This enhanced infrastructure allowed the commercial exploitation of the pigeon industry to boom as commercial hunters could learn quickly about new nesting sites and could follow the flocks around the continent. These were the rolling out of the telegraph and the railroad. After the American Civil War in 1865, however, came two technological developments that set in motion this pigeon’s extinction. Although hunting for food was reducing their numbers, the species was not yet threatened. Even just using a long pole one could knock a few low-flying birds down. The flocks were so thick that hunting was easy. These birds were tasty and their arrival guaranteed an abundance of food. Although the birds had always been used as food to some extent, even by the Indians, the real slaughter began in the second half of the 1800s. Commercial hunters began netting and shooting the birds to sell in the city markets. The decimation of the passenger pigeons population started in earnest when hunting them for sale as meat became an industry. In order to protect their produce the farmers retaliated by shooting the birds and using them as a source of food. As the forest mass decreased so did their food supply. When the early settlers cleared the eastern forests for farmland, the birds were forced to shift their nesting and roosting sites to the remaining forests. Passenger pigeons needed large forests as they congregated in such vast numbers. Schorger estimated that in 1871 one of their nesting sites that covered 850 square miles of Wisconsin’s sandy oak barrens was home to 136 million breeding adults. Their migrations took hours to pass overhead, darkening the sky and making a terrific roar. In 1855 passenger pigeons were still the most abundant bird in North America. It is estimated that in 1500, when Europeans first arrived in America, passenger pigeons made up 25% to 40% of the total bird population in North America and that their population numbered around four billion.
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