labor to complete. George spent some time
on display at the American Museum of Natural History before
being returned to Ecuador. There was a little bit of
a dispute between the researchers and the Gallopacus and the
the government of Ecuador about where he should be kept
once he was returned. The government's argument was that a
(23:41):
lot more people would be able to see him on
display in the capital of Quito, and they also argued
that there wasn't a facility in the Gallopacus Islands that
could guarantee precise enough temperature and humidity control, I mean
after after an animal specimen is preserved through taxidermy like
that doesn't mean it stops decaying for the rest of time, right,
(24:05):
It's still it's still tissue that's going to have to
be preserved. So there is a bronze statue of George
at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz and the Galapagos. Instead, in
the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Park Service
launched Project Isabella, which was a massive conservation project meant
(24:26):
to restore several islands that had been damaged through the
introduction of non native plants and animals, and this included
exterminating hundreds of thousands of feral goats. The work at
Penta Islands started in nine and in two thousand and
three the island was declared goat free. Fortunately, it appears
that none of the island's plant species became extinct during
(24:49):
the goat infestation, and May thirty nine, sterilized adult tortoises
were released on the island to continue the restoration process.
So basically they're there to serve the purpose that tortoises
fulfill in that ecology, but not to make more baby
tortoises yet. Gonna work on that part later in a
(25:14):
breeding program was announced to try to bring back the
Penta Island tortoise, or at least a tortoise that is
genetically similar. The starting point is a population of Isabella
Island tortoises that had interbred with some Penta Island tortoises
that sailors throw overboard about a hundred years ago. There
has also been talk of cloning Lonesome George himself, although
(25:37):
that has of course raised a number of ethical questions,
along with concerns that people won't care about protecting endangered
animal species if we just clone them later. We said
at the top of the show, or at the top
of this chapter of the show, that there were fifteen
species of tortoise and the Galapagos, but now there are
only ten. Some of those species were only saved from
(25:59):
extinction through very careful breeding programs and other conservation efforts,
and although they used to live elsewhere in the world,
giant tortoises are now found only in the Galapagos and
in the Aldabra atoll UH in the Seychelles. Uh. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail for us?
I do. I have two really short ones, and I'm
going to read both of them. The first one is
(26:19):
from Lauren, and Lauren says, I just listened to the
Memphis Sanitation Workers strike episode and wanted to write in
since I grew up right outside the city. Unfortunately, I
don't remember ever learning about the strike in our school curriculum,
which is sad because there's so much history in the
city that I never knew until I was older. However,
the National Civil Rights Museum is based in Memphis, adjacent
(26:39):
to the Lorraine Motel where Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Was assassinated, and I was lucky enough to tour it
before moving away. It's a powerful, moving experience with exhibits
that opened my eyes and deepened my empathy for the
civil rights movement. I strongly encourage visitors to Memphis to
go through the museum, especially if classes tend to only
scratch the surface of the turmoil of the time. Thank
(27:02):
you for telling these stories and broadening my horizons, Lauren.
And then the other is from Sarah. Sarah says, I
was excited to see the Memphis podcast in my que
since I grew up in a suburb of Memphis. As such,
I had several school field trips to the historic Lorrain Mottel,
which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Inside there
are some great exhibits, including a full size garbage truck
(27:23):
in the room talking about sanitation strike. At the end
of the museum, you're able to walk past the room
where MLK Junior stayed and you can look out the
window where there is a reef hanging on the railing
where he was shot. I was surprised that you didn't
mention that the Lorraine Motel is now a museum. If
you're ever in Memphis, I highly recommend going there, even
more than Graceland or Beal Street, especially when it comes
(27:45):
to seeing an important part of history displayed in a
historic place. Have a wonderful day, Sarah. Thank you, Lauren
and Sarah. I originally had a lengthy discussion of that
museum in the notes for the show, because there's a
whole long arc about how when it went from your hotel,
it remained a hotel for a long time, and then
(28:07):
the owners had financial difficulties. Long story short, then it
was purchased and made into a museum. But because that
episode was running long, uh and I really wanted as
much of the focus to stay on the strike and
the striking workers themselves. That was one of the things
that wound up being removed for the sake of time.
So yes, the Lorraine Motel that was the site of
(28:28):
Martin Luther King's junior's assassination is now um a National
Civil Rights Museum. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast,
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook
at facebook dot com slash miss in history. We're on
Twitter at miss in history. Our Instagram and our Pinterest
are also at missed in History. You can find our
(28:50):
podcast on Apple Podcasts and on Google Play and anywhere
else do you want to get podcast. You can subscribe
to it there, and you can do all that and
a whole lot more at our web site, which is
missing history dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M
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