The pigeons: the bird that broke the branches

The 1840s — 1914

Fort Wayne's roosts: The passenger pigeon is the one vanished animal Fort Wayne remembers in its own voice. The Allen County record, gathered on the Genealogical Society's passenger pigeon page, keeps two neighborhood memories. From South Wayne in the 1840s and 1850s: an old-timer recalled that pigeons "roosted in such numbers in the sycamore trees along the St. Marys that he was awakened in the middle of the night by the noise of the breaking limbs, brought down by the weight of the birds." From Fairfield Avenue, the same memory in other words: residents recalled the neighborhood as having wild hogs, wolves, and "'wild pigeons' so thick that they broke tree branches where they were roosting." The Fort Wayne press noticed the flights as news — the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker annotation cites the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette of 3 March 1866 (p. 2) in its passenger pigeon file.

The mechanism: The extinction that followed is stated on Indiana's own historical marker for the species, installed at Metamora in 2017: "A population in the billions as late as 1860 was nearly zero by 1900. Communication and transportation advancements enabled market hunters to kill unprecedented numbers for food and sport." The canal and then the railroad — the same works that made Fort Wayne — let hunters follow the nesting colonies by telegraph and ship barrels of birds to city restaurants, while the mast forests the flocks fed on were cleared around them. The marker's second face records the end with an Allen County lesson in it: the last verified passenger pigeon in the wild was shot near Laurel, in Franklin County, on 3 April 1902, and the species became extinct when the last captive bird, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914.

The company it keeps: Fort Wayne keeps the pigeon's memory officially. On the towpath at Eagle Marsh stands the Little River Wetlands Project's "Lost Birds of Canal Days" marker, its information provided by members of the Stockbridge Audubon Society, naming three birds a canal-era walker would have seen and no one will again: the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet — extinct 21 February 1918, when the last known bird died in the same Cincinnati Zoo — and the greater prairie-chicken, extirpated from Indiana though it survives in Illinois and farther west. The marker's close is the section's own rule: "Places like Eagle Marsh help all birds survive."

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society, "Passenger Pigeon History" and "Fairfield, Fort Wayne, Indiana" (the St. Marys roost and Fairfield Avenue recollections), acgsi.org.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana Historical Marker, "Passenger Pigeon Extinction" (installed 2017; annotated text, including the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, 3 March 1866 citation), in.gov.
3. Historical Marker Database, "Lost Birds of Canal Days" (photographed 2 June 2023; the Little River Wetlands Project marker at Eagle Marsh), hmdb.org.