SUN JOURNAL • August 9, 2020
Call it a sad footnote that history somehow forgot, but in 1904, somebody in Bar Harbor gunned down a female passenger pigeon. Less than a century earlier, John James Audubon reported watching in awe as a flock of more than a billion passenger pigeons winged overhead. It is said there were more passenger pigeons in those days than all the other birds in North America combined. Passenger pigeons, to their great misfortune, made for a tasty meal. And by the turn of the century, no more than a smattering were left anywhere. One of them, though, flew above the rocky Maine coast until 1904, when somebody gunned it down, too. That the last known wild passenger pigeon’s last moment came in Bar Harbor should be worth remembering.