This comprehensive book meticulously documents much that is known about the iconic extinct passenger pigeon.
One hundred years ago today, the last passenger pigeon, a captive-bred adult named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Since we knew that she was the last of her kind, her body was frozen into a 300-pound block of ice before she was shipped by train to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was skinned, dissected and preserved as a mount.
History suggests that few things stimulate human ingenuity more than the challenge of killing. This is most evident when the intended targets are other human beings, for no other organism poses anywhere near the same severity of threat. But as a species, we are no slackers even when the adversary is an eighteen-inch-long bird. Safe only when they rose above high enough to exceed the range of weaponry, the passenger pigeons otherwise lived a gauntlet whereby they became the targets of an arsenal that employed an amazing array of instruments. [p. 91]
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