At One Place

When did the last passenger pigeon die?

When did the last passenger pigeon die?
1 September 1914
Martha, at Cincinnati Zoo

The passenger pigeon had been the most numerous bird in North America and possibly on Earth, with flocks estimated in the billions that took days to pass overhead. It went from that to extinct within about fifty years, through commercial hunting and habitat loss. Martha's body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where she remains.

What
Martha, at Cincinnati Zoo
When
1 September 1914
Category
The natural world
Could this change?
Not in any foreseeable way. The event is closed.

The natural world

Question When
When did Vesuvius last erupt? March 1944
When did the last thylacine die? 7 September 1936
When did the last ice age end? About 11,700 years ago
When did the Earth's magnetic poles last reverse? About 780,000 years ago

This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When did the last passenger pigeon die?
1 September 1914 — Martha, at Cincinnati Zoo.
What happened?
The passenger pigeon had been the most numerous bird in North America and possibly on Earth, with flocks estimated in the billions that took days to pass overhead. It went from that to extinct within about fifty years, through commercial hunting and habitat loss. Martha's body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where she remains.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution

How these figures are compiled and checked