The Carolina Parakeet’s habitat once extended south to the Gulf of Mexico, east to the Ohio Valley.  It was commonly seen by early settlers ornamenting bare winter trees as far west as Colorado and as far north as lower Michigan.

Arriving with great chatter, vibrant flocks of tens to hundreds flitted about the forests and swamps, ate cockleburs and nuts, and roosted together in hollow trees.

As swamps were drained and forests became fields and orchards, the parakeets turned to grain and seeds.  While the birds helped to rid fields of the unwanted cocklebur, they also added crops to their diet.  Farmers began to shoot them in numbers.  The Carolina Parakeet was a communal bird, and its ranks were easily decimated.  When a parakeet fell, the flock flew to its side or stayed nearby, ensuring the demise of many more.

Feather hunters and trappers, who captured the birds and sold them as caged pets, further diminished flagging populations.  Competition from European honeybees for the hollow trees in which the Carolina Parakeet roosted also contributed to the species decline.

No one knows precisely where the last parakeet died in the wild.  The last two known parakeets, Lady Jane and Incas, lived together for thirty-two years in the Cincinnati Zoo.  Lady Jane died in 1917 and Incas, soon after, on February 21, 1918.

Garefowl, Penguin, Pinwing, Gordo, Moyacks, Great Apponath, Geirfuglar, Wobble, Binocle—these are some of the names given the Great Auk by people who lived on the coast of Europe, north to Iceland, Greenland, to Newfoundland and down the eastern seaboard of North America.  Swift and agile swimmers, able to dive to great depths, the Great Auk lived most of its life at sea.

In the spring, auks came with their life-long partners to mate on the isolated rock islands of the North Atlantic.  Flightless and awkward on land, the Great Auk was extremely vulnerable out of the sea.  Although it had been hunted for thousands of years and was an important fresh meat source for early explorers, its numbers began to decline significantly in the 1500’s as it was overexploited for sale in the fish markets of Europe.  In the 1770’s, its numbers were decimated as men corralled the birds by the thousands, and, using some of the birds bodies as fuel, boiled the auks to harvest their black feathers.

By 1800, the last population of Great Auk found refuge on a remote island off the coast of Iceland.  In 1830, a volcanic eruption pulled the island beneath the waters of the sea leaving the fragile population adrift.  The remaining few took refuge just off the southwestern tip of Iceland on Eldey Island, within easy reach of man.

The last documented pair of Great Auks was killed on Eldey Island on June 3, 1844.

Strutting through the brush, male Heath Hens boomed and pounded the earth to attract a mate.  Each year, returning to their breeding grounds, they engaged in spectacular displays of bravado and strength, jumping and spinning in the air, thrusting their chests against one another, as they competed for the right to propagate their species.

When European settlers arrived on the east coast, they hunted the bird so extensively that servants bargained not to be fed Heath Hen more than two or three times a week.  The Heath Hen’s habitat stretched along the coast of New England from Maine to Virginia.  But by 1870, due to overexploitation, the Heath Hen population on the mainland of the east coast had vanished.

Numbering in the 100’s, the survivors lived on Martha’s Vineyard.  Over the next quarter of a century, the state of Massachusetts attempted to save them: enacting a hunting ban, shooting predatory animals, planting crops to feed the hens, and establishing a reserve in 1908.  But numbers continued to diminish.  A disastrous fire and the unfortunate arrival of goshawks, a serious Heath Hen predator, ravaged the remaining population.

Heath Hens usually flew only to the lower branches of trees.  But in 1929 ornithologists witnessed a hopeful male fly to the top of a tree and call out, loud and repeatedly, across the island.  There were no Heath Hens to hear his plea.  He was last seen on March 11, 1932.

On December 12, 1878, a boy left his home in the rural southern tier of New York State in the hope of returning with wild game for the family table.  At a place on the Chemung River called the Buttonwoods in Elmira, New York, he shot an unfamiliar duck: unfamiliar because it was far from its native habitat, blown inland by a storm that pounded the Atlantic coast.  The bird he shot is thought to have been the last Labrador Duck ever seen.

Wings whistling as it flew this sea duck migrated along the coast from Labrador to Nova Scotia and as far south as the Chesapeake Bay, wintering mainly on the shores of New England, New Jersey and Long Island.

Diving through silt and shallows, the Labrador Duck used its unusually wide, flat bill to feed on mussels and shellfish.

Because of its supposedly unappetizing flavor, the duck was not sought after by hunters.  The reasons for the species’ extinction remain unclear, but its reliance on shallow-water mollusks, which were themselves greatly diminished by the growth of industry on the Eastern Seaboard, was likely decisive.

In 1896, the last great Passenger Pigeon flock came to roost on the banks of the Green River outside Bowling Green, Ohio.  Hunters descended on the roost and killed nearly the entire flock.  Two hundred thousand dead birds were barreled and loaded into boxcars.  Shortly after leaving the depot, the train derailed.  Stranded in the heat, the birds were left to rot.

At the time of European arrival, Passenger Pigeons accounted for up to forty per cent of the land birds of North America.  They flew in vast flocks, numbering in the millions, sometimes eclipsing the sun from noon until nightfall.  Flying sixty miles an hour, they migrated across their geographic range, which stretched from the northeastern and mid-western states and into Canada to the southern states.

In the 19th century as America’s urban population grew and the demand for wild meat increased, thousands of men became full-time pigeon hunters.  With nesting sites holding unimaginable numbers, hunters slaughtered the birds with great efficiency.  It was inconceivable that in less than fifty years, the Passenger Pigeon would be nearly extinct.

On March 24^th, 1900, a boy in Pike County, Ohio shot the last recorded wild Passenger Pigeon.  Fourteen years later, under the watchful eyes of her keepers, the last captive Passenger Pigeon, Martha, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo.