The lost birds: prairie chicken and passenger pigeon, Chapman's warnings with their endings

CHAPMAN (1880) TO THE LAST RECORDS · 1972 AND 1902–1914

Chapman saw both of these endings coming and printed the warnings in 1880. Of the prairie chicken he wrote the sentence that heads this section's bird record: "The chiefest among the Grouse family is the prairie chicken, which, if not carefully protected, must ere long follow the wild turkey, never to return." It was not protected in time, and the irony the record holds is that the turkey — the bird he expected the chicken to follow into oblivion — is the one that came back, by the deliberate restoration told in the article above, while the chicken ran his prophecy out to the letter. The state's end is kept in the Indiana Magazine of History's account ("After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken," 1992): on 3 April 1972 a Department of Natural Resources research biologist, Robert D. Feldt, surveying ground where the year before no bird had been found, found a single booming cock — one male, displaying on a booming ground that had gone silent. "To my knowledge, that was the last authentic, confirmed prairie chicken sighting in Indiana," the account closes, "a race that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands." The 1972 ground was not this county's — the state's last prairie chickens held on in the western prairie counties — and the county's own ending is earlier and unrecorded bird by bird: Chapman's warning is the last certain county record, which means the bird that filled Harris Prairie's mornings in the settlement generation vanished from this ground somewhere inside the drainage-and-ploughing decades without a dated farewell. The passenger pigeon's county ending is the same shape at a larger scale. Chapman in 1880 still has them: "The wild pigeons continue to make their semi-annual visits, but not in such vast numbers as years ago. Acres of forest were so often filled at night with these birds that the breaking of boughs… could be heard for miles in the night's silence." He even borrows Audubon's fall-1813 account of the great Kentucky flight to size what the county's roosts had been. The state's last certain wild bird fell later than the county's roosts emptied: the last verified wild passenger pigeon was shot near Laurel, in Franklin County, on 3 April 1902 (Joel Greenberg's research, as carried by the Indiana Historical Bureau), and the species ended in a cage — Martha, the last of them, dead in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914. Two birds, two endings, one pattern: Chapman printed the diagnosis (the gun and the market, the drained and ploughed ground) while both species still stood on this county's lists, and neither was saved by being understood. They are this section's pure losses — the animals for whom no restoration arc exists — and they stand measured against the Story of Granger section exactly as he left them: the chicken in his warning, the pigeon in his diminished flocks.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Chapter II, the Scratchers and the Doves: the prairie-chicken warning, verbatim; the wild pigeon's diminished semi-annual visits and the roosting account with Audubon's 1813 flight.
2. Indiana Magazine of History (Spring 1992), "After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken": Robert D. Feldt's single booming cock of 3 April 1972, the last confirmed prairie chicken sighting in Indiana.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau / Joel Greenberg's passenger pigeon research: last verified wild passenger pigeon shot near Laurel, Franklin County, 3 April 1902; Martha, the last of the species, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, 1 September 1914.