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Chapman wrote both of these birds' warnings himself, in 1880, in the present tense: of the prairie chicken — "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"; of the wild pigeon — they "continue to make their semi-annual visits, but not in such vast numbers as years ago," when "acres of forest were so often filled at night with these birds that the breaking of boughs and the flying of pigeons made a noise that could be heard for miles." He then reprints Audubon's 1813 Ohio flight — three days unbroken, an estimated billion-plus birds — as the measure of what the county's own flights had been. The protection Chapman asked for did not come in time for either bird, and the ends are dated at state and national frame because no last-bird record for St. Joseph County or Lincoln Township was found in any source reached: that absence is part of this article's finding, not a detail to be filled by borrowing another county's bird.
The prairie chicken's Indiana end is unusually well witnessed. The state held hundreds of thousands in the 1850s–1860s, on the prairies of the north-west — the same tallgrass-and-marsh-edge country that runs through this county's western townships. DNR research biologist Robert D. Feldt, who had worked the state's prairie chicken remnant since 1963, flushed a single booming cock in stubble on 3 April 1972, in the north-western remnant country, and wrote the sentence that closes the state record: "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 survives in Illinois and westward; in Indiana it is extirpated, a marker at Fort Wayne's Eagle Marsh stating the same verdict for the canal country. For this ground the honest last-record is Chapman's: a common grouse of the county's prairies in 1880, under a printed warning — and then silence in the county record reached.
The passenger pigeon's end is the century's type case. Indiana's own marker record fixes the last verified wild bird in the state: shot near Laurel, Franklin County, on 3 April 1902 (one modern retelling notes a second bird seen the same day; the marker's "last verified" stands). The last of the species, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914. Between Chapman's bough-breaking county roosts of living memory in 1880 and extinction in 1914 stand thirty-four years — the shortest arc in this section, and the only one with no return at its end.
Sources: Chapman (1880), pp. 341–342; Feldt account in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (Spring 1992), "After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken"; Indiana Historical Bureau, passenger pigeon extinction marker record (Laurel, 1902; Martha, 1914). Closure: MIXED — state and national ends DUG; the county/township last-bird is a NAMED GAP, settler: the state ornithological record (the Indiana Audubon / Indiana Birds specimen and sighting file) read for St. Joseph County.