Painting by L. A. Fuertes

• Well-known for its agile flying ability and speed.
• When roosting and nesting it was often reported that pigeons piled on top of each other. Apparently so many pigeons would land at once that even thick branches would break under their weight.
• As with other pigeons and doves, the male selected nesting material one piece at a time, and took it to the female (sometimes landing on her back). She arranged the twigs under her to build the nest.
• Just like other pigeons and doves, both parents produced crop milk to feed their young for the first few days of life. In feeding, the nestling put its bill deep into the open mouth of the adult. The parent then regurgitated the crop milk.
• Fledgling Passenger Pigeons grew rapidly (as do the young of other pigeons and doves). Within 14 days they had grown to be as big and heavy as the adults. Fat fledglings were extremely valued by humans for food.
• Apparently the adults abandoned their nesting colonies when their young were 13–15 days old. The abandoned fledglings stayed in their nests begging for about a day and then attempted to fly to the ground and feed on nuts and acorns. They could not fly well enough for days and could easily be captured by hand.
• Hunters would take hundreds of thousands of adults and squabs from a single nesting site. When nesting colonies were disturbed by humans the adult pigeons would abandon their nestlings, causing the loss of even more birds.
• Habitat loss (deforestation) also contributed to the decline and extinction of the Passenger Pigeon.
• It is possible that as the population of Passenger Pigeons declined they simply stopped breeding altogether.
• The last Passenger Pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on September 1914. The bird was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. "Martha" (named after Martha Washington) was once mounted in a display case with this notation:

MARTHA
Last of her species,
died at 1 p.m.
1 September 1914
age 29
in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden
EXTINCT

Sources used to construct this page: Blockstein, D. E. 2002. Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). In The Birds of North America, No. 611 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.). The Birds of North America, Inc., Philadelphia, PA.