John James Audubon
Tale of passenger pigeon extinction may have had natural twist
One hundred years ago in September, Martha the passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo.
She was the last of a North American species whose population once had numbered in the billions. Naturalist John James Audubon once described a mile-wide migratory flock that darkened the Kentucky skies for days in 1813 -- and brought the Louisville population to the banks of the Ohio River with their guns.
Even discounting for artistic license, that’s a lot of birds.
The extinction of Ectopistes migratorius, punctuated by Martha’s demise, has become a lesson taught in generations of ecology courses about what happens when humans over-hunt animals and destroy...
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Tale of passenger pigeon extinction may have had natural twist
One hundred years ago in September, Martha the passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo.
She was the last of a North American species whose population once had numbered in the billions. Naturalist John James Audubon once described a mile-wide...
The plight of the pelican
Over the last several months, a young brown pelican's obsessive preening regimen has dominated the view from my office window at the Northern California wildlife hospital where I work. We don't name the patients we care for — if animals could talk, I...
Bay Psalm Book breaks auction record; Huntington to display rare tome
A copy of the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in English-speaking North America, was purchased for $14.2 million on Tuesday night at Sotheby’s in New York.
There are 11 surviving copies of "The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully...
Bay Psalm Book sells for record $14.2 million in New York auction
Those people who argue that print is dead just don’t understand the business model. A tiny book of psalms, printed in Colonial America in 1640 -- when digital referred to nothing more than fingers and toes -- has been sold for about $14.2 million, a...