Wild Wednesday: Passenger Pigeon

Join LTC environmental education staff at the Charlevoix Public Library for an evening with one of the most staggering stories in North American natural history, and one with deep roots in northern Michigan. Passenger pigeons once nested here in numbers that bent trees and darkened the sky for hours at a time, and the forests of our region were among the last strongholds of a species that may have been the most abundant bird on earth. We’ll look at what made this animal so extraordinary, how commercial hunting and habitat loss drove it from billions to zero within a single human lifetime, and what the passenger pigeon’s absence has meant for the beech forests we still walk through today.