The Cincinnati Zoo and we can be perhaps a little closer to extinction than any other zoo, since we had two very highly visible species, the last of which died in our zoo, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, one of the most abundant of all land birds. Audubon and Wilson used to say that they’d fly over the Cincinnati Zoo and Louisville area in flocks that would last for days. Their wing beats would drown out all sound. They’d literally block out the sun, the birds were so vast. Well, the last bird died in our zoo and September 1st, 1914, followed four years later by our only endemic species of parrot, a bird that nested along the eastern United States, all the way into Florida, the Carolina parakeet. The loss of those species were from different reasons. The passenger pigeon was a marketing, hunting, you know, a meat product where they would ship barrels of these birds off to Chicago and New York, and they thought the abundance of the birds, they’d never- They tried to pass legislation. Nah, the birds will be around forever.
