Ernest Ingersoll’s “Four American Game Birds."
Drawing by J. Carter Beard. In: Harper’s Weekly (October 12, 1889), p. 809.
J. Carter Beard depicts one pigeon in flight with a rather slumping posture, while its fellows roost placidly on dead limbs. The author of the article, naturalist Ernest Ingersoll, was an early supporter of the protection of wildlife and its natural habitats. He laments that clearing away mast-bearing trees such as oaks and beeches, which fed the wild pigeons, and the “incessant destruction of old and young which falls upon every accessible roost as soon as it is reported” have greatly diminished the species. He writes that in 1889, “the birds’ splendid flight still cheers us now and then in autumn and spring, as in long bending lines these noble birds rush across the sky … but the glory of the tribe has departed with the disappearance of savagery in the land, and the passenger pigeon—the very image and spirit of exultant wildness—will soon be a rarity.” Just twenty-five years later, the passenger pigeon would be extinct.