They continued, undiminished, for three days. ![]() The birds apparently tightened into undulating clouds, diving swiftly toward the earth and rising, swept together into whirling columns “with a noise like thunder,” which resembled, to him, “the coils of a gigantic serpent.” When he reached Louisville at sunset, having traveled nearly 60 miles from Hardinsburg, where he first sighted the flocks, Audubon found to his amazement the pigeons were still passing overhead. Martha, believed to be the last Passenger Pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 at age 28 or 29.īut what he could not describe, he insisted, was “the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions” when a hawk appeared. Shooting Passenger Pigeons was all too common, as he would later memorably, if horrifically, describe. They flew too high, he goes on to say, to reach with a rifle shot, though clearly some were attempting it - “nor did the reports disturb them in the least,” he adds. ![]() There was no mast, Audubon reasons - no acorns nor wild nuts to bring them to the ground, either of which the birds would devour, he recounts, ravenously, to the point they would often suffocate on them. He observed the Passenger Pigeons flying continuously throughout the day, an unceasing torrent of birds, from the barrens to the mouth of the Salt River - the village of West Point - where he dined at Young’s Inn, having ridden some 40 miles in the interim. “The air was literally filled with Pigeons,” he writes, “the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse the dung fell in spots not unlike melting flakes of snow and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” In barely over 20 minutes, he counted 163 separate flocks. He dismounted and tried to keep count, making a dot for each flock with a pencil. The numbers of birds - it is estimated there were 3 billion of them in Audubon’s time - clearly astonished him. ![]() “I observed the Pigeons flying,” he writes, “from northeast to southwest in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before.” A short distance beyond what is today Hardinsburg, steering his sorrel over a buffalo trace through what he describes as a “Barrens” - probably scrub oak and grasslands, spotted by underbrush rooted in poor soil - he encountered what was to be one of the most memorable experiences of his life: waves upon waves of Passenger Pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius, in flight. On an autumn morning in 1813, John James Audubon set out from his home in Henderson, Kentucky, traveling east by horseback toward Louisville.
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