Passing Passengers

#NatureTwinning Part 36:

Yet more cashmere sweater + quilted vest + long scarf combos -- Buy one, get one free

Leopard Ray--Tuesday, 2/21/18

Looking for a pop of color?  How about one bright aqua arm?

Outfit cost per wear (OCPW): $11.34

What do you get when you put grey-on-black polka dots and a leopard print together?  A leopard ray, I think.  I enjoyed this brief blog post from a leopard researcher about how both individual leopards and rays can be identified by the pattern of their spots.

Henry Doorly Zoo

Martha Passenger Pigeon Memorial--Wednesday, 2/22/18

This outfit is a good demonstration of how I think about different shades of navy.

The background of the scarf is what I consider a true navy--it's a very dark blue, but it's not going to be confused with black.

The pants and the shoes are a very dark navy--dark enough that they are fairly easily confused with black.

And the vest is a surprisingly versatile color I call light navy--it works great where navy is called for and coordinates very well with other navy tones, but it doesn't give that "almost but not quite" thing that you can get with two somewhat different shades of true/dark navy.

OCPW: $19.27

As a Jeopardy-addicted kid, of course I knew that the last living passenger pigeon in the world was named Martha and that she resided and died at the Cincinnati Zoo.  (It was probably the first thing I knew about Cincinnati, and the only thing I knew about Cincinnati for many years.)  But a very long time had passed since I'd last thought of that fact, so I was taken momentarily by surprise upon seeing a memorial to Martha's memory at the zoo.

In 1813, Audubon described a giant flock of passenger pigeons:

“The air was literally filled with Pigeons,” Audubon wrote. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of the wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.”

Other ornithologists also took note of these massive flocks:

Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about two hundred and sixty million rock pigeons in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

An eye-witness account of a flock in Ohio in 1855 gets at how intimidating this experience could be:

As the watchers stared, the hum increased to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed.

The Smithsonian describes the last 50 years of the pigeon's history:

In spring 1860, a flock of passenger pigeons estimated at more than 3.7 billion flew over Ontario. The largest documented nesting of passenger pigeons occurred in Wisconsin in 1871: An estimated 136 million breeding birds covered some 850 square miles of forest. Roosting passenger pigeons often landed in sufficient numbers to shear limbs from trees. But by 1890 passenger pigeons were an unusual sight in the wild—they had become a prized food source, hunted relentlessly, shot, netted and burned out of trees, for a huge commercial market. By 1900 no more than a handful were reported.

Soon the only remaining pigeons were in captivity.  The four of them in Milwaukee died in 1907, leaving Martha and two males in Cincinnati.  One male died in April 1909, and the other on July 10, 1910.

And then there was one.

Martha died of old age on September 1, 1914.

And now there is this.

Cincinnati Zoo