Gene Stratton Porter's The Last Passenger Pigeon

Research

In The Last Passenger Pigeon Gene Stratton-Porter describes herself and her family’s interactions with wildlife, especially hunting birds. Stratton-Porter’s father was a very religious man, not allowing any of his twelve children to harm doves and passenger pigeons because they are portrayed in the bible as holy. According to their website, “Later, in the New Testament, the pigeon was first mentioned during the baptism of Christ where the dove descended as the Holy Spirit” (“21 Amazing Facts about Pigeons”). Gene Stratton Porter wrote The Last Passenger Pigeon to inform the people of her time and generations to come how humans’ actions impact wildlife in many ways. The author states, “He used to tell me that they were among the

very oldest birds in the history of the world, that one of the bases of reckoning a man’s wealth in Biblical times was to count his dovecotes, and he showed me how these were made and explained how the doves and the wild pigeons were used as a sacrifice to the Almighty, while every line was on his tongue’s tip” (196).
In The Last Passenger Pigeon, the author shares her first hand encounters with the brutal conditions of how men in her neighborhood hunted the pigeons. Stratton-Porter tells readers her feelings towards how the pigeons seemed to begin to disappear. Stratton-Porter states, “I was shocked and horrified to see dozens of these beautiful birds, perhaps half of them still alive, struggling about with broken wings, backs, and legs, waiting to be skinned, split down the back, and dropped into the pot-pie kettle” (197). Earlier in the book Stratton-Porter explains her disbelief about how the older men before her time treated the forests, stating, “The cleared soil had been cleared at the expense of inroads into these same forests and this this thing had been going on for more than a hundred years before my time” (193). Stratton-Porter says the men treated the forests as something in their way of their future farm land. “When a man started to clear a piece of land he chopped down every tree on it, cut the trunks into sections, rolled them out of his way, in order that he might use the land for the growing of wheat, corn, and potatoes” (193).
Response
When I first heard about The Last Passenger Pigeon in class I honestly had no emotional reaction to the piece.

I thought of the reading as just another environmental writing trying to bring light to extinction of a species of bird. Then once I sat down a few nights ago I read the passage and I started to tear up reading about these poor birds brutally hunted. I started to feel the same emotions as Stratton-Porter did when she saw the bag of birds at her neighbor’s house. What really shocked me about how these birds went extinct. No one else saw them as Stratton-Porters father did, biblically. Her father told the other men in their neighborhood about how killing off the quails were bad for farming. Stratton-Porter states, “These things he studied out and began to pass along to his neighbors, even to put in his sermons that he preached in the pulpit” (196). Towards the end, I really enjoyed with how Stratton-Porter saw the wild pigeon after they were thought to be extinct, with a price for its capture and had no desire to disturb the bird. Stratton-Porter states, “So here I was looking with all my soul at one specimen of a bird bearing on its head a price ranging from one hundred up, with no way and no desire to capture it” (204). The very last part of this piece blew me away by the emotion wave I got feeling the bird voicing his thoughts. With the extinction of the passenger pigeon, there has been conservation movements to protect the wildlife and there habitat from

industrial expansion. In the article “100th Anniversary of the Passenger Pigeon Extinction”, author John Schulz states, “The tragic extinction of the passenger pigeon helped launch the modern conservation era, and it is a story providing a stark reminder of potential consequences of reactionary and ineffective management decision processes” (Schulz). Stratton Porter’s writing of The Last Passenger Pigeon gives amazing insight on how our actions affect everything around us including everything’s future.