The very last passenger pigeon on earth was a female named Martha who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was born sometime in 1895 or 1897, or perhaps 1900 or 1902, maybe at the zoo or maybe one state over, in Illinois; over the years, many different versions of her story have been offered. (As a Wisconsin naturalist once put it, “It would be difficult to find a more garbled history than that of Martha.”)
Like all passenger pigeons, Martha was a slim, elegant bird, with long tapering tail feathers and a narrow black bill—a far cry from the crumb-fed rock pigeons of urban America. (Had she been male, she would have sported greenish-blue display feathers; as it was, she was mostly brown.) Just a few decades before her birth, Martha’s was the most common bird species in North American—perhaps in the world—with individual flocks containing up to or even beyond a billion members.
Martha became the last of her kind upon the death of her companion, George, who also lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. The two occupied a cage ten feet wide by twelve feet long and were fed on cracked corn, wheat, and cooked liver. Whether or not they ever mated is unknown; like the Washingtons, they remained without issue. After George passed away, in July 1910, officials at the Bronx Zoo tried to convince officials at the Cincinnati Zoo to send Martha to New York. They refused.
Martha lingered on in Cincinnati, growing weaker at the same time that she grew more famous. A reporter who visited her in her final, solitary years described her as “atremble with the palsy of extreme old age.” Zoo-goers who came to see the elderly bird were disappointed because she barely moved. To prod her to get up and walk around, they tossed sand at her. To give her some peace, her keepers roped off her cage. They lowered her perch to within inches of the ground.