On 1 September 1914, between midday and 1 pm, in the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, Cincinnati, Ohio, a pigeon breathed her last, and with her died her species. The pigeon was known as Martha, and the species was the Passenger Pigeon. Amongst all extinctions, this example remains unusual in two respects: the precision with which…
Category: AUTHOR: Reflections, Inglorious, Message from Martha, Remarkable Birds etc
Inglorious – no sparkle here
Driven grouse shooting still exists but it is beleaguered. It’s good to think of how far we have come in just a few years. It is a worthless hobby and its proponents have no answers to the charges against it except to ignore them. If driven grouse shooting hadn’t been invented c170 years ago then…
More riches of authorship
This book is out of stock at the publishers, Bloomsbury, and has been for quite some time now, but then it was published in 2015 (hardback) and 2016 (updated paperback). So if you see one in a bookshop just blow the dust off it, please. I received my royalty payment for 2020 recently and it…
Passenger Pigeon Day
‘On 1 September 1914, between midday and 1 pm, in the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, Cincinnati, Ohio, a pigeon breathed her last, and with her died her species. The pigeon was known as Martha, and the species was the Passenger Pigeon. Amongst all extinctions, this example remains unusual in two respects: the precision with which…
Riches not beyond measure
I got this from Pelagic last week. Most publishers do this, they have a minimum amount under which they don’t pay you the royalties earned in a period but carry it over to next time. And I’m not complaining, and certainly not about Pelagic because they pay royalties every six months whereas most publishers pay…
Conflict over the uplands in social media?
If you all turn to p273 of your copies of Inglorious then you will find an exhortation from me to use social media in our campaign to ban driven grouse shooting. Written in January 2015 it lists the Twitter followers of the following organisations and individuals. Here are what they were then, in June 2016…
A message about A Message from Martha
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Dear Mark Apologies for the sudden email from a random stranger. However, unknown for me, I felt compelled to contact to congratulate and thank you your excellent book on the extinction the Passenger Pigeon which I’ve just finished. As a lover of the natural world ( and fascinated by extinct birds) I wouldn’t say it…
Belmont County, Ohio
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Two years ago today, near the bank of the Ohio River which forms the border between eastern Ohio and western West Virginia, there was a blow-out at a gas well owned by XTO Energy, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, which took 20 days to get under control. The gas well was about to be put into…
I liked getting this…
Yesterday I got an email from the USA; Hello, Mr. Avery. My name is ***********[girl’s name] and I’m a 9th grader at ********** North Junior High. I am doing a class project on passenger pigeons, and I see that you have quite a bit of expertise on the subject. A lot of people have varying…
Remarkable Birds
Remarkable Birds is now published in five languages.