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Chapman's account, 1880; extinct 1914
The county's word: The passenger pigeon is the one animal in this section that no return can ever follow, and its St. Joseph County record is Chapman's alone: the 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" at their roosts "that the breaking of boughs as they settled upon them could be heard for miles." It is a decline recorded in real time by a man who had heard the fuller version — the visits continuing, the numbers already thinned, in 1880, thirty-four years before the last pigeon on earth died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Chapman follows the county passage with Audubon's celebrated description of the 1813 Ohio River flight — the sky darkened for three days — and the file marks that passage for what it is in the book: a borrowed set piece describing Ohio's river, not this county's sky. The local record needs no borrowing. A roost that broke branches audibly for miles, remembered as already diminished, is the county's whole pigeon testimony, and it is enough.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–343 — the county passage; the Audubon Ohio River passage printed in the same pages and marked there and here as Ohio's.