The Case for Bringing Back the Passenger Pigeon - Issue 42 : Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/the-case-for-bringing-back-the-passenger-pigeon
North Dakota is not known for its pigeons. Or forests, for that matter. The state bird is the western meadowlark, a mellifluous yellow songbird often seen singing on fence posts. Such posts substitute for trees in much of North Dakota. The state is primarily covered in what was once short-grass prairie but is now mostly farms embedded in a human-made grassland, exceptions being the Badlands and a swath of boreal forest in the far north near Canada. Yet it was near Williston, the heart of western North Dakota’s new boom-and-bust oil patch, that Ben Novak first fell in love with Ectopistes migratorius—the passenger pigeon, a bird that rarely graced this region, if ever.feathered eclipse: There were once so many wild passenger pigeons that people were encouraged to hunt them—some said the (...)
