Those themes played out throughout the day, and throughout the de-extinction discourse: bringing back. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.” “Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. “Do you want extinct species back?” said Stewart Brand, environmentalist and founder of Revive & Restore, a group of researchers and enthusiasts who organized the TEDx panel and coordinate de-extinction research. ![]() On the issue’s cover a parade of vanished animals poured forth from a test tube: a woolly mammoth and a saber-toothed cat, a giant sloth and a Tasmanian tiger, a giant moa and, of course, a pair of passenger pigeons. at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, which dedicated an issue of its flagship magazine to the topic. The notion was unveiled last spring at a day-long TEDx event held in Washington, D.C. Yet to some people, the passenger pigeon’s story doesn’t need to have an unhappy ending they might fly yet again, resurrected by biotechnology. There’s also a Pigeon Valley Cemetery and a Pigeon Valley Road, though the valley itself now goes by another name. In New York, where I live, there’s a Pigeon Mountain, Pigeon Creek, Pigeon Lake, two Pigeon Brooks and no fewer than four Pigeon Hills. Their sheer, vanished ubiquity is evident in the list of places named after passenger pigeons, which can be found just about everywhere east of the Mississippi and below the Arctic. Centennials being a form of ritual, much has been written about them recently: about flocks a mile wide turning mid-day skies black and taking days to pass, descending upon Eastern forests in a storm of life. ![]() The last passenger pigeon died just over a century ago, though they’ve lived on as symbols-of extinction’s awful finality, and also of a human carelessness so immense that it could exterminate without really trying what was the most populous bird in North America. Passenger pigeon eggs at the Maine State Museum Brandon Keim displayed courtesy of Paula Work, registrar & curator of zoology at the museum
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