I thought this chapter was well written and extremely interesting. Learning about the bird population we once had is really something marvelous. It especially intrigued me because it is completely different than what we have now. Now, I wouldn’t be able to picture having so many of the around.
The loss of birds in the area completely took me by surprise. It was sad reading about the passenger pigeons and their decline. Kali’s description of the Euro-American’s excessive hunting was eye-opening. To learn that they hunted them by the hundreds for leisure is particularly barbaric in my opinion. On page 132, the author wrote “As late as the 1870s, hundreds could still be shot in a day; but by the 1880s, the passenger pigeon had become rare.” This statement really put the extent that the Europeans hunted in perspective. Within a decade, they had completely changed the environmental dynamics. Furthermore, it makes me regretful that we wouldn’t be able to see the large flocks of birds circling the air and covering the sun. Those kinds of enigmatic sights are lost to us, because of their excessive hunting.
After reading about the Europeans holding the last passenger pigeon captive in the Cinncinati Zoo, I got a better understanding of how our society and economy was formed. The idea that humanity removed their population from the area only to put one of them in containment to be marveled at disgusts me. It is a common in our society to deplete what we are given and the mourn our loss after instead of appreciating what we have, when we have it. Throughout our readings, we continue to see the lack of respect for nature the settlers and how much that outlook has changed the gift of nature given to us.
The settler’s used the birds for materialistic and monetary purposes. If the settler’s used them primarily for meat, killing so many of them wouldn’t have been necessary. However, it is also important to recognize that those practices are continued today. As long as we continue using animals as a commodity, we will continue to kill them off.
This is a picture of one. I looked it up out of curiosity.
