Species

Justification
This species was formerly distributed across North America, but is now Extinct as a result of habitat clearance and hunting. The last reliable wild record dates from 1900, and a search beginning in 1910 failed to find it.

Taxonomic source(s)
AOU. 1998. Check-list of North American birds. American Ornithologists' Union, Washington, D.C.
Brooks, T. 2000. Extinct species. In: BirdLife International (ed.), Threatened birds of the world, pp. 701-708. Lynx Edicions and BirdLife International, Barcelona and Cambridge, U.K.
Cramp, S.; Perrins, C. M. 1977-1994. Handbook of the birds of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The birds of the western Palearctic. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Sibley, C. G.; Monroe, B. L. 1990. Distribution and taxonomy of birds of the world. Yale University Press, New Haven, USA.

Distribution and population
Ectopistes migratorius was found forest in eastern and central Canada and the USA, occasionally wandering south to Mexico and Cuba. Over the 19th century, the species crashed from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction (Schorger 1955). The last wild bird was shot in 1900, and surveys in 1910-1911 failed to record any (Blockstein and Tordoff 1985). The last captive bird died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo (Wilcove 1989).

Ecology
It was a nomadic species, breeding and foraging in vast flocks millions of birds strong. It exploited seasonally available crops of beechmast, acorns and chestnuts; scouting for food sources and infomation sharing was likely to have required flocks of a certain critical size, below which survival would be compromised. Birds nested in April or May in vast colonies typically 16 by 5 km in size.

Threats
The precise cause of its extinction is difficult to determine, but the widespread clearance of the hardwood trees which provided its mast food, and the proliferation of the rail network and telegraph system which enabled efficient location of nesting colonies and the transport of young birds to market are probably the two single most important factors. Other important factors were excessive shooting, Newcastle disease, and towards the last of their years, the breakdown of social facilitation (Halliday 1980, Blockstein and Tordoff 1985, Bucher 1992).

References
Schorger, A. W. 1955. The Passenger Pigeon: its natural history and extinction. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, USA.

Halliday, T. R. 1980. The extintion of the Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius and its relevance to contemporary conservation. Biological Conservation 17: 157-167.

Blockstein, D. E.; Tordoff, H. B. 1985. Gone forever: a contemporary look at the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. American Birds 39(5): 845-851.

Wilcove, D. 1989. In memory of Martha and her kind. Audubon 91: 52-55.

Bucher, E. H. 1992. The causes of extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Current Ornithology 9: 1-36.

Text account compilers
Brooks, T., Khwaja, N., Mahood, S.

IUCN Red List evaluators
Butchart, S., Symes, A.

Recommended citation
BirdLife International (2013) Species factsheet: Ectopistes migratorius. Downloaded from http://www.birdlife.org on 23/05/2013. Recommended citation for factsheets for more than one species: BirdLife International (2013) IUCN Red List for birds. Downloaded from http://www.birdlife.org on 23/05/2013.

This information is based upon, and updates, the information published in BirdLife International (2000) Threatened birds of the world. Barcelona and Cambridge, UK: Lynx Edicions and BirdLife International, BirdLife International (2004) Threatened birds of the world 2004 CD-ROM and BirdLife International (2008) Threatened birds of the world 2008 CD-ROM. These sources provide the information for species accounts for the birds on the IUCN Red List.

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Additional resources for this species