Hi side door listeners, recently we put a call out on Twitter asking for listener pitches,

and someone emailed us with this idea to tell the story of the passenger pigeon,

once thought to be the most populous bird in North America and now extinct. This story is a great idea.

Such a good idea it has been done before and it's been done really well. So today we

wanted to bring you that story reported by a podcast called

Outside Inn from our friends over at New Hampshire Public Radio, hosted by

Sam Evans Brown. I don't want to give too much away here so here's outside in with an episode they call

Tempest in a teacup. So what do you know about the passenger pigeon?

There was a lot of them.

They would darken the skies.

And now there are none.

Exactly.

The roar of their wings on arriving and

departing from the roost is tremendous and the flocks during the flight darken the

heavens. So the passenger pigeon was incredibly abundant. The best guess at their population based on descriptions

that Europeans gave of their flocks is that they were in the billions.

The ground is covered from the depth of several inches with their manure, a flock would land then move like a

tide eating acorns. Then another bunch would land ahead of them and the flocks would leapfrog

until they ate every acorn and beech nut on the forest floor.

And not only were there a lot of them, but the defining trait of the passenger pigeon was that

they lived in these huge flocks.

So some folks think that there were maybe only ever five flocks at a time so we're

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