![]() Learning of some of these methods, Potawatomi leader Pokagon despaired. They poisoned them with whiskey-soaked corn. They attacked the birds with rakes, pitchforks, and potatoes. They shot the pigeons and trapped them with nets, torched their roosts, and asphyxiated them with burning sulfur. By 1896, there were only a quarter million birds left. A typical shooting club would go through 50,000 birds in a weekend competition. Pigeon hunting was a full-time occupation for thousands of people. Throughout the 19th century, pigeon meat was the mainstay of the American diet, and merchants in eastern cities sold as many as 18,000 birds a day. It is difficult now to imagine the ravages that would destroy this creature within 50 years. Image: Smith Bennet via Wikimedia Commons. Passenger pigeons being hunted in northern Louisiana, 1875. ![]() Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” 1947 STORY: On Stone Age Skills and Why We Need This Ancient Wisdom But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” ![]() “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. He compared the noise of the birds taking flight to that of a gale, the sound of their landing to thunder. He saw dung so deep on the forest floor that he mistook it for snow. Audubon visited roosting and nesting sites and found trees two feet in diameter broken off at the ground by the weight of birds. He estimated that the flock contained over one billion birds, and it was but one of several columns of pigeons that blackened the sky that day. In 1813, as James Audubon traveled in a wagon from his home on the Ohio River to Louisville, some 60 miles away, a stream of passenger pigeons filled the sky, and the “light of the noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse.” He reached Louisville at sunset, and the birds continued to come. In 1870, when their numbers were already greatly diminished, a single column one mile wide and 320 miles long, containing an estimated two billion birds, passed over Cincinnati on the Ohio River. Yet until I stood in that cold, dark forest, I had never sensed the full weight, scale and violence of the disaster.Īt one time, passenger pigeons accounted for 40 per cent of the entire bird population of North America. The first was the site of the last great nesting flock of passenger pigeons ( Ectopistes migratorius), a small stretch of woodland on the banks of the Green River near Bowling Green, Ohio. Some years ago, I visited two places that in a different, more sensitive world would have surely been enshrined as memorials to the victims of the ecological catastrophes that occurred there. I believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.The destruction of the bison, also known as buffalo, resulted from a campaign of biological terrorism unparalleled in the history of the Americas. I wanted to develop one that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work with scary configuration text files) or cost money. This is why I've built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively (instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you). ![]() What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say no". At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is to not use any social media. ![]() However, I can imagine many of your friends and family are not. You may be wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook (if you even have one), etc. ![]()
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