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 talking

about maybe a billion birds per flock.

That is a lot.

There's so many in a flock that you never see an end to it.

There were so many that the Archbishop of Quebec

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