Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts

September 1 - Passenger Pigeons - Extinct!

 Posted on September 1, 2021


This is an update of my post published on September 1, 2010:



Martha, a passenger pigeon, died on this day in 1914. She was thought to be the last passenger pigeon in the world, and when she died in a Cincinnati zoo, people sadly declared the species extinct. No passenger pigeon has been seen anywhere in the world since.


This species was hunted to extinction, although of course there were population reductions due to loss of habitat, as well. These birds traveled and nested in huge flocks, sometimes more than two billion birds in a flock! As flocks flew by, they sometimes stretched a mile wide and 300 miles long across the sky, taking several hours to pass. These huge numbers made the passenger pigeon one of the most common birds in the world in the nineteenth century.


When Audubon was making his famous
studies and illustrations of birds, there were
LOTS of passenger pigeons about.

And it became extinct in the early years of the twentieth century!

It's sad to read that super unfair and inhumane hunting methods were used to kill these birds, and that as late as 1896, hunters killed the final flock of 250,000 passenger pigeons—even though everyone knew that it was the last large flock! Apparently in one place in Michigan alone, 50,000 birds were killed per day throughout a hunting season that lasted almost five months. Dead birds—used for meat—were shipped by the boxcar-full to Eastern cities.


During the last two decades of this species' existence, conservationists tried to breed passenger pigeons in captivity. However, the birds were used to living and breeding in huge groups, and in small flocks, birds did not mate successfully nor live long. The only silver lining to this sad story is that people became aware of human impact on species and of the possibility of extinction because of overhunting. New laws and practices arose because of this extinction, and surely some creatures still live today because of that new interest in conservation.



Also on this date:





Self-University Week Begins




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April 26 - Happy Birthday, John Audubon

Posted on April 26, 2021


This is an update of my post published on April 26, 2010:





...in keeping with this week's conservation theme, what with John Muir Day and Earth Day:







I give you bird-lover and artist John Audubon.

Born on this date in 1785 in Haiti, and raised mostly in France, John Audubon always liked nature and especially birds. He came to America at age 18, where he lived on his family's land and spent time hunting, fishing, drawing, and playing music. He tromped through woods and wilderness, often dressed in frontier clothes and moccasins.


Audubon decided to find and paint all the birds in the eastern United States. To that end, he spent even more time in the woods, observing, hunting, and sketching birds. He collected eggs, banded birds to learn about their nesting habits, took notes on his observations, learned taxidermy, and honed the craft of painting.

Eventually, after several years of effort, Audubon had made 435 paintings that included more than 1,000 birds!





Audubon had to put a lot of time and effort into finding publishers for his work. He had no success with U.S. publishers, so he went to Europe, where he became a bit of a star telling frontier tales and displaying his paintings. Still, it was hard to get enough money to print his wonderful bird book. Eventually he succeeded in publishing and selling his book, but it sounds like finances were always a challenge for Audubon.

Audubon's Legacy

Audubon made a difference in the world, and not just with bird lovers. He influenced other naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, and he influenced taxidermists and wildlife artists, who had previously relied on stiff poses but were now inspired by Audubon's natural style. Audubon seemed to capture birds mid-action: feeding their young, making nests, catching prey.


After Audubon's death, the National Audubon Society was formed to conserve wildlife and wild spaces, and many parks and a few towns and counties are named for this artist and ornithologist (bird scientist).

But...Yikes!

Audubon was an adult in the United States during the first half of the 1800s. This was of course a time in which slavery was a big deal and the nation was building toward a Civil War on the issue. People attempting to whitewash Audubon said that he took no stance on slavery - but not only did Audobon shrug off the passionate abolition movements gaining popularity in Europe and the U.S. - he was himself a slaveholder! 

As I mentioned above, Audubon wasn't super rich, and there were times when Audubon sold off his slaves because he needed cash. But there were at least two periods of time in his life when Audubon bought, owned and sold human beings! And this at a time when a lot of white people were very much anti-slavery, and were outspoken about the evil nature of slavery. He had every chance to be, himself, anti-slavery, but he was pro-slavery and even willingly participated in enslaving people. 

Yuck.

The more positive legacy...
Obviously, the conservationist group known as the Audubon Society is anti-slavery, so...

...Check out the Audubon Society's kid pages.

Learn about birds, learn how to draw birds, play a bird game, and more.

And the Great Backyard Bird Count is a valuable way for amateurs to contribute to science! Notice that there are some fun games, jigsaw puzzles, and activities listed under GBBC for Kids, on the blue side menu!

Here are some of Audubon's paintings of birds.

Here is a quickie video about Audubon. 

And this video explains why most of the original copper plates from Audubon's paintings were melted down!

Here is a how-to video about drawing a hawk face. The textures this artist achieves with his pencil can help you appreciate some of the techniques that Audubon might have used to achieve his lifelike paintings. (Here is a video that shows a more basic and cartoonish approach to drawing several different sorts of birds.)



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June 9 - Happy Birthday Phoebe Snetsinger

Posted on June 9, 2019


She set a world record...

...for spotting birds?


Serious birdwatchers, or birders, need patience, good walking shoes, binoculars, and knowledge. Phoebe Snetsinger, born on this date in 1931, had all of those - and she also had a strong motivation:

She had, she was told, terminal cancer.

"Terminal" means that she was expected to die from the cancer. However, when amateur-birder Snetsinger was given this diagnosis, at age 50, she decided to take a trip to Alaska to add birds to her list of species she'd seen and identified. And when she came back from that trip, she discovered that her cancer was in remission!


Birdwatchers have this thing called a Life List - a long, probably computerized list on which they list the various species and sub-species that they have spotted, along with dates and places. You can guess from the phrase "Life List" that the list includes all the species of birds spotted over the entire course of your life. If you hit 600 birds, you're doing great!

Well, Phoebe Snetsinger saw more than 8,000 different bird species!!!



That's about 85% of all bird species! Impressive!

Snetsinger's cancer came back several times, but it also went into remission again, over and over. Snetsinger fought back with at least one surgery, probably some other treatments, and by gallivanting all over the world in defiance of her death sentence. She even wrote a book called Birding on Borrowed Time.

Snetsinger had an adventurous spirit and enough money to travel all over the world. Thanks to her inheritance from her father, Snetsinger traveled to all seven continents in order to see all those different kinds of birds!

Snetsinger became the first person ever to break 8,000 on her Life List, and when she died at age 68 - in a car accident, while birdwatching, by the way - NOT from cancer! - she had 8,398 different species on her list.

Since then, her world record has been broken a few times, and right now there is one bird watcher, British birder Tom Gullick, who has reached 9,000 different species of birds on his Life List!

It took him until he was 81 years old to see that many - very nearly all of the bird species that exist! - and so I can revise my original list of what bird watchers need to succeed:

patience, 
good walking shoes, 
binoculars, 
knowledge,
an adventurous spirit,
enough money to travel,
and luck - to live a long life!




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