!00 Years Ago Today Martha Died,

and she was the last known passenger pigeon to have existed,

named after George Washington’s wife the pigeon died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, marking the end of the passenger pigeon species, (Ectopistes migratorius), just a few decades prior to Martha’s death, the passenger pigeon flourished throughout much of North America; in the early 1800s, they were considered one of the most abundant species of bird in the world, with their numbers somewhere between 1 and 5 billion, they lived in giant colonies that stretched for miles in length, darkening the sky for hours as they passed overhead,

but a combination of over hunting and habitat loss caused the species’ numbers to dwindle and between 1870 and 1890, the passenger pigeon suffered a “catastrophic decline,” with millions of birds slaughtered, after 1900, there were no longer any passenger pigeons in the wild, and only a handful (including Martha) remained in captivity at the University of Chicago, their handler, zoologist Charles Otis Whitman, tried one last attempt to breed the birds -- without success, after her death, Martha was frozen in a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where she remained on display for 80 years, now, she is considered somewhat of a cultural icon, symbolising the threat of extinction for many other endangered species, 

going back to the first paragraph, taking the lowest figure of 1 billion birds it seems incredulous that they could have all been wiped out, but it happened.