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July 29, 2025 64 mins
On today’s episode we talk about a bird that was once so numerous that Americans thought it would be impossible to kill them all. Until, suddenly, they did. What might the world look like if the passenger pigeon hadn’t gone extinct?
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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to The History Guy podcast Counterfactuals. What is a
counterfactual in the context of studying history, It is a
kind of analysis where we examined what might have happened
had historical events gone differently as a thought experiment. The
goal is to learn and understand history as it is
by talking about what it could have been as a

(00:27):
twist on the historical stories that we tell on the
History Guy YouTube channel. This is a series of podcasts
that dwell on that eternal question what if. I'm Josh,
a writer for the YouTube channel and son of the
History Guy. If you're a fan of the channel, you
already know Lance the History Guy himself. To liven up
our discussions on what might have happened, we have invited

(00:48):
Brad wagnan history officionado and a longtime friend of The
History Guy, to join us. Remember that if you'd like
to support us, you can find us on Patreon, YouTube,
and locals dot com. Join us as we discuss what
deserves to be remembered and what might have been. On
today's episode, we talk about a bird that was once
so numerous that Americans thought it would be impossible to

(01:11):
kill them all, until suddenly they did, what might the
world look like if the passenger pigeon hadn't gone extinct?
Without further ado, let me introduce the History Guy. On
September one, nineteen fourteen, an elderly widow named Martha passed

(01:32):
away in the home where she had been taken care
of for the later years of her life. Named after
Martha Washington, she was truly extraordinary. She'd lived nearly twice
as long as the rest of her family. As she aged,
her caretakers had to rebuild her home because she became
too old to climb stairs, and yet she continued entertaining
her many guests despite a palsy that made her quiver.

(01:53):
And when she finally died peacefully of a stroke in
her sleep, the world moored because Mark was one of
those very rare creatures called an ender, meaning that she
was the very last of her species. Not forty years before,
Martha had had billions of brothers and sisters, But when
she died in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, it

(02:16):
represented the end of an era, because Martha was the
last passenger pigeon on Earth, and her death represented the
startling extinction of what had only recently been one of
the world's most profligate creatures. You can't say that passenger
pigeons are forgotten history. Everybody knows what passenger pigeons are

(02:37):
as a cautionary tale of human hubris, But their passing
changed the world in ways that people don't understand. The
life when passenger pigeons was around is different in ways
that are forgotten today. The time of the passenger pigeon
is history that deserves to be remembered. Their numbers were,
of course amazing. The famed ornithologist John Jay Audubon documented

(02:59):
a time in eighteen thirteen when giant flocks of passenger
pigeons passed him for three days straight. He tried county
the number of flocks that passed and finally gave up,
as so many flew by the keeping up was not practicable.
On his first attempt, he counted one hundred and sixty
three flocks passing in a period of just twenty one minutes.
In eighteen sixty six, one flock in southern Ontario was

(03:21):
described as being one and a half kilometers wide and
five hundred kilometers long. The flock took fourteen hours to
pass and held in excess of three and a half
billion birds. There were so many birds that one American
writer suggested that if all the world's passenger pigeons flew
single file, they would have stretched around the earth twenty
two times. These are more than just numbers, They represent

(03:43):
a truly dominant species. Researchers assert that when their population
was at its height, passenger pigeons may have been the
most numerous bird on Earth. One researcher contended that this
one species accounted for between twenty five and forty percent
of the total land bird population in the United States.
And so in the cautionary tale about the bird's extinction,

(04:03):
there is another story. How was life different in the
time when passenger pigeons blotted out the sun. Pigeons are,
of course a common sight today, and estimated one million
live in New York City, but the pigeon experience was
rather different in the era of the passenger pigeon. A
terrifying account from eighteen fifty five had residents of Columbus, Ohio,

(04:24):
so startled by a kit the term for a group
of passenger pigeons that blocked out the sun, that women
and children screamed and ran for home, and some people
dropped to their knees in prayer. After the kit passed,
the scene was described as ghostly as the bright sun
illuminated a town turned white by being covered in pigeon pooh.
And while the image of a pooh covered Columbus, Ohio

(04:46):
might be startling, it's really more important than just some
level of astonishment. The pigeons in their pooh were so
prolific that they literally changed the environment of North America. Take,
for example, the white oak. Before European settlement, oaks nominated
the forest throughout much of what is now the eastern
United States, and among the oaks, the white oak reign supreme.

(05:10):
Its range once included every state east of the Central Plains.
Early botanists claimed that vast areas of the Eastern forest
were nine tenths white oak. By contrast, its cousin, the
red oak joly, made up only a small percentage of
Eastern forests, around maybe five percent, and the red maple
was almost unknown in the forests of the northeast. This
was important economically. White oak is a particularly valuable wood.

(05:33):
In fact, in terms of the quality and quantity of
saw timber, white oak was arguably once North America's most
valuable hardwood species used extensively for construction, flooring, and cabinetry.
Because of its ability to resist a caay, white oak
is often used in boat building and is particularly good
for outdoor use such as decks. Moreover, due to its
cellular structure, the lumber of white oak is particularly impervious

(05:55):
to liquids, making it particularly valuable for the making of
barrels and calves us in the making of barrel aged
spirits like wine and whiskey, but there is more liquid.
Spirits interact with the wood in their casks, and the
seasoning and heating treatments during the barrel making process result
in the production of a pleasant tasting oak lack tones.
The process for the creation of cask is a closely

(06:16):
held secret by barrel makers called coopers, and is part
of what instills the character of each distilleries unique creation.
White oak, commonly referred to as American oak, is the
most commonly used variety in whiskey coopridge worldwide, and by
US regulation, bourbon whisky must be aged in charred American

(06:37):
white oak barrels. Put simply, if you have a favorite
scotch or bourbon, or you like a particularly aromatic wine,
you like the taste of white oak, but American white
oak is disappearing. As a one two thousand and three
study noted, the white oak decline throughout its range has
been dramatic, and in response to this decline, it is

(06:57):
largely being replaced by less valuable red oak and red maple.
So what you may be thinking, does this have to
do with passenger pigeons, Well, actually quite a lot. The
bird is believed to play a significant ecological role in
the composition of the forest of eastern North America, and
especially the former prevalence of white oaks. White oaks germinated
in the fall, therefore making its seeds almost useless as

(07:19):
a food source during the spring breeding season, while red
oaks produced acorns during the spring, where they were devoured
by the pigeons. The effect of the massive amount of
pigeons resting on forest was dramatic. They would lead massive
amounts of broken foliage that were flammable, encouraging both the
frequency and intensity of forest fires, which then favored fire
tolerant species such as white oak over less tolerant species

(07:40):
such as red oak and maple. And the same pigeon
poo that turned Columbus Ohio ghostly was produced in such
quantities that at nesting sites it destroyed surface level vegetation
while adding huge quantities of nutrients to the soil. This
favored the white oak, which requires a sunlight to thrive.
By contrast, the forest today without the natural clearings that
the passenger pigeon helped to produce flavored trees like red

(08:02):
maple that thrive in shade. Selective logging and fire suppression
have had their effect, and yet the extinction of the
dominant bird species of the forest has undoubtedly had an effect.
One surprising effect of the change is that the colors
of the forest have changed. Eastern deciduous forests used to
turn yellows, oranges, and russets in the fall. Because of

(08:22):
the increasing percentage of red maple, the fall colors have
turned increasingly red. The extinction of the passenger pigeon has
literally changed the color of the forest. And another effect
of the extinction of the passenger pigeon was the end
of the era when in America we very commonly eight pigeons.
Pigeon was a common staple of the nineteenth century American diet,

(08:44):
while in the same era chickens were mostly raised for
eggs and chicken dinners were rare. That is to do
with developments in chicken technology, which radically changed chickens and
especially their availability year round, that occurred largely around the
turn of the twentieth century. Pigeons, however, were critical part
of frontier survival, where spring flocks returning north offered a
ruddy supply of cheap protein as winter was ending. People

(09:07):
survived in winter mostly unpreserved foods, so fresh meat would
be a cause for rejoicing. French naturalists Benedict Henry Revoil
wrote in his eighteen sixty five book Shooting and Fishing
in the Rivers, Prairies and Backwoods of North America that
when a kit descended on the town of Hartford, Kentucky
in eighteen forty seven, the population was under arms. Men
and boys all carried double or single guns and lay

(09:29):
hid behind woods, rocks, and wherever there was a chance
of shot. Prodigious quantities were killed by these means, and
that during his three days stay at the time nothing
was eaten but pigeons. People on the American frontier often
preferred a rustic pigeon pie, but Revoil noted that they
were also eaten boiled, broiled, stewed, or baked. As important

(09:50):
as pigeons were to the frontier, a key technology of
the era changed the way they affected the American diet.
Railroads allowed pigeons to be shipped in quantity to Eastern
markets and in commercial hunting, and the demand was huge.
A nineteen seventeen report to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture
noted that at one point the New York market alone
would take one hundred barrels a day for weeks without

(10:12):
a breaking price. Chicago, Saint Louis, Boston, and all the
great and little cities of North and eastern United States
joined in the demand. The report concluded, need we wonder
while the pigeons have vanished? The day when pigeon was
on most everybody's diet is one of the cheapest and
most available proteins is almost unrecognizable today. Today, the commercial

(10:32):
squab industry produces less birds for consumption in a week
than a single chicken company produces every hour, and a
single bird cost as much as twenty five dollars. A
squab producer noted in an article in Popular Science in
twenty eighteen, one hundred years ago, everyone was eating them.
Now you can't find them unless you're filthy rich. Meanwhile,

(10:52):
according to the National Chicken Council in twenty eighteen, Americans
are on pace to eat ninety two point five pounds
of chicken per capita. On a side note, popular science
suggests we not look towards the cheaper alternative of urban pigeons.
While they are not, as some assume, particularly carriers of
avian disease, their diet of essentially trash means that they

(11:14):
likely ingest things like rodent side battery, acid and lead.
But it was of course the demand that eventually spelled
the passenger pigeon's demise, and in that two of the
great technologies of the nineteenth century conspired against them. Not
only did railroads allow barrels of pigeons to be shipped
to Eastern cities, they allowed hunters to travel to the flocks,
having been alerted to their locations along the new telegraph lines.

(11:37):
In eighteen seventy one, the Wisconsin newspaper The Kilbourne City
Mirror described the commercial pigeon hunting industry at a Wisconsin roost.
Hardly a train arrives that does not bring hunters or trappers.
Hotels are full coopers are busy making barrels, and men,
women and children are active in packing the birds or
filling the barrels. In eighteen seventy one, a single seller
of ammunition provided three tons of powder and sixteen tons

(12:00):
of shot to supply hunters at one pigeon roost during
a nesting season. Just one town in New York was
estimated to a shift one point eight million pigeons to
larger cities. In the year eighteen fifty one alone, passenger
pigeons were hunted and trapped for food, for sport, to
a limited agricultural past, to their habitat was chopped up,

(12:22):
cut down for timber, cleared for farmland, so that the
patchwork of wilderness that we have today would be unrecognizable
to a mid nineteenth century American. How such a profligate
species could be driven to extinction in such a short
period of time is still a point of scientific study
and national debate, and it should be. But that's the
story everybody knows. But there is another story as well,

(12:43):
because in Martha's passing came the passing of a different
time of the era, when the nation was still new,
when nature's bounty seemed unlimited. An era before supermarkets, when
if you wanted to eat, it depended upon what you
could grow or catch or kill. When we looked at
the sky and instead of at our cell phones, an

(13:04):
era when we didn't think that we knew everything. Even
the forest today blush a different color, as if they
don't quite recognize themselves. The passenger pigeon is known in
popular culture for good reason, but there is another reason
to remember them, because passenger pigeons show us how very
different life was just one hundred and fifty years ago,

(13:27):
so different that we might not recognize it today. It
represents a different, more optimistic and naive era that no
longer exists, but that deserves to be remembered.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Now for the fun part, where I the History Guy
himself and longtime friend of the History Guy Brad Wagnen
discussed what might have happened if it all went a
little differently. The passenger pigeon is a really emotional story,
and it's one that they think that it touches people
still today, even though we're more than a century since
the last one died, and it's this was such an

(14:01):
incredible way of showing just how much a species like
that can impact history. And it's not just that you know,
this was an animal that people once dealt with every
single day, and in numbers that I think we can't
even imagine. I mean, there's very few creatures on this
on this planet that had that number of individuals, but

(14:23):
in a way that we can really understand how they
existed and interacted with the world and really altered the
entire face of the of the continent. And you know,
they're totally gone, and it's amazing how much their life
and death ended up impacting impacting the world. And I
think that that's what's so great about the story is

(14:43):
it's not just the story of the death of a pigeon.
It's about the repercussions of what happens when a pigeon dies.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
And with possible exception of maybe like domesticated chickens, which
we witness very much, we don't really have a species
like it today. So that's so dominant that if that
species disappeared, we'd be looking around gorinking whatever happened. But
I mean literally, you know flocks that had trillions of
animals that took that flew for miles. You know that

(15:12):
that you know autumna and stood there for days trying
to count the number of flocks and you finally just
couldn't even count them anymore. And to imagine that that
went extinct. So it's I mean, it's amazing today because
you sit here and say, how could that happen? How
could even us kill that? How could we put that
out of business? But it's also if you lived in

(15:32):
the time before the extinction of the passenger pigeon, I mean,
how can you imagine a world without them? Now? You know,
they flew over Columbus, Ohio and painted the place white,
But obviously that would be you know today that you
might not like it that the pigeons are coming over
and turn it in your car, you know, white with
pigeon poo. But it's it's just you can imagine, I mean,

(15:52):
you know, imagine a world with I don't know, dogs
or cats. Imagine a world. I mean, it's it's hard
to imagine what happens when you lose something that is
that part of the ecosystem.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
And the thing is, of course the ecosystem notices too,
which is which is part of the real story of
the Passenger Pigeons. And I do I like this episode too.
It wasn't why did the passenger pigeon go extinct? It's
it's it's like, how is the world different because of that?
Which is I thought it fun spin on it. We've
done a few episodes on birds. They haven't typically done
all that well in the YouTube channel. I you know,

(16:25):
I guess there's stories that are for the birds, but
I mean there's still there's still good stories.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, we've there's a couple we've done that are somewhat
related to this story.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
We've had. We've got several pigeon stories. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
The only the only other North American creature that I
can think of that would have the you know, cultural
and historical impact be the Great American bison.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yeah, the bison.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah, yeah, that we commonly call the buffalo. And that's
another one of those stories, and it kind of shows
how mankind is going to it's going to interact with
the natural world, and well, we are hungry and so
periodically we do go out to hunt. Is just that
perhaps the passenger pigeon is an indication of what happens

(17:11):
when modern technology meets a very large appetite.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it was. It's hard to imagine because
it was such a primary protein source for so much
of the country. It's hard to imagine, you know what
it would have meant when that protein source just sort
of disappeared, because the reason it was such a primary
protein source is because it seemed to be limitless. Yeah,
and it showed that as far as humans go, I mean,

(17:38):
nothing is there's nothing that's truly limitless. There's nothing we
can't use up if we try hard enough. And one
of the things, you know, now, the passenger pigeon is
such a just a lesson. And I mean, as I
think you mentioned in the episode of If Human Hubris
in like eighteen fifty seven or something like that, there
was they tried to pass something to protect the passenger
pigeon that the Ohio State Congress answer by saying, there's

(18:00):
no reason.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
To do that. This is a creature that is so
so numerous that the gun can't materially affect its numbers.
And boy, it looks softly bad in hindsight, but they're
I mean, their numbers dropped very quickly. And it's essentially
between when they first start noticing these numbers declining and
say the eighteen seventies or so, and then the eighteen

(18:23):
nineties by then, they're a rare species.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
There were going on. It's possible that the last person
to have a confirmed signing of a passenger pigeon was
was Theodore Roosevelt, who saw some near his farm in Virginia,
though he even afterwards, at the time he was sure
because he'd known passenger pigeons, but later he started to
question whether that's what he had actually seen. Of course,
there's a lot of pigeons out there. You know. It

(18:47):
was a huge combination of things, I mean, but it
was probably more the habitat destruction than it was the hunting.
The hunting was, you know, prolific, like the bird was prolific,
and the hunting, you know, aimed at this at the young,
the squad, so it's grabbing them before they com mature
and could reproduce. But was probably the disruption of the habitat,
and probably the species literally had evolved to use its

(19:10):
huge numbers that is that needed that for survival. That's
how a community raised young, that's how it defended itself
from predators. And so it just turns out that you
can't you can't operate a you know, a population of
ten or one hundred or a thousand passenger pigeons. Once
you get below a million, then suddenly they can't they
can't survive.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
One of the things that surprised me in terms of
looking at this to kind of talk about the counterfactual
of you know what if the passenger pigeon did not
go extinct, It is the question of how many passenger
pigeons could there be, you know, in terms of how
small a number. And it's surprising how how little information
we really have about the passenger pigeon because by the

(19:50):
time people thought we should study what they're doing and
how these these birds live, we had killed so many
of them. I mean they talk about what and like
one of the last big nestings, they killed fifty thousands
birds a day for five months. And it did get
to a point where, I mean, these birds because of

(20:10):
the fact that how they didn't run from predators. They
just go sit, you know, one hundred square miles or
three hundred square miles and all of them are roosting there.
You can raise enough of them because you just there's
not enough predators to possibly.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Kill them all. But when you brought into the humans
and the modern technology and the ability to kill fifty
thousand of them a day for just huge amounts of
time and then but it's amazing that we really are
not sure how small a number. We're pretty confident that
it was a fairly large number and that they relied
on these. They seem to have trouble with say Martha,

(20:45):
they had trouble getting her to reproduce, and it's possibly
because there wasn't there just wasn't large numbers of them
at that. Yeah, that might have been part of what
it took to reproduce and they actually might communicate have
raised young. Yeah, I mean that that's part of the
assumption now is to say that you don't have to
reduce the numbers much because they survived. The large numbers
were the whole the whole species depended upon that. But

(21:05):
that's a question because the passenger pigeon is one of
those animals that is a potential for the extinction. It's
hard to say because the way that that specimens were
preserved largely actually ends up destroying DNA. We had no idea.
We thought we were preserving them. But if you could
de extinct the passenger pigeon, or if you could try
to you know, breed from a pigeon population now back

(21:28):
to some version of the passenger pigeon, which is what
they tried to do with the quaha in Africa. One
of the questions is, you know, how many if you
could figure out how to make a passenger pigeon, that
you got to make before it's anything more than Martha
hopping around the zoo.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
And they've done some interesting like genome studies that are
supposed to kind of figure out, you know, you're supposed
to be able to tell through the genetic diversity what
the size of populations are. That seemed to suggest that
that they had existed in much smaller numbers than you know,
we saw in the eighteen hundreds. But it's not I mean,
there also seemed to be from the ones that I read,

(22:05):
there's there's some disagreement over exactly what that means, because
one of them suggested that they had big dips and
growths and that we had kind of caught them at
a you know, at the apex. And then maybe one
of the reasons why they went extinct is because it
was also during a natural dip because of how big
the population.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Had gone, and that just so we were and there's
some argument you know, Columbus shows up disease spreads throughout
you see a large depopulation of humans in North America,
and so both bison and passenger pigeons. It's possible that
their populations were smaller at the time when the human
population eating them was larger. And because we had essentially

(22:42):
depopulated the human population, which is you know, it's hard
to say how many that is, but killed some millions
of humans via disease spreading across the continent. That meant
that those species grew. I mean they're arguing that with
both of those species there, and it suggests that the
people that lived here had a better I mean, they
probably just didn't have the same methodology of killing them

(23:04):
in such vast numbers as we did. I mean, we
didn't just use gud I mean we did things like
we used rockets to fire nets that would catch them. Yeah,
the whole sale. And it wasn't just you know, while
we were just eating them. Even at like you know,
people are killing them to eat them during the winter
and stuff. When you happen to see them flying by
your farm, there was there was certainly you know, I mean,

(23:27):
certainly modern technology increased It's interesting to Mars too. You
know that all the different ways that they were because
you know, squab is a very uncommon dish today. I mean,
there's not too many restaurants that serve squab. It's compared
to chicken, very expensive. Uh. And you know, there's probably
not too many of our viewers that have really eaten pigeon.

(23:48):
If they do, you know, if they did, it's probably
pretty rare. So it's interesting to think that they were,
you know, for months at a time when they were moving.
That would be the primary, you know, source of protein.
And so to imagine a menu that has thirty items
that are are all pigeon are based items, it is
and and I mean I think we have a real

(24:09):
idea too of what I mean people think of like
those little city pigeons, you know, by my point being,
the pigeons don't necessarily seem like something you want to eat. No,
don't eat, don't don't eat the pigeons. The city pigeons
will eat anything including like battery, acid and garbage. Uh.
And and so I mean, if you're feeding them, you know, doritos,

(24:31):
that's probably the best food they're getting. So yes, that
that's the first thing they'll say is don't eat the
city chickens. That that they accumulate every nasty poison that
comes out in the city and then they you know,
so there I mean, I guess they keep from a distance.
I know some people some people call them what winged rats,
but but that the real lesson though, is don't don't
eat the pigeons. They're they're not safe to eat. Yeah,

(24:54):
those are not those are not eating the pigeons. But
these but these were, these pigeons were you know, eating
nuts and off the ground, and that was their primary
food source, and in doing so they spread those nuts everywhere.
Had a large effect on the forest canopy. I mean,
the ecosystem was so impacted by these birds. But at
leads to this, you know, kind of our question was,

(25:15):
I mean, did the did the bird change the ecosystem?
And when we changed the ecosystem, is that what made
the bird win extinct? Or if if the bird was
back or hadn't gone extinct, would we have a different ecosystem.
It's kind of hard to say, because you know, at
the point that we took these eastern forests and cutting
into a patchwork, if you'ling over them, it looks more
like a chessboard, you know. Then it looks like could

(25:35):
the bird have survived at that point or would the forest?
You know? But I mean that the idea is it
has such an impact on the ecosystem that our forest,
our ecosystem in North America would be different if we
still had had passenger pigeons. So I mean, I think
there's a lot of questions that are going to you know,
what would it mean if if we hadn't hunted it
to extinction. But that's the first question to say, how different,

(25:57):
how different would the world be if there were if
we still had millions of these birds flying around.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
I think that one of the realities is that there's
a large portion of this story that begs back to
you know, hearkens back to nostalgia when a man was
closer to nature. However, the story of Columbus, I think
is a very good example of exactly how devastating one

(26:25):
of these large flocks could be when it was flying over.
The reports of where the roost had occurred indicated that
it looked like a tornado had gone through the forest
because the sheer number of birds on branches were causing
trees to split, branches to fall off, and the amount
of dung that was being put over the ground essentially

(26:49):
was acting like a natural herbicide and it was killing
the undergrowth. And this was on a scale of potentially thousands,
tens of thousands of acres at a time. So it's perhaps, yeah,
it does harken back to the nostalgia. The thing is,
the nostalgia might not be quite so as pretty.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
As we would like to imagine.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's certainly, you know, the ecosystem is a lot of
pushing and pulling, and when one species is doing really well,
you know there's I mean that comes at the expensive well.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
It's true, and it comes at the expensive of food crops.
I mean the reason that we tore up the ecosystem
is because we were planting that and eating the food
and so I mean it would be possible to maintain
the passenger pigeon population and still be able to do
the farmland that would feed us all. I mean, we
also got a lot of rid of a lot of wetland,
and we always came and modified. I mean it's like

(27:43):
you know when you're playing Civilization, it's in the engineers
they just like literally changed the environment. So we could
we have created the environment where humans can live in
at least a dense population like we have now and
still have maintained the passenger pigeon. It is an interesting question,
but what could we have interstate highways if a one
hundred mile long flock of birds could come and cover

(28:05):
everything in Pooh? I mean, yes, that be a driving hazard, right,
That's it just just doesn't that.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Don't you think that would be slippery huh?

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Obscure vision? Right? Yeah, I mean if you're if you're
underneath it while you're trying to drive. You have to
wonder if you know, if passenger pigeons survived, The question
is is I mean, you're right, can they could? They? Was? This?
Was this simply a story of if we were going
to live here in the way that we were going
to live there. I mean maybe maybe it just wasn't
you know, the two the two species were mutually exclusive essentially,

(28:41):
And I mean I think we'd be talking even on
the on the kind of brightest side, I would think
we barely keep the I mean something like the bison,
where we get pretty close to extinction. Their numbers are decimated,
but they're able to be rehabilitated somewhat and I mean,
clearly what happens with these guys is we just moved
too late by the time we were talking about But

(29:01):
I mean, could we yellowstone a population of passenger pigeons
that we really don't know? I mean, that's because that's
why this one. Most of the bison now are are
in yellow stumpat Yeah. I mean, could could we possibly
create a part big enough to maintain a real population
of passenger pigeons? Or could you know, like Roosevelt said,
could we have you know, a few acres where we
have a viable population that we protect from the raccoons

(29:24):
or whatever it's going to be eating them. That's you again,
that's a question of the extinction, and you know, you
know what it means.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Brings a little bit into question, did you did you
really save the passenger pigeon? If what you've done is
kind of build a large open area, so what to
save me? I mean, certainly, certainly it's not the same
as it was, right, I mean, which is there's some
question there because this is it's certainly not the way
it would have lived when it lived in the wild.
But there really is I mean, how trying to imagine
how we would live with passenger pigeons today was kind

(29:51):
of one of the challenging pieces of this for me,
because it's it's hard to know even if we're talking
a smaller number of birds, I mean, we seem to
be still talking in the the hundreds of thousands of
these things, and they still would have been in very
large flocks. But how how do they how do they
survive in the modern world, and how do we deal
with them? You know, one of the problems was that

(30:13):
they were incredibly destructive to agriculture, and so that's I mean,
that's an issue, and and it's hard to when it
comes down to the question of are we going to
let people starve so that the passenger pigeons can fly around?

Speaker 1 (30:26):
I mean, that starts to be kicking. So I mean,
but what you know, what we're learning kind of today
is that a lot of those that we sought to
be a conflict of nature was really you know, we
just have to learn, you know, lessons about how, you know,
we can modify the way that we do things in
a way that allows us to live alongside nature. And
that's the big argument that's kind of made today U

(30:46):
And I mean, and it's hard to say is that
truly possible with passenger pigeons? And to what extent is
I mean we need parking lots and roads and farms
and all sorts of things that are gonna gonna take
a lot of on. But I mean, could we could
we sustain could we have stainably hunted the passenger pigeon
in a way that maintained a population that would still
be a large food supply.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
See, that's a question like if if we had the
passenger pigeon, and I mean even if we're not talking
totally domesticated, but how would that have impacted say, you
know how much chicken we eat.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
Today, Kentucky fried pigeon.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right if squab was a readily available food source. I mean,
it's it seems like maybe that that alters things because
I mean one of the one of the changes is
that we didn't have large numbers of pigeons. But if
you were able to do you know what we've done
with chickens even a little bit, which is that you
can make a billion chickens and they can be what
you want. I mean, could we have bread pigeons, these

(31:42):
pigeons that are clearly able to profligate. That's in such
incredible numbers. You know, do we have a domestic pigeon
industry because there is now there's a squab industry. Now
there's people that rage pigeons. So could we have done
that with the passenger pigeon? You know, maybe by reserving land,
I mean their point where we say that this you know,
this particular land which might be marginable marginal for agriculture,

(32:05):
could be you know, able to maintain populations of passenger
pigeons that could then be sustainably hunted and be used
of sort. And then so we would we would literally
be going into Kentucky fried pigeon, right, I mean we
Taco Bell would have and pigeon nuggets. And well, I
mean because there were you know, we used them and
use pigeon pies and you know roast pigeon, you know,

(32:28):
boiled pigeon and whatever kind of pigeon. Yeah, And and
I mean maybe we find ways to just like we
have with the chicken, to make them better for the
systems we want to use them in. And I don't know,
that's an it's an interesting it's an interesting kind of
future to imagine that we've we essentially have just this
whole other kind of meat essentially that is regularly. And

(32:48):
if you can imagine if we say we found a
you know, a planet that was habitable, I mean, one
of the types of species that you would want to
take with you would be something like the passenger pigeon
that where you could I mean, you got your seat
bank that we're going to bring there. I mean, they
would disperse the seeds, they would become a ready food supply,
they could grow in huge numbers. They would essentially help you,
you know, terraform a planet. And I mean so I

(33:11):
mean if you could bring you know, two passenger pigeons
and show up and have them turn into two million
or two billion within a few years, then you could
create forests, you know, on any sort of soil that's
fertile enough to grow something on as long as they've
got food. I mean, they're also helpings to the soil
with the just tremendous amount. And like we found here,

(33:34):
they actually, you know, they modified the forest in a
way that was at least proved to be useful, with
one of the differences being that white oak thrived in
the passenger pigeon forest and red oak has largely displaced
that in the in the non passenger pigeon forest, and
there's some reasons that we prefer white oak to red oak,
and at some point we might not be able to
make bourbon because there's not enough white oak to be

(33:56):
able to make the white oak casts that by law,
you have to use in order to call it bourbon.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
I mean, that's what's so great about this episode is
the way these this kind of web of connections.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
I did run across something that apparently there's somewhere in
the state of Tennessee where they are trying to encourage
people to go out and harvest white oak acorns so
that they can go in and basically start modifying the
ecosphere and try to bring back the white oak in
the numbers that it was that it was previously at.

(34:29):
And you know, of course, a part of that debate
also has to follow along the lines of, you know,
how much is man responsible for bringing down the white
oak population for bourbon barrels and other uses versus natural
changes because the passenger pitchons.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
And we figured out lots of ways to raise you know,
it's hard to do a tree form, though it takes
a enoughful lot of time to do a tree for them.
I mean, when we've simply changed the color of the forest,
that's a differentation. Uh. And and so certainly if we
if the passenger pigeon had not gone extinct, if we'd
figured out some way to keep the passenger pigeon going,
it might mean that the forest that we have preserved

(35:11):
would have a different you know, bio biome, and that
that bio might offer us some stuff that would be
you know, more useful to us in a number of ways,
you know, uh, you know, in terms of lumber and
you know, all sources of food. So I mean it's
it's interesting because of course we kept passenger pigeons, we
would have a major food source that now is completely
you know, pretty much gone. I mean, there's not very

(35:33):
much pigeon even going on. But we also might have
different sources of of wood lumber that we used to
you know that that that's how we used to to
build things. I mean, as as a species, it's it's
amazing how powerful they were, and you know, that's amazing.
Then again, it comes to and what's kind of the
point of the episode was to say, if you lived
in the time of the passenger pigeon, that could you
even recognize the world when it disappears over a period

(35:56):
of just a few decades.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
You wonder, I mean, in the de extinction of the past,
I wonder, what does a passenger pigeon if you brought
it to life today, it wouldn't recognize almost anything about
the world.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
The whole de extinction thing kind of let me, I'm
going to go down a bit of a rabbit hole here.
But when we think of the extinction, I think that
a lot of people think to Jurassic Park, where we
are going to make a one clone of a velociraptor,
a t rex or brotosaurus at nauseam. The fact is

(36:28):
that the extinction is far more complex, and really you
can de extinct traits of a creature, but not the
actual creature. And unfortunately, with one of the one of
the pop culture things Game of Thrones, dire wolves, someone
has decided that they are going to go and try

(36:51):
to de extinct the North American dire wolf. It's a
laudable effort. However, in the context of the modern world, really,
what are you doing. Are you creating a species that
you want to reintroduce into the wild. And also, oddly enough,
from Jurassic park. In the history of the world of
bad ideas, this might be the first because there are

(37:13):
so many unintended consequences. As we've seen invasive species become
a huge problem almost almost where.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
We see them.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
So anyway, Yeah, the extinction thing is, you know, just
to put it within context, we're never going to have
billions of passenger pigeons darkening the skies of the entire
upp and northwest to the point where where they were
in the past.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
It's interesting to think about what that, you know, what
that would really mean in practical ways, And I don't know.
I mean, it's it's difficult to see how you reintroduce
that kind of creature, especially with something something like the
passenger pigeon, that it feels like, I mean, what's the
point of bringing them back if they're just going to
be in zoos kind of thing, except that, you know,
we can show that we can, But I don't I

(37:57):
don't know how what that looks like in terms of
I don't know how you make a live population of them,
and we have so few of them and so little
DNA to find. I don't know if it's you know,
how do you build a population, how do you make
enough individuals to have self sustaining therein.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Because we you know, we can assume it's not at
least outside the Roman possibility. You know what happens if
our you know, ability or technological ability alters. I mean,
what if we did come to the ability to de
extinct species. This is a species that, you know, whatever
Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, nature selected them for extinction.
This is a species we hunted to extinct extinction. You know,

(38:37):
would we should we? Could we? And you know could
We's different? But if we could, should we? And you
know how how would that change things? You know, if
you brought back to the Carolina parakeet much smaller populations,
you know, that would probably be something that would be
hopping around a zoo. I mean, it might be cute
and if we if we let it loose in the wild,
it might impact the ecosystem in some ways. But you're right,

(38:57):
I mean, you know, we have a new ecosystem now,
would be an a base of species. But I mean
to try to bring back you know, if we had
the if we came up with the ability that we
could could literally reproduce the passenger pigeon as it was
and create a billion, you know, flock of passenger pigeons,
would we and and would the world be a better
place or you know, would be the world be a

(39:19):
worse place. It does connect to our counterfactual because I
think part of the question is simply, you know, how
do you live with this animal? And how do we
imagine surviving with the passenger pigeon over that century. But
one of the I mean, one of the other questions
that I think is cool to talk about is how
the death of the passenger pigeon not just essentially created

(39:40):
the conservation movement. And it's not that there weren't people
worried about it before, but in terms of actual movement,
the passenger pigeon was was probably the number one choice
and the number one poster child for it. It was
such an easy way of showing, look at how humans
have done some things so incredibly damaging, and if it

(40:03):
can happen to the past. There was sort of this
thought that if you know, if God had made it,
there's no way we were going to kill it. And
it turns out that that we could. Yeah, and which
is which is a shaft idea?

Speaker 2 (40:14):
And if you can kill the passenger pigeon because some
of the other animals that were i mean, the bison
kind of barely survived. You talked about, I mean, something
that's kind of similar to this one in some ways
is the Rocky Mountain locust, which was say even more
of a past than the than the passenger pigeon was,
really and something that was wiped out, I mean in

(40:35):
another animal that there were billions of just insects and
then you know, wiped out in essentially such a short
period of time. But then we talked about we had
an episode on Ned McElhenny of the Tabasco fame and
saving various waterbirds like the snowy egret. There were much
more populations for the years, and they were being hunted

(40:55):
I mean horribly, so that I mean, there were other
animals that could have maybe been a poster child for
this kind of thing, and certainly the wetland birds are
another option or if if somehow the passenger pigeon doesn't
become that poster child. Teddy Roosevelt one of the things
that he did while he was in office was to
try to protect these wetland birds. And one of the reasons,
you know, when they passed the nineteen eighteen Migratory Bird Act.

(41:18):
Those were the kinds, some of the kinds of birds
that they were trying to protect, and the passenger pigeon
certainly would have fallen under that under that group as well.
But you know, the passenger pigeon's death when it died,
might have been one of the reasons why we've saved
some of those other species. And so, you know, if
the passenger pigeon survives and we don't have that poster child,
do we live in a world now that doesn't have

(41:39):
egrets and spoon bills and whatever other kinds of wetbird
wetland birds there are to that we were killing for feathers,
because it seems like even a few years of delay
on that might have led to the extinction of numerous
other there.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
Are species that would be easier to drive extincts. So,
and that's a fair point. If if we had the
passenger pigeon or hadn't lost the passenger pigeon, are the
other things we would have lost instead? And like we
said from the start, there's there's always going to be
a trade off that's involved. That's a very good point.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
Yeah, Now, if the if passenger pigeons had been more resilient.
You know, how does that affect life in the in
the upper Midwest, basically from almost as far west as
the Dakotas and definitely as far east as upstate New York.
I am imagining much like a tornado warning, you would

(42:31):
receive the warning that a large passenger pigeon flock is
headed in your general direction. Farmers need to prepare as
well as basically anyone who's going to be in.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
The path and in doors.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, and then and then the cleanup efforts after that.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Can can you imagine a flock appeared over not even
New York City, Let's just let's go for somewhere smaller,
like say, you know, Rochester, New York or Minneapolis St.
Paul or you know, can you imagine the cleanup efforts
on that and the penential damage as well as It's
pretty certain that with their primary food source limited to

(43:12):
an extent, that these flocks would start going after crops.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, so, which is something they did, and I mean
maybe we do. I mean, you know, Dad kind of
mentioned maybe we figure out a way to limit some
of their damage on crops. But I mean they're going
to have to get their food somewhere, and so maybe
they were more adaptable and they just you know, like
city pigeons moved into eating all the garbage or something
like that. That's going to cause problems somewhere, right, whatever

(43:38):
they're eating, if we're talking several eve, if we're talking
billions of birds, I mean, they're the weight of that
on the ecosystem is going to cause I mean, it's
going to push something around someplace.

Speaker 3 (43:50):
Oh yeah, definitely, you would have entire areas denuded of food,
and so you know, there's definitely this is a it's
a counterfactual future that you have to look at and say,
this would be a disaster or this would be very
difficult to live with. I shouldn't say a disaster, but
you know, it would be something that would have definite

(44:12):
it would have definite consequences and very very real consequences
on a scale of natural disasters that definitely bigger than
a tornado, probably in some way smaller than a hurricane,
but getting fairly close there, just by the sheer amount
of the perspective of.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
We live without them, now, how would it change our lives?
But we lived with passenger pigeons until the latter part
of the nineteenth century, they were just part of life.
So would we have evolved the way we do things differently?
I mean, there was still agriculture in eighteen seventy, There
was still you know, roads in eighteen seventy. Columbus might

(44:54):
have been painted white one day, but I mean people
still lived in Columbus, right, I mean, certainly less and
the you know, the grasshopper plague. So how might we
have evolved our culture differently alongside the passenger pigeon rather
than taking the idea that just says we're going to
make the changes that might cause the extinction of the

(45:15):
passenger pigeon. And I mean, then that's an interesting question.
I mean, so it might be that what we use
as crop ones today we use we use different crop
or a different crop land. You know. It might be
that what we used for lumber we used different for
us for lumber, or that we that we lumbered differently.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
You know.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
It might be that that roads in America are covered
or more covered than they are today, you know, or
we might we might you know, place them along river
valleys or you know, places where you know, the passenger
pigeon didn't go and you know, poop on everything. If
we imagine, you know, suddenly now a billion pigeons or
a trillion pigeon show up in poopons, that's a disaster.

(45:57):
But if we imagine we've always lived with the pigeons,
then that that that leads to an idea would there
be a different future, because I mean, the point of
the episode is to say that here's this change that
is relatively recent. I mean, you know, this isn't this
didn't happen in Greek times. This happened, you know, in
American times. A change that radically made a different land

(46:17):
before and it occurred in human history, and we it's
kind of funny that we kind of forgot that, that
we kind of forgot what it was like before the pigeon.
But when you talk to a counterfactual, I don't think
we necessarily would say how would we have the world
we have today with a trillion pigeons? It would say
that how would the world we live today be different
with a trillion pigeons? And you know it might I mean,

(46:40):
you know, we might not be going for solar panels
on the roof like we are now.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
I mean I think that there is there's certainly an
argument for the pest that they would still be because
I mean, they were a pest for the people of
the nineteenth century, right, and maybe you would get a
warning on your phone that'd be like, ah, yeah, the
pigeons are coming. But you do wonder how we would
have adapted and how they would have adapted, quite honestly,
if if they were capable of it, or if we weren't,

(47:07):
if we weren't hunting them as as you know, as strenuously,
if if we would have had a world that just
simply altered in ways that we we can't even quite imagine.
And I mean that's I think that's part of something
you can learn from this episode is the idea that
the the forests in you know, the eastern United States
literally in the fall blush a different color then they

(47:29):
then they used to because of getting rid of the pigeon.
I mean, if we think of keeping the pigeon, there
are changes perhaps that that we would find extremely surprising
that that would be difficult for us to kind of
pick out an a counterfactual discussion, because maybe you're right,
I mean, maybe we we essentially have you know, you
have clear migratory patterns that they can follow and we've
just built our roads around them. But that might mean,

(47:52):
you know, cities are in different places, and we live
in different places, we grow food in different places, which
might impact how we grow. I mean, it's an interesting
it's interesting to imagine what that might look like.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
I think that your Josh is right on it. Whenever
you have a conflict of species competing for the same
amount of land, one of the species has to give.
And so it is possible that a more energetic passenger
pigeon would actually have caused the settlement of the uppermost

(48:24):
Midwest to have occurred more slowly and perhaps less completely,
which in turn has a lot of implications on diet.
Perhaps there's not as much wheat grown in the United
States because the populations and the agriculture is so much
easier in the South, where the pigeons are not not

(48:49):
as numerous, it's not part of their natural range. So
instead of going to the you know, instead of going
to the story and seeing aisles upon isles of bread,
do we see eye upon aisles of rice as well
as rice, some sort of rice, bread, rice, crackers, rice needles.
You know, does rice become even more important as a

(49:12):
dietary stable. And I think that the answer would probably
be yes.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
I mean that the passenger pigeon was was in the east.
It was not apparently in the west, was not apparently
past the Rocky Mountains. We do grow a lot of
food that direction. So it maybe it means that the
that you know was the original Midwest, which is you know, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana,
maybe that didn't populate as quickly, but maybe populations move
more quickly into the far west. Well there was where

(49:36):
there were fewer pigeons, and you know what is that?
Of course that means an awful lot for native populations
and you know, oh yeah, how that that yeah, that's
true in terms of conflict, and I mean it's it's
it's not necessary I think to say that the that
that the one of the species has to give and
that I mean, we're pretty smart and we figured out
how to live alongside some species we didn't think we could.

(49:59):
And so you know, maybe it was we preserve parts
of the forest that we were cutting down without even
thinking about what that meant, that we preserve those parts
of the forest instead of patchwork forests that we actually
know have some swats that are open and some sauce
that are not and and that the pigeons were therefore'd
be less, you know, eating our crops because we have
a place where the pigeons are eating the things that
they like to eat. Uh And I mean so I

(50:20):
mean see, I mean it would be an interesting kind
of you know, I don't know, short story to write
to say how we how we lived around pigeons and
you know, ever get their phone alert and everybody runs
under maybe we all wear now you remember when they
had that in the eighties, they had that it was
like an umbrella with that hat, that a little umbrella,
and that maybe we all got those right, you know,
maybe we all have a pigeon hat. Uh and and

(50:42):
and we you know, but I mean if and we
just we just see that as sort of the normal,
the normal way of life. If you see them as
a food supplies, you see them as a way that's
maintaining the forest or something like that, then then then
you know, golly, we might not be so put off
by them as as an invasive species. We might because
they used to cheer when the pigeons came, because that
meant suddenly, yea, all winter didn't have any meat yeah. Yeah,

(51:03):
and now suddenly we got you know, we got pigeon
pot and we we certainly don't have that issue today.
I mean, so even if pigeon, I mean, we might
have been using pigeon meat in different ways, but I
don't think I don't think we'd today be going out
with our guns to gun down pigeons in our yard
because that's what we're going to eat for the winter.
I mean, I think that the advance, the advances in

(51:23):
terms of you know, refrigeration and supermarkets would likely have
come absent or present the Yeah, we would probably have
some other way of harvesting the species that was more sustainable. Uh,
And but we still you know, again, we still might
be you know, getting squad at the grocery store in
a way that we don't today. But I mean it's
I mean that that I'd like that whole idea that

(51:45):
your you know, because it would be a regular predictable thing.
But like your pound buzzes and everybody just kind of
knows what's to do. You know, how different how different
would our automost automobiles be if if we had would
we not worry about the color of our automobile? Right?
I mean would because they're just going to become Maybe
no one would care what color your automobile is because
it was always going to get pooped on anyway. Maybe
you know, it's not the exterior or the automobile account.

(52:09):
You know, how to create an exterior that is more
resistance to it or something. If we have machines that
is coming, you know, clean the roads off after a snowstorm,
I mean, maybe we've got equipment that says, oh, the
pigeons came through, and you know, the city rolls out
the Pooh cleaner and and and we all go about
our business. That weirdly does remind me. I just saw

(52:29):
they there's in the French Quarter in New Orleans. I
mean it's famous for you know, not smelling that good.
There's apparently a company in there that has like patented
this particular cleaner to clean the streets to specifically to
combat that kind of scent. And so it makes you wonder,
I mean, how we adapt to these various things that
maybe you do.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
You know, you just have you got a truck that's.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
Purpose built to get rid of however it is you
have to deal with copious amounts of pigeon poop. I
mean in anachronistic way. If we could ask, like, you know,
professional urban planners to say, how would we you know,
urban plan differently if we were trying to preserve the
passenger pigeon, If we were trying to preserve a large, viable,

(53:12):
you know, species that we're going to use as a
primary food source that lives the way the passenger pigeon does.
I would think that modern urban planners, that modern environmental
designers and stuff like that would actually have some ideas
on that, and it would be interesting to see how
buildings might be different. It might be that the tops
of buildings are used as roosting places for pigeons. It

(53:33):
wouldn't be worth the money to you know, to do
all that planning, because you know, we're not going to
get the pigeon back, But it is an interesting, it's
an interesting thought idea to say, you know, would would
our cities, would our roads, would our automobiles, would our clothes,
would our restaurants you know, look different if we had,
if we had wanted to save the passengers. At some

(53:54):
point we realized that we could lose the passenger pigeon,
and we did what it would take to save that.
What would we have built different I think say, I
think it's a very fair question. I don't know if
we're talking about you know, and I mean we talked
about potatoes and catch it being you know, you couldn't
have civilization without them. But I mean I think we
could that we could say that it would be a
very different place. Maybe we'd have flying cars by now,
because the way that we transported by flying above the

(54:16):
flocks pigeons. Pigeons. Yeah, yeah, planes, planes hitting birds. You'd
hate to have hit a flock of a billion. Yeah,
well that's I mean, how would how would would we
be able to have an airline industry if we still
had flocks that large? I mean, there's still some massive
flocks of birds, and you know, they have ways that
they try to keep them away from airports and et cetera.

(54:38):
But it's an interesting question, and so I think I think,
I honestly think it would be fun to say, you know,
maybe maybe to go to a bunch of kindergarteners and say,
you know, draw, Maybe not kindergartens, we go to you know,
creative second graders and say, draw a city that also
has a billion pigeons. Yeah, you know, and and see
see how we you know, the creative ideas we would
have around the you know, around the pigeon.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Yeah, to revisit something that you guys brought up earlier.
If there is a readily available supply of wild game,
in this case, passenger pigeons, does the domestication the chicken
take place at the scale in the United States that
is that currently? And my argument is probably not, because

(55:20):
if you still have flocks of hundreds of millions to
billions of these birds, then suddenly it's like farm salmon
versus wild cot salmon. There would probably be two grades
of you know, oh that common plub squad versus by
wild cot natural who dined solely on acorns. Oh chicken, Oh,

(55:42):
that's so so twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
Maybe because I mean that you always saying that young
squab as much as much softer, much more tender, and
so we weren't necessarily eating passenger pigeons when it was
the best time to eat them. I mean, that's one
of the reasons they had to come up with some
ways to cook them. We maybe find ways to me
you know that the modern chicken certainly barely resembles the

(56:07):
chicken we bred it and I mean maybe we would
have done that. But I mean we also figured out
just by giving it specific vitamins of a winter, we
can get a chicken to lay eggs of a winter,
which they didn't used to do that. And so you know,
we used to be a much more seasonal thing, and
that we're far fewer chickens and you mostly ate eggs
and et cetera. So I mean, could the you know,
could the same thing have I mean, is there a
supplement that you could give passenger pigeons to keep them producing? Uh?

(56:32):
And you know, you know, maybe we're managing the population
that way because we did figure out a way to
keep them to make chickens much more more. Maybe you
figure out that instead of you know, instead of slowing
down how many pigeons you kill, you increase the number
of pigeons. Yeah, I mean we there are more chickens
today then there were passenger pigeons at their heyday. And yeah,

(56:53):
and that's and so that it says that it's possible, right,
I mean, we would, you know, if we were just
pigeoning the way that we're chickening. And again we're back
to Kentucky fried pigeon. But you know pigeon, you know,
popcorn pigeon. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
There was an interesting piece that I saw which was
it talked about how the death of the passenger pigeon
left mast all these nuts and various things that they
were eating. You know, suddenly there was a much larger
supply of that and nothing competing for it. And one
of the animals that benefited from it was this particular mouse,
I think it's called the white footed mouse or something

(57:27):
like that. And apparently the white footed mouse is a
particular host for young ticks. And one of the things
that this was arguing is that you can draw a
line between the death of the passenger pigeon, the growth
of these mice, the way that these ticks are then,
you know, living on this particular host, and the prevalence

(57:48):
of lime design in the in the modern era. And
so there is there is an argument to be said
that if the passenger pigeon had continued to continued to
compete for that food and kept down the populations of
the mice, that we might have less of a problem
with lime disease. And there's they kind of talked about
some stuff that's it's kind of complex because there's ticks

(58:08):
have kind of a complex life cycle and stuff. But
you know that there's some there's some argument to say
that that that was impacted by the death of the
passenger pigeon, and that's I mean, that's another place that
just seems kind of unexpected. But that we talk about
all these changes in terms of could you imagine a
world where chicken is I mean, chicken is such a

(58:29):
dominant food I mean globally but in the United States,
And if we're talking a world where you come in
and that's it's it is not you know, the primary
or the soul kind of kind of foul essentially foul food.
You know, this this this the birds we're eating because
I mean we eat other birds. We eat turkeys and
and and ducks and geese and stuff like that, but

(58:52):
none of them compare in terms of volume to chickens.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
So we raise I mean, those are those are populations
that we're not that big in the wild and that
we've managed to make very so I mean, you would
think that that means that we could have created some
sustainable version of pigeon of pigeons. I try to think
about even the advertisement. If you look at like like
the Chick fil A is advertising eat more chicken. I mean,
if we have something that's up there it's pige file

(59:17):
a and it's eat more pigeon.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
I mean, that's that.

Speaker 1 (59:20):
Even to something like that is I mean, you could
have pop culture impacted in a way that I mean,
pigeons might mean something different to us than they do
today because of what kinds of animals.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
You know, what we think of first when you think.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Like pigeons, I mean, I mean, that's that is that
the idea that this pigeon was once a massive source
of food in America and it's not now, so that
the pigeon seems weird is funny, because I mean not
pigeon would have semed weird to someone at some point.
And of course, if you were another North American species,

(59:56):
it's quite possible that you sustained yourself largely on pigeons.
And so the reduction in passenger pigeons might result in
a significant decrease in the sasquatch population in the eastern
United States.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Uh, maybe the sasquatch were living. Maybe they were, And
I mean, certainly.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
If it was a fairly small population, you would not
have been able to impact passenger the passenger pigeon population
like we were, like we did once we once we
brought in the kind of industrial level pigeon killing, and maybe.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Well, not only that, not only that this occurred at
a critical time in which the Native American population was falling,
and Sasquatch had a unique moment in history when with
that pigeon supply, it could have reproduced and challenged Homo sapiens.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
In the entirety. Except the death of the passenger pigeon.
The death of the passenger pigeon saved us from from
our squatchtopia, pautiful Sasquatch or overlords.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
I do want to harken back to one one potential
point that I think really is also kind of a
it's a bit of an unknown. In all of the research,
there was a very huge focus on the passenger pigeon
died because man hunted it to death, and there is
no other reason, which, as we all know, is it's

(01:01:23):
a stretch. The question is what was that other or
what were those other contributing factors? I would argue that,
you know, and unfortunately, you know, the passenger pigeon really
dies off at a time before serious research into you know,
the effects of biotic infections, animal born pathogens really comes

(01:01:47):
into its own. So is it also possible that the
passenger pigeon was much like much like indigenous populations in America?
Was it susceptible to you know, the nineteenth century equivalent
of a.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Bird Personeah, I mean it's possible. Yeah, there was some
There was one specifically that I saw that they had
suggested as a possible but it was it was a
specific illness that bird Scott and and it's I mean,
it's part of it's just so difficult to know because
it's I mean I mentioned that earlier in the episode,
is that it's incredible how little we know about them,

(01:02:25):
given given how many there were and how long we
lived beside them. And it's one of those things where
we just, you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Truly were so used to it. It was such a
such an everyday part of life that you didn't really
think to look closely until it was too lng.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's that's the fully strange part
of it. There were just so many of them we
never bothered to study, and by the time, you know,
the numbers were reduced, our opportunity had changed or had
passed and that's it seems a tragedy.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
Yeah, And so I mean, if you are to de
extinct the passenger pigeon, is it possible that we could
then you know, start isolating what the problem was and
then actually get a breeding size flaw that could be
managed and have it, you know, return it to its
return it to its habitat.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Or might we reincubate some sort of illness that would
then end the world Chicken suppie.

Speaker 3 (01:03:15):
There is a very real, the rare real plausibility, yes,
for every time you push, something pushes back.

Speaker 1 (01:03:23):
Yeah, that's the in unexpected ways as we learned in
this episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of
the History Guy podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode
of counterfactual history, and if you did, you can find
lots more history if you follow the History Guy on YouTube.
You can also find us at the Historyguy dot com, Facebook, Patreon,

(01:03:44):
and locals. If you want to hear more counterfactuals, stay tuned.
We release podcasts every two weeks. In an Enemy dost

(01:04:13):
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