A month today…

…A Message from Martha is published. Here is a sneak preview… Here is the list of chapters…   Chris Packham says: ‘This hugely thought provoking and important book is the kick up the arse that every complacent conservationist needs right now‘ and ‘This heart-wrenching saga of extinctions, old and new, is as much about us…

A Message from Martha

In two months’ time, A Message from Martha: the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and its relevance today will be published in the UK. Chris Packham is one of only about half a dozen people who has read it so far and he says: ‘This hugely thought provoking and important book is the kick up…

This day in 1900

In his book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Chris Cokinos describes the death of what may have been the last wild Passenger Pigeon at the hands of the young Press Clay Southworth in rural Ohio.  That was on 24 March 1900 – after that, the only Passenger Pigeons known to man (and woman) were…

Pigeons and doves

I went out for a walk on Monday morning and as I parked the car at 0710 a large flock of pigeons flew past. Just Woodpigeons, nothing very special, but hundreds of them so quite interesting. And then another flew past, and another and I started counting.  In 15 minutes c5000 birds flew past; and…

Sunday in Liverpool

Sunday was, do you remember, the 99th anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon in the world, in Cincinnati Zoo, at around 1230 local time? At 1230 local time in the Central Library in Liverpool, I was looking at one of only about 120 remaining complete volumes of John James Audubon’s Birds…