The Passenger Pigeon — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Businessman’s Labor of Love

Mershon frames his project as a “labor of love” and acknowledges that a trained writer might have given the material “a more finished and literary setting.” This self-deprecation is telling: the book’s strength lies in its unpolished authenticity. The editor’s voice appears mainly in the introduction and chapter headnotes, letting the contributors speak directly. The table of contents reveals a deliberate structure, moving from classic ornithological descriptions (Wilson, Audubon) to contemporary reports of netting, slaughter, and the last sightings. Mershon’s role as compiler—rather than author—shapes the reader’s experience, inviting us to weigh conflicting accounts and piece together the puzzle of extinction.

The Netter’s Ledger: A Record of Catches

One of the most striking excerpts is a letter from a pigeon netter, H. T. Phillips, detailing his catches year by year from 1862 to 1878. The prose is terse and factual: “In 1862, at Monroe, Wis., … we made one haul of 250 dozen … on corn bait in a pen 32 × 64 feet.” The numbers are staggering—hundreds of dozens of birds taken in a single haul, shipped by steamer and rail to markets in Detroit, New York, and Boston. The netter’s account reads like a business ledger, with costs for bait (500 bushels of corn at 25 cents per bushel) and express fees ($12 to $13.50 per barrel). This cold commercial record contrasts sharply with the earlier naturalists’ awe, underscoring the scale of the harvest.

Shifting Geographies of the Flocks

The netter’s letter also tracks the pigeons’ movements across the Midwest: nesting in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Canada, and even as far as Southern California. The birds “have been moving west,” he notes, and he describes following them from Manistee to Mackinac to Cheboygan, adapting his methods to each location. The logistics of transport—floating crates down rivers, transferring birds over dams, using tiers of ice for cooling—reveal a makeshift industry built around the flocks’ unpredictable migrations. The reader sees the pigeons not as a static species but as a shifting resource, pursued by a network of trappers who moved with the birds.

The Voice of the “Old Timer”

Mershon includes a chapter titled “Recollections of ‘Old Timers,’” which gathers firsthand memories from men who had known the passenger pigeon in its abundance. These accounts, often written in colloquial language, offer a personal counterpoint to the scientific and commercial records. One correspondent recalls that “the birds were pulling wheat badly” and that farmers “broke them up” to protect their crops. Another notes that the pigeons nested “on hemlock mast alone in Pennsylvania, and in Michigan on the pine mast after the beech mast was gone.” These details ground the narrative in everyday experience, showing how the pigeon’s fate was entangled with agriculture, weather, and human opportunism.

Reading The Passenger Pigeon as a compilation means attending to the gaps between its sources. The scientific descriptions of Wilson and Audubon belong to an era of wonder; the netter’s letters belong to an era of extraction. Mershon does not resolve the tension—he preserves it. For a first reading, pay attention to dates and locations: the book’s chronology maps a decline that was neither sudden nor uniform. The pigeons did not vanish all at once; they were followed, trapped, and shipped until there were none left to follow.

In the ledger of loss, the old record of the passenger pigeon sits heavily on my heart, a story of abundance turned to silence. It makes a quiet kinship with A Year with the Birds Third Edition, Enlarged — Edition Insights, a book that catches the fleeting joy of wings. The one mourns what vanished; the other treasures what remains. Together, they share a whispered truth about paying attention.