Boom-bust ecology

 

I´ve read the exact opposite in some book and I haven´t double-checked the sources cuz reasons. So make of this little evolutionary (non-)mystery whatever ye wish!

Why was the Passanger Pigeon so extremely common? Doesn´t that reflect a fundamental inbalance in North American nature at the time? Didn´t they have natural predators?

The short answer is: no, the passenger pigeon’s abundance does not indicate a fundamental ecological imbalance. It indicates the opposite — a highly productive, tightly coupled ecosystem that humans later broke.

Let’s unpack why they were so numerous, why predators didn’t “control” them, and why their abundance was actually stable for millennia.

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1. The core reason: an enormous, pulsed food base

Passenger pigeons were specialists on mast — especially:

• Acorns

• Beechnuts

• Chestnuts

Pre-colonial eastern North America contained vast, continuous deciduous forests, many of them dominated by mast-producing trees.

Key point:

• Mast production is episodic and super-abundant

• In good years, forests produced far more food than resident animals could consume

Passenger pigeons evolved to:

• Track mast pulses over huge distances

• Convert brief food surpluses into massive population growth

This is classic boom–bust ecology, not imbalance.

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2. Why predators didn’t regulate them “down”

A. Predator saturation (the most important factor)

Passenger pigeons didn’t avoid predators — they overwhelmed them.

Even with:

• Hawks

• Eagles

• Owls

• Foxes

• Wolves

• Snakes

• Humans (Indigenous hunting)

Predators simply could not eat fast enough to make a dent.

This is a known strategy:

If prey numbers exceed predator capacity by orders of magnitude, predation pressure becomes evolutionarily irrelevant.

So paradoxically:

• Being extremely common was their primary defense

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B. No specialist predators

Passenger pigeons had:

• No obligate predator that depended primarily on them

Why?

• Their food base (mast) fluctuated wildly

• Pigeons themselves were nomadic and unpredictable

Specialist predators would starve in bad years.

So predators remained generalists, which cannot regulate a super-abundant prey species.

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3. The scale of the ecosystem matters

Estimates suggest:

• 3–5 billion pigeons

• Flocks miles wide

• Nesting colonies covering hundreds of square miles

This scale is hard to intuit today, because:

• We live in fragmented ecosystems

• Large-scale abundance has been erased

But comparable phenomena still exist:

• Sardine runs

• Locust swarms

• Caribou herds

• Wildebeest migrations

Abundance ≠ imbalance.

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4. The pigeons were not destabilizing the forest

This is crucial.

Passenger pigeons:

• Did not destroy mast trees

• Did not eliminate competitors

• Were part of a co-evolved system

In fact, they likely:

• Helped disperse seeds

• Influenced forest regeneration

• Contributed nutrients via guano

They were more like:

A mobile nutrient-cycling system than a pest

The forest expected them.

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5. What actually caused the collapse

The system failed only when two human pressures coincided:

A. Industrial-scale hunting

• Market hunting with nets and guns

• Telegraphs used to track flocks

• Railroads shipped pigeons nationwide

This removed pigeons faster than reproduction could replace them — something no natural predator ever did.

---

B. Habitat fragmentation (the fatal blow)

Passenger pigeons required:

• Huge colonies

• Massive social cues to breed successfully

Deforestation:

• Broke forests into patches

• Prevented large nesting aggregations

• Caused reproductive failure even before numbers got low

This created an Allee effect:

• Below a critical population density, reproduction collapses

Once that threshold was crossed, extinction was rapid.

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6. Why this feels “imbalanced” to modern intuition

We’re used to:

• Reduced megafauna

• Simplified food webs

• “Managed” populations

So a species numbering in the billions feels unnatural.

But in deep ecological time:

Abundance was normal; scarcity is the anomaly.

The eastern forests were once:

• Bigger

• Richer

• More productive
  than anything we now experience there.

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7. Final synthesis

• Passenger pigeons were common because:

  • North America was extraordinarily productive

  • Mast forests created huge food pulses

  • Predator saturation worked perfectly

• They had predators — just not ones capable of regulating them

• Their abundance reflected ecological integrity, not imbalance

• Their extinction reflects human disruption, not natural instability

Or in one sentence:

The passenger pigeon wasn’t a sign that nature was broken — it was a sign that it was working at a scale we’ve since erased.

If you’d like, we could next:

• Compare passenger pigeons to bison (a similar story)

• Look at whether their extinction changed forest composition

• Or explore why abundance-based defense is especially vulnerable to modern technology

Dead as a solitaire

 

The dodo, the passanger pigeon and the great auk are three almost iconic extinct birds. Inevitably, some people claim to have seen them after they officially traversed to the proverbial hunting grounds. 

Also as usual, some of the reports are more difficult to believe than others. For instance, a report of a living dodo in Zambia?! Hint: the dodo was a flightless bird living on the island of Mauritius. Zambia is a landlocked country in South-Central Africa. But even that pales when compared to an alleged video of a dodo in...Costa Rica. Yeaaah. 

My "favorite" is the Canadian whiskey distiller who tricked the media to a marketing event on the Orkney Islands, claiming to finance an expedition looking for surviving great auks. The runner up is the bizarre story of penguins on the run in Norway being mistaken for said auks. Is that even true, or an April Fool´s joke?

Interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt believed that he spotted passanger pigeons seven years after the species supposedly disappeared. So TR *did* have some kind of cryptid connection. The usually trigger happy rough rider decided not to shoot them. Later sightings are probably misidentified mourning doves or bizarre specimens of domestic pigeons on the run.

A very entertaining video, all in all.    

Bird brains disprove materialism

 

Scientists have finally started to use "the brains God gave geese" and realized that (non-human) animals are - wait for it - conscious?! I mean, maaaan, who knew? Or was it *self*-conscious? Same thing.

No surprise there. But thanks for noticing, I suppose. What´s more intriguing is that different kinds of brains can give rise to the same kind of (self)-consciousness. Brainy creatures mentioned in the video above include humans, birds (and not just the inevitable corvids), crocs and even ants. 

So how can entirely distinct kinds of physical structures cause animals to be equally conscious? Please don´t tell the Idealists, LOL. 

Therefore God. 

The island of Doctor Moreau

 

This will never happen and is probably just another scam to part rich people and governments with their money. But nice try! 

"Closer than people think": De-extinction 

An ordinary Joe

A crazy news story about a pigeon named after Joe Biden, a bizarre tweet from the Prime Minister of Australia, a strange world record, and a happy ending.

Nothing about QAnon, though. 

Note for Swedish readers: a "bar-tailed godwit" is called "myrspov" in Swedish. 

Joe the Pigeon gets a pardon

Check out the checklist

Just when you thought the show was over…

“Handbook of the Birds of the World” (HBW) is a 17-volume encyclopedia describing all living species of birds. It seems the editors just can't part with this project, since supplemental works are still being published. This is the first volume of “Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World”, covering the non-passerines. A second volume, featuring the passerines, will be published later this year. Despite its name, the “checklist” isn't a traditional, boring, scientists-only textual mass of Latin names. Rather, it's a kind of super-summary of the 17-volume HBW, complete with species presentations (albeit shorter ones than in the original work), range maps and color illustrations. The main reason for rinsing and repeating everything one more time seems to be that it *isn't* a straightforward rehash.

The editors have apparently applied a new method for defining species, associated with Joseph Tobias, to the world's avifauna. Rather than looking at the DNA evidence, the new species concept is based on morphology and bird behavior (including bird song). This has led to substantial changes in the taxonomy. Among non-passerines, there have been 462 splits and only 30 lumps, presumably meaning that 432 new species have been added to the list, all of them described and illustrated in the Checklist. Say hello to the Snow Mountain Tiger Parrot, Butterfly Coquette and Lompobattang Fruit-dove! In an article on the web, the HBW-cum-Checklist editors forthrightly admit that the recognition of many new species has obvious consequences for conservation efforts, including larger amounts of grant money for the scientists involved in the conservation…

Another new feature of the Checklist is that it (finally) describes and illustrates (if at all possible) extinct birds, including the Great Auk and the Dodo. The total number of extant bird species covered in this first volume is 4,372 plus 99 extinct species. It will be interesting to see if Lynx Edicions manages to squeeze all passerines into a second volume as promised, or if yet another jumbo-sized book is waiting in the wings…

I'm not sure who would want to buy “The Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World”, but if you found the 17th (index) volume of the HBW incredibly boring, I suppose this could be just what you were looking for.

Five stars!

The dodo and the deer

I've been reliable informed that a character using the moniker “Ashtar Command” must be an expert on all things nerdy. Can confirm!

Today, we are going to discuss some aspects of the coat of arms of Mauritius, as depicted on this T-shirt. The creature on the left (heraldic right or dexter) is, of course, a dodo. But what is the creature on the right (heraldic left or sinister)? According to Wiki, which doesn't cite any sources, it's a sambur deer (sometimes spelled sambar deer). However, some quick research on the web revealed that no sambar deers (Rusa unicolor) live on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.

After some additional nerdy browsing, I've come to the conclusion that the animal is a rusa deer (Rusa timorensis). These deer, while not native to Mauritius, have indeed been introduced to the island. They are, somewhat confusingly, sometimes called “sambur deers”, which may explain a thing or two!

It's interesting to note that the coat of arms shows both an extinct native animal (the dodo) and a living non-native ditto (the rusa deer). I suspect there may be some kind of meaning behind this, perhaps to indicate the complex history of this small nation, or its multi-ethnic character? Incidentally, the Latin motto means “Star and Key of the Indian Ocean”, and nothing else. Next week: the hunt for the White Dodo!

Lars Jonsson´s boring birds

"Birds of Wood, Park and Garden" is the first volume of a five-volume work, covering all birds of Europe. This volume is intended as a field guide to the birds of woodlands and parklands in Europe north of the Alps but south of the boreal forest zone. In other words, the usual boring feathered critters hopping around outside my window...or at least further out in "my" strolling area. They are all in there: house sparrow, tree sparrow, fieldfare, blackbird, green woodpecker, wood pigeon and the super-abundant corvids. Gee, I constantly have to remind myself that these are supposed to be close evolutionary cousins of the T-rex, lest I surely die of boredom! Only the bluecrow and the hoopoe stand out but, alas, they never seem to show up outside my apartment building...

The Swedish edition of this book was the first thing ever published by Lars Jonsson, the famous Swedish bird painter. He was only 24 years old! The text, penned by Jonsson himself, sounds extremely mature, so I always assumed the author was at least in his fifties... Jonsson's illustrations are, of course, excellent but still feel "rough" compared to his later forages into bird painting. I don't wish to sound ungrateful to the Master, but this basic-basic bird guide somehow didn't rock my world in the way Jonsson's later works tend to do. Therefore, I only give it three stars. Still, it is strange that Jonsson was flunked by the Swedish Art Academy. What did they want him to do, a Pollock?!

Lars Jonsson´s first book

Believe it or not, but this is Lars Jonsson's first book, the original Swedish edition of "Birds of Wood, Park and Garden". It was published in Sweden in 1976, and is both written and illustrated by Jonsson himself. At the time, the young painter was only 24 years old. A few years earlier, his application to the Art Academy in Stockholm had been turned down! Considering that Jonsson went on to become the Audubon of the 20th century, I sure wonder why? Even in this early book, his genius is clearly visible...

My main problem with "Fåglar i naturen: Skog, park, trädgård" is that the birds featured in it are so, well, damn boring. These are the birds every Swede sees outside his window from childhood onwards: sparrows, finches, crows, magpies, thrushes... OK, magpies are quite cool (they are the parrots of the North!), but otherwise, I long to see some stray albatross or thunderbird gently circling around my local shopping mold, LOL.

Unfortunately, it seems that Jonsson's first book is unavailable at the present time from our favourite vendor, Amazon. Don't worry, the sparrows will be here next year as well...

These birds don´t need a closer introduction

This is volume 4 of the truly Brobdingnagian "mother of all birdbooks", the Handbook of the Birds of the World. Known as the HBW for short, this 16-volume work took almost 20 years to publish, and apparently a supplement which is still waiting in the wings (pun intended). The total price of the entire series is about 4,200 dollars!

Obviously, the HBW is mostly intended for well-funded libraries and research institutions. In contrast to regular reference works, however, the HBW contains a lot of truly spectacular photos (all of them in color), plus illustrations of all described species (also in color). I'm not sure if this combination of commercial appeal and super-scientific contents makes any kind of sense, but clearly *somebody* is buying it, since the editors were allowed to finish their work. As we speak, they are busy preparing a Handbook of the Mammals of the World!

This particular volume of the HBW covers the following orders: Sandgrouse, Pigeons and Doves, Cockatoos and Parrots, Turacos and Cuckoos. With the possible exception of the Sandgrouse, these birds hardly need a closer introduction.

As usual, the HBW deserves five stars, although I must once again warn the general reader about the non-popularized character of this work and the exorbitant price. However, if you have an advanced interest in birds (and a lot of money!) don't worry, you won't feel cuckolded if you really do buy one of these...

Pigeons from the Black Lagoon

Stephen Green-Armytage is a photographer who worked for LIFE, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, amongst others. He has published several artistic photo books about birds, including "Extraordinary Chickens", the sequel "Extra Extraordinary Chickens" and "Extraordinary Pheasants".

As the name suggests, this one is about pigeons! The first part of the book shows ornamental pigeons, photographed at various pigeon shows. The second part deals with wild, exotic pigeons. There are about 200 color photographs in the book. As usual, Stephen Green-Armytage is particularly drawn to bizarre breeds and specimens. Many of the extraordinary pigeons look unnatural, as if they stepped out of a bad zombie movie. There are pigeons that look like crosses between doves and roosters, others look like lizards, miniature vultures or gigantic swifts. There's even a pigeon that looks vaguely like a flamingo (I think). I must admit that I don't really liked it. Are these birds really healthy?

But yes, the photos are exquisite, and the book is an excellent birthday or Christmas gift. Personally, however, I'm not going to place the Pigeons from the Black Lagoon on my coffee table. They just look to spaced out, LOL!