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1880–1972, the two endings · Run B #219
Chapman prints both birds as warnings, and both warnings came true on dated records: of the prairie chicken he writes that it is "the chiefest among the Grouse family," and that "if not carefully protected, [it] must ere long follow the wild turkey, never to return" — a fate he misassigns in one detail, since the turkey did return and the chicken did not. Of the passenger pigeon: "the wild pigeons continue to make their semi-annual visits, but not in such vast numbers as years ago," followed by the period's set piece — the acres of roosting forest, the breaking boughs, and Audubon's 1813 Ohio flight, estimated in Chapman's quotation at over a billion birds, with the farmers' slaughter at the roosts told whole. Both passages are pp.
The prairie chicken's Indiana ending is documented to a single bird. The greater prairie-chicken, hundreds of thousands strong in the Indiana prairies of the 1850s–1860s, was worked down by habitat loss and hunting until the state's remnant hung on in the northwest — the Kankakee country of item 6. On the chilly morning of 3 April 1972, DNR wildlife research biologist Robert D. Feldt, who had studied Indiana prairie chickens since 1963, found a single cock booming on a stubble field in the survey area where the year before there had been none; the bird flushed, "and that was the last time I ever saw an Indiana prairie chicken. To my knowledge, that was the last authentic [confirmed] prairie chicken sighting in Indiana." The species is extirpated from Indiana — it survives in southern Illinois and farther west — and no reintroduction has restored it. No prairie-chicken record seated in Penn Township stands in the sources reached; Chapman's county statement is the local evidence, printed at county size. The passenger pigeon's ending is the state's marker: the last verified passenger pigeon in the wild was shot near Laurel, Franklin County, on 3 April 1902 — an Indiana bird holds the last-wild record — and the species became extinct when the last captive, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914. The Indiana Historical Bureau's 2017 marker at Metamora carries both dates; this section carries them as the state frame inside which Chapman's county flights ended.
Sources: Chapman (1880), pp. Prairie chicken: Jones, "After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken," Indiana Magazine of History, Spring 1992 (Feldt, 3 Apr. 1972, last confirmed Indiana sighting; 1850s–1860s abundance) and Indiana marker record for the Fort Wayne "Lost Birds of Canal Days" sign (prairie-chickens extirpated from Indiana). Passenger pigeon: Indiana Historical Bureau marker 24.2017.1, "Passenger Pigeon Extinction," Metamora (installed 2017; last verified wild bird near Laurel, 3 Apr. 1902; last captive died 1 Sept. 1914) — no township record claimed for either bird.