Sargent's pigeon (aka Buttons), the last wild passenger pigeon for which there is an extant specimen.
In the world of passenger pigeons, Ohio is a special place, being the site of some of the most iconic locations and objects related to the species. Cindy had spring break and was planning on seeing her family in Columbus. I came along on my own personal haj to visit these shrines and talk with people who know them. I had made arrangements ahead of time with Bill Whan, a top Ohio birder, who set up Monday for me to meet Paul Gardner of the Archeological Conservancy and Bob Glotzhober, the Senior Curator of Natural History at the Ohio Historical Society. We even managed to do a little birding.
As part of my ppigeon research last fall, I posted requests for information on numerous birding listserves throughout the eastern US. Bill Whan responded with lots of great historical material and we developed a correspondence over the months. Cindy and I picked Bill up at his house and we headed over to Paul’s to talk about Native Americans and their relationship with ppigeons. Some have claimed that competion with Native Americans kept pigeon numbers low and it wasn’t until the collapse in the human population due either to the Mini Ice Age or the arrival of Europeans considerably later did the birds attain their great abundance. The competition would be over the mast- specifically tree nuts- that the pigeons depended on and that native people also used in their diets. Paul doubted that this competion would have been very intense because the people utilized hickories most heavily while the pigeons preferred beech and oak. Indians also used oaks, but their favorites were acorns from the white oak types because they had were sweeter due to less tannin. The pigeons, on the other hand, concentrated on the red oak types because it took two years for their acorns to develop, and thus they could feed on them while still attached to the trees (by falling to the ground in the fall, acorns from white oaks were likely to have germinated by spring nesting season; once germinated, the acorn loses much of its food quality.)
From Paul, we headed to Bob’s office. The Ohio Historical Society has a lovely museum as well as a complex of warehouses where artifacts are stored some distance away. Bob’s office was at the latter. For ppigeonites, the critical item in their possession is Buttons, purportedly the last wild ppigoen shot. It occurred in March 1900 in Sargent’s, Ohio. (No one will ever know when the last wild bird died, and I know of a very strong claimant that was killed two years later in Indiana, although it is likely the specimen is no longer extant) Button’s story was mined in great depth by Christopher Kokinos in his Hope is a Thing With Feathers but Bob provided us with more information and we arranged to meet him a few hours later at the museum to see Buttons. Because of funding issues, the museum is open only on Thursdays, and given this was Monday the lights might not be on so we had to bring flashlights.
One of only two yellow-crowned night-heron nests known in Ohio photographed by Bob Baran.
This gave us a chance to do a tiny bit of birding (“Yes, Virginia, there are other birds than passenger pigeons.”) and lunch. Bill had mentioned that the only known nests of the yellow-crowned night-heron in Ohio occur in a snazzy part of Columbus and that the birds had returned. I have a fondness for this species so we drove over there. Palatial homes lined either side of the street. And over that street were the branches of two trees, each with a rickety nest occupied a pair of night-herons. They were not very neat builders as the street had a little pile of branches under the nests, not to mention the white splotches of excrement. Yellow-crowned night-heron numbers have been steadily declining in inland areas so it is not surprising to me that Ohio has only one known nesting location, but what does amaze me is that in the whole state there is no river bottom swamp, say, that is more appealing to the species than this residential neighborhood. Birders had been coming here for years, and they have made it a point to show the birds to locals to build good will. A young lady walked by with her dog looking perplexed as to why we were there, and so we offered her a look through the scope. As we made ready to leave, a car pulled up right under the nest and the birders inside asked where the night-herons were.
Yellow-crowned night-herons in Columbus prefer the nicer parts of town.
We picked up some Middle Eastern food and took it to Bill’s house for lunch. We met his charming wife and browsed through some of his wonderful library. As I headed to the bathroom on the second floor, I spied on a bookshelf a most striking title of an anthology of detective stories “Hard Boiled Dicks.” (And no the editor was not Jeff Daumer.) After some more chatting, Bill reminded us that our window to see Buttons was waning so we dashed off to the museum. Armed with flashlights, we waited for Bob who did arrive. We were qauite surprised to that although the intereiror was largely unlit, the display of extinct birds was lit. And there was Buttons, or Sargent’s Pigeon as some prefer. Button’s was long thought to be a young male but is in fact a female. She earned her sobriquet by virtue of the fact that the young taxidermist who stuffed her, replaced her eyes with buttons.
Bob Glotzhober, Bill Whan, and Cindy Kerchmar at the Ohio Historical Society Center.
Tags: Buttons, Columbus OH, Ohio Historical Society, Sargent's pigeon, yellow-crowned night-heron