The face of extinction

Natural History, May, 2004 by Hanna Rose Shell

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, as documented by no less an eminence than John James Audubon, passenger pigeons by the billions turned day to night as they passed overhead in the American skies [see "Audubon in Kentucky," by William Souder, page 46]. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, all that had changed: fifty years of relentless extermination forever banished Ectopistes migratorius from the Earth. The last passenger pigeon in the wild was reportedly shot by a boy in Ohio in 1900.

But the species officially went extinct only with the death of Martha, a denizen of the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha had been born in about 1894, and, in her youth, she had a female passenger pigeon's classic good looks: pale cinnamon-rose breast; long, pointed tail feathers; a graceful head and neck. By the year of her death, the news of an incipient extinction, together with clamorous announcements of unclaimed cash rewards for locating a passenger pigeon nest or colony, was attracting visitors from far and wide to Martha's red-roofed aviary in Ohio.

In the following years, many more visitors turned out to admire Martha's taxidermied mount in the Birds of Our World gallery, at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Martha's presentation there, in fact, was carefully planned. Her body had been promised to the Smithsonian, and when she finally expired, in September 1914, the zookeepers rushed her corpse to the Cincinnati Ice Company. There, held by her feet, she was lowered into a tank of water, frozen upside down in a 300-pound block of ice, and shipped by express train to the capital.

Martha was officially signed into the Smithsonian collections as a "passenger pigeon in the flesh." Her accession card is by turns blunt, then sentimental: "The death of this individual marks the complete extinction of the genus and species, of the countless hordes of other days." She was unpacked, thawed, and autopsied. Several organs--including her eyes, brain, and liver--were examined and placed in separate jars of ethyl alcohol.

Once Martha's taxidermic treatment was complete, she was perched on a model "branch," enclosed in a glass case, and given a post of prominence in the gallery, surrounded by other extinct and endangered avians from North America. In her new, postmortem role, she even went on the road several times on behalf of species that were facing the threat of extinction. She served as a tabletop mascot at a conservation conference for the San Diego Zoo at the zoo's golden jubilee, in 1966, and at a Cincinnati Zoo fund-raiser, in 1974. She always flew first class, coddled by the flight crew and protected, at least financially, by a hefty insurance policy.

Almost five years ago, though, around the turn of the millennium, Martha's perch went dark. The Smithsonian Institution closed its bird gallery indefinitely to the public at the end of 1999. And now the last exemplar of a vanished species is hidden away in a storage cabinet in the bird division's research collections.

Yet without reminders such as Martha, how are people to visualize, materialize, and memorialize the Earth's destroyed and extinguished species? After eighty-five years in the public eye, the figure of Martha has become an organic monument, biologically continuous with the living bird she commemorates, the embodiment of extinction itself. In the words of the naturalist A]do Leopold, effigies such as Martha's "live forever by not living at all."

HANNA ROSE SHELL is a historian of science at Harvard University and a filmmaker. She recently edited the new edition of William T. Hornaday's 1889 book, Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002).