This is the memory palace, I'm Nick Demet.

It's impossible to know for sure, but Ornithologists tell us that there were as many as five billion passenger pigeons in North America, the beginning of the 1800s.

That was one in every five birds, and when they would fly south in the fall and north again in the spring, the birds would actually darken the sky.

Many reputable accounts say the flocks would stretch out a mile wide and 300 miles long.

The flocks would take hours, sometimes all day to fly overhead.

You'd wake up in the morning to the sound of approaching birds, and while you ate your breakfast and tended your fields all day and brought your livestock in or whatever, the flock would still be overhead when it got dark.

The sound must have been incredible.

The droppings from a couple of million birds would rain down, defoliating whole swaths at forest.

When they would settle down in a forest as a layover, it would take years for the trees to recover.

When nesting site in Wisconsin occupied 850 square miles, there was many as 136 million birds there.

But all of this made them incredibly easy to hunt.

It was said that if you shot a rifle into the air as they flew overhead, that one shot could take down 30 birds.

They were flying so close that they collide, like some sort of horrible pile up on an interstate, and they plummet.

In as the American human population spread west, the forest started to disappear.

It has industrialization and immigrants while the eastern cities, people needed meat and industrial hunters stepped in.

They'd light fires and stands of trees to smoke the birds out and then kill them.

They would take a single pigeon and sew up its eyes for some reason, then they'd tie it to a stool.

So their panic flapping would cause curious flocks to land, then they'd be trapped and killed.

Sometimes they would soak feed and alcohol to get the birds drunk so they'd be easier to kill.

In Potosky, Michigan in 1878, 50,000 birds were killed every day for five months.

They were packed into box cars and shipped to New York or Boston or Providence or New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore.

That same year, a different Midwestern supplier shipped another 3 million passenger pigeons.

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