Passenger pigeon
![passenger pigeon passenger pigeon](https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/assets/img/species/birds/PassengerPigeon_Hayashi_PD.jpg)
Latter-day estimates suggest something in excess of 3.5 billion birds in that flock. It was a mile wide, 300 miles long, and took 14 hours to pass a single point. In 1866, a cloud of birds passed into southern Ontario. He estimated that more than a billion birds had passed over him. John James Audubon rode the 55 miles from Henderson, Kentucky, to Louisville one day in autumn 1813, and through the whole long day, he rode under a sky darkened from horizon to horizon by a cloud of passenger pigeons. The passenger pigeon may have been the most abundant bird since archaeopteryx fluttered its first feather back in the late Jurassic. In the beginning, they were around, but not especially abundant. They now nest in parks, cemeteries, suburban yards, and the quieter neighborhoods in the city. They probably moved into the farmyard early in our history. They invaded land cleared of trees by fire, windstorm, or farmers, nesting in the brush or trees at the borders of the clearing and feeding on the open ground and at the edge of the woods. The mourning dove ate the seeds of dozens of kinds of plants. The slightly larger passenger pigeon specialized in big seeds, eating acorns and the nuts of hickories, beeches, and chestnuts. The other, a vagrant that could cruise at 60 miles per hour, was named the passenger pigeon.
![passenger pigeon passenger pigeon](https://news.cgtn.com/news/7a596a4e7851444f7a51444f314d444f7a55444f31457a6333566d54/img/69368e60072644709e8fef542acead2c/69368e60072644709e8fef542acead2c.jpg)
One came to be called the mourning dove for its soft, moaning call. When the Pilgrim fathers were shooting birds for their supper, two kinds of doves lived in eastern North America.