Originally published 18 April 2000
Most of us have heard of the passenger pigeon, a bird that once darkened the skies of North America in its teeming numbers, and now is no more. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
We may have heard, too, of the ivory-billed woodpecker, sometimes called the Lord God Bird, a magnificent animal that frequented the pine and gum forests of the southern United States, and now is (probably) extinct.
The colorful Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck, and the great auk of the North Atlantic are less well remembered. They once graced this continent in their thousands. They, too, have fallen victim to human predations.
All of these extinct creatures are recalled by Christopher Cokinos in his wonderful new book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. But embarrassingly, for a long-time New Englander, I had never heard of another of the birds chronicled by Cokinos — the heath hen.
The heath hen is — or was — a wild, chicken-like bird that once was rankly common on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Some writers maintain that the Pilgrims were able to survive their first hardscrabble winters only because of the abundance of heath hens on the ground.
The 18th-century naturalist Thomas Nuttall wrote that the birds “were so common on the ancient bushy site of the city of Boston that laboring people or servants stipulated with their employers not to have the heath hen brought to table oftener than a few times a week!” The bird was not, apparently, a great delicacy, which is why it was considered appropriate fare for the common folk below stairs.
Of course, as Boston, New York, and other Eastern cities grew, there were common folk aplenty. And the heath hen cooperated by making itself an easy target for hunters. In the spring, the birds would seek out wide fields of cropped grass for courtship rituals, the males “booming” out calls that announced their presence far and wide. They perched in low trees like “sitting ducks.” And, when they took to the air, they flew in such nice straight lines that even a youngster with a new gun could pop them off with ease.
Within a century of the coming of Europeans, the heath hen’s continued existence was problematic. In 1831, Massachusetts declared seasonal limits for hunting the birds, but the law wasn’t effectively enforced, and the fine, $2, was less than the market value of two heath hens.
Throughout the 19th century, birds and guns boomed away until the fields were clear of a creature that had supplied Native Americans with a steady food supply for centuries. The heath hen’s last holdout was on Martha’s Vineyard. By the century’s end, fewer than 100 birds remained.
The Massachusetts Legislature finally got around to serious action to save the bird, establishing a protected refuge on the island, with a warden. The heath hen made a modest recovery in the early years of the 20th century, but a devastating brush fire in May 1916 wiped out any progress the bird had made. With only a few dozen birds remaining, conservationists really scrambled, but it was too late.
The last heath hen on Martha’s Vineyard, nicknamed “Booming Ben,” boomed his last in 1932.
Chris Cokinos’s book recounts the final days of the heath hen, and five other extinct birds that haunt our imaginations — the passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet, Labrador duck, and great auk. His story is full of beauty, avarice, wonder and pathos. It is a personal narrative, tinged with a measure of collective guilt, and shot through with the desire “to gesture some honor, some witness towards these other lives, from who we have taken so much, even themselves.”
The big question is why we should care about the demise of five species of birds (four actually, since another race of the heath hen survives in the Western United States) when 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. Extinction is a necessary engine of evolution, a corollary of the thrust toward biological complexity and diversity. Without extinction, we would not be here. As conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.”
Compassion and guilt are the new things under the sun that make us human. Millions of Carolina parakeets died annually during the 19th century to decorate women’s hats and dresses, and thousands of armed men willingly blasted the birds out of the sky for profit. We are the only creature who adorns itself with the skin and feathers and other species, and we are the only creature who will kill another species for sheer sport. That’s part of being human. The other part is that we are capable of regretting what we do.
