"When Europeans arrived in North America, passenger pigeons were thought to make up 25-40 percent of the bird population of the eastern United States. In 1866, a report described a single flock o more than 3.5 billion passenger pigeons flying across the Ohio skies, taking more than fourteen hours to pass overhead. At one o'clock in the afternoon on the first of September 1914, the last remaining passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo."

HTCAM