What bird first spotted
What bird first spotted by Jacques Cartier in Prince Edward Island was once the most numerous bird on earth? The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is legendary as a symbol of unbelievable abundance and of human-caused extinction. It was an essential living resource to 18th and 19th century America that was over exploited to extinction out of a combination of greed and ignorance. The species occurred only in North America, primarily east of the Rocky Mountains, and bred almost exclusively in the eastern deciduous forest. There were some 3-5 billion passenger pigeons in America prior to the arrival of the Europeans; they comprised perhaps a quarter of the continent's bird life. Yet, due entirely to human activities, the passenger pigeon was extinct in the wild by the end of the nineteenth century, and its last representative, the fabled Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914.